Who makes whiskey? A laconic Scot tending a still in the Highlands? A good old boy nursing his sour mash in Kentucky? A moonshiner brewing sneaky Pete up yonder in the holler?
They're not the only kinds of whiskey makers anymore. Lately there's been an explosion of handmade whiskey here on the West Coast. Forget Scotland and Kentucky -- we have a crop of eager Western dudes who want to create a distinct Western style of whiskey.
They're taking this nouvelle whiskey idea in wildly differing directions -- rough and powerful, sweet and fruity, gnarled and smoky, mellow and harmonious. The result is whiskeys with very distinct personalities, whiskeys you don't find anywhere else.
In the last few years six distilleries have started making and selling whiskey in California and Oregon, and two more will join them in the next year or so. An equal number of outfits up and down the coast are eyeing the idea. Already we have three times as many (legal) pot-still distilleries as the rest of the country combined.
Easterners may be puzzled. The West Coast is known for lighter drinks -- beer and wine. In fact, that may be exactly why small-batch whiskey is happening here. "West Coast consumers are more receptive to craft whiskey," says Lee Medoff of Edgefield Distillery near Portland, Ore. "They've grown up with wineries and microbreweries."
A distinctive process
Most of the world's whiskey is made in high-volume continuous stills that can produce thousands of gallons a day. The West Coast craft whiskey movement has gone back to the antique pot still, which is more labor intensive and a lot less productive, yielding perhaps five gallons per batch. But it produces a more distinctive result, which is why single-malt Scotch has always been pot-distilled.
The whiskey makers come from two quite different traditions. There are brewers -- down-to-earth guys from craft breweries who know their grains -- and there are makers of European-style fruit brandy (eau de vie), with its goal of preserving delicate fruit flavors through the brutal process of distillation.
The transition to whiskey is attractive for an eau-de-vie distiller -- he just contracts with a brewery to deliver a batch of beer made to his specs and then distills it. Now the distillery needn't have a down season; you can make whiskey all year round, even when there's no fresh fruit.
On top of that eau de vie is a narrow, exotic sliver of the American beverage market, whereas whiskey is already familiar to the public.
For brewers, the transition is much more involved. They have all the mysteries of the still to master, and their taxes and insurance will go up once they become distillers (beer isn't a fire hazard, but 124-proof whiskey is). The biggest problem is warehouse space -- unlike beer, which you can sell as fast as you make it, whiskey has to be aged for years.
St. George Spirits, on Alameda Island in the Bay Area, has roots in both traditions and shows the unprecedented possibilities of a new approach to whiskey. Master distiller Jorg Rupf comes from generations of eau-de-vie distillers in Germany; assistant distiller Lance Winters was a brewer before he joined in 1995. The product of their collaboration is like no other whiskey ever -- it has a rainbow of sweet fruit and flower aromas you can scarcely believe come from grain, and an amazing smoothness on the palate.
Best known for its Hangar One Vodka, the distillery is in a striking location: an isolated airplane hangar in the former Alameda Naval Air Station. From its back door there's a picture-postcard view of San Francisco.
Rupf and Winters use a mixture of the toasted malts that give color and flavor to darker beers such as porter and stout; they're the only West Coast distillers to do so. Perhaps this is where their whiskey gets the striking fruit aromas that make it so distinctive. (Their use of Bourbon barrels also explains some of its sweetness.) They also include some smoked malts -- not smoked over peat, as for Scotch, but over hardwoods such as beech and alder.
Another San Francisco company, Anchor Brewing Co., made the first of these West Coast whiskeys: Old Potrero. Anchor's owner, Fritz Maytag (whose family created both Maytag washers and Maytag blue cheese), has a track record of turning out excellent products by revitalizing old-fashioned, small-scale production techniques. His Anchor Steam beer was instrumental in reviving craft beer brewing in the 1970s.
Around that time, he was intrigued to read that 200 years ago, most American whiskey was rye (see "Heads, Tails of Making Whiskey"), sold straight from the still without barrel aging. He decided to set about rediscovering the sort of whiskey George Washington made: 100% rye.
"There was an opportunity here to step in," Maytag says, "on a tiny little scale, the way we did with beer, taking very traditional attitudes but with modern food processing knowledge." He made his first whiskey in 1993.
