’Tis the season for festive beverages, and revelers increasingly are enjoying locally made spirits as a new generation embraces drinks made from recipes dating to the days of Prohibition.
The craft distilled-spirits business is taking off all over the country – often with tours and tasting rooms – in urban and suburban areas from Washington, D.C., to North Carolina, Texas, California and Washington state, where Seattle is something of a ground zero for the market’s explosive growth.
In an industrial area of Northeast Washington, D.C., the city's only distillery, New Columbia Distillers, is in a converted car-storage space. Open only two years, it’s already about to get competition from a new distillery around the corner.
“We’re the first in a hundred years,” co-owner and distiller Michael Lowe, 65, said of his new D.C. venture.
He joined forces with his son-in-law, John Uselton, 41, and together they make rye whiskey and several gins under the Green Hat Gin label, named in honor of the bootlegger who provided Congress with illegal booze during Prohibition and always wore a green fedora.
A retired lawyer, Lowe looked into being a distiller because “I got bored being retired.” And now? “It’s a lot of fun.”
The two started off studying the field, and after an apprenticeship, started making gin, which doesn’t have to age. They’re now also making whiskey, which needs to age in barrels for several years. The high-end products range from $36 to $39 for a 750-milliliter bottle, and Lowe said the business was already profitable.
Uselton said the local angle drew people to their tastings. “People want to be a part of something,” he said.
Bar manager Brenden Mulder-Rosi, 32, has been buying the gin for the nearby Boundary Road restaurant since the distillery opened. “Since day one, we’ve been super fans,” he said. “I think the old locavore works really well for distilling. But above all, it really is a question of taste.”
It’s mainly millennials who are driving the boom, as they discover the range of spirits and a bit of the romance of Prohibition, the period from 1920 to 1933 when the U.S. Constitution banned alcoholic beverages but people found ways around it.
Troy Turner, a co-founder and the chief operating officer of Seattle’s Tatoosh Distillery, which makes bourbon whiskey and rye whiskey said, “All the recipes I have are from my great-great-grandfather in Louisiana. Now I’m doing it legally.”
Asked about the quality of craft spirits, Esquire magazine’s Drinks columnist, David Wondrich, said, “It varies so widely it’s amazing.” He sees the appeal of the way the products are made: “It’s local, it’s artisanal.”
And it’s struck a chord in the last few years.
Frank Coleman, spokesman for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, said that when he’d started at the trade association in the early 2000s there were only a handful of craft distilleries. “There are now over 650,” he said. “We’re in the middle of a whiskey renaissance.”
That’s certainly the case in Fort Worth, Texas, where Leonard Firestone, a co-owner of Firestone and Robertson Distilling Co., and his partner, Troy Robertson, founded a whiskey distillery in the southern part of the city.
“For Troy and myself, we were huge whiskey fans,” he said. “We were interested in the process and intrigued by the romance of it all.”
When he realized there was no Texas whiskey on the market, Firestone, who’s related to the winery owners of the same name in California, saw an opening. Their TX blended whiskey, selling for $35 a bottle, has been so successful that the distillery is expanding to a second facility, a former country club in southeast Fort Worth.
“The tourism has been unlike anything we ever expected,” said Firestone, who’s rented the original space for four weddings and anticipates more events at the new location when it opens in two years.
The mechanics of the still are the same as 100 years ago: The grains – corn, rye or wheat, depending on the product – are ground, mixed with water, fermented and then put in the distiller to separate the alcohol and water. Alcohol has a lower boiling point than water does and it vaporizes faster, allowing the collection of the condensed alcoholic liquid as the end product.
Gin gets its name from juniper berries and its distillers play with a mix of botanicals, which to Lowe means the mixing and recipes “give you a lot of creativity.”
The regulations for start-up are a little more complicated than for other businesses because distilling is regulated by Uncle Sam. The federal government, through the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau of the Department of the Treasury, approves and licenses distilleries and collects a tax of $13.50 per gallon on alcoholic beverages.
The Washington suburb of Rockville, Md., does not suggest tropical landscapes, but here – in a converted car repair shop in an industrial zone – Edgardo Zuniga is making rum. A former chef, the Costa Rican native decided he wanted to get into the spirits business and this year opened Twin Valley Distillers – the first distillery in Montgomery County since Prohibition – which also makes vodka and whiskey.
“Maryland had the best rye whiskey in the world during Prohibition,” Zuniga said. “Millennials are returning to liquor, to the old things.”