A Craft Distillery Worthy Of The Word ‘Craft’

by Larry Olmsted

Just a snipet of the longer article on the craft of Woody Creek Distillers:

Where small distillers can excel is by creating their own supply chain, and that is exactly what Woody Creek Distillers in Colorado is doing – and what sets it dramatically apart from the vast majority of “craft distilleries” (Tuthilltown Spirits in New York, for one, makes vodka from local farmers’ apples and whiskey from locally grown grain and corn). Woody Creek, near Aspen, to date has specialized in vodka, made entirely from fresh potatoes, which they grow and harvest themselves. Because they grow winter rye as a cover crop from fall to spring, when it is not potato season in Colorado, they are currently making rye whiskey with their own rye. They’ve also made very small quantities of infused eau du vie and apple brandy, with apples and fruits grown by their neighbors. For their next project, a more traditional whiskey, they are using solely malted barley grown in Colorado. For their bourbon-style product, they will use a non-GMO Colorado sweet corn variety known as Olathe. “Interest in natural, fresh and organic ingredients is so high right now and we decided to go that route,” said Mark Kleckner, COO and co-founder. But for their most intriguing project, they introduced a rare super vodka potato not previously grown in this country.

“Our model is simple: use the highest quality equipment and practices along with the best possible ingredients,” said Kleckner. “We are vodka guys,” said Kleckner of himself and Pat Scanlan, one of his two partners, a former engineer for NASA and the Defense Department who does the potato growing, “and we thought Chopin was the best of the potato vodkas on the market, and we wanted to create a super-Chopin, so we started doing research. We found out that Chopin was using cellared potatoes much of the time, and potatoes dehydrate and lose quality quickly. Most US distillers, even small ones, who use potatoes are using older or second potatoes, or even starting with dehydrated potatoes or neutral sprits from potatoes. We decided to approach it like a vintage product – great French wineries don’t use old or seconds grapes. We grow our own potatoes, harvest and mash the same or next day, and hand distill each small batch. We do it all ourselves, with planting in May and starting the harvest around Labor Day.” For about two months, Scanlan harvests 12 tons of potatoes each day, which Kleckner distills, using potatoes that have never been out of the earth for more than 48 hours. “When we’re out of potatoes for the season, we stop making vodka.” It’s that simple – and that rare.

The only product currently on the market is Woody Creek’s Signature Potato Vodka, made from 100% potatoes, mainly Rio Grande, a variety indigenous to Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, which has a long tradition of prodigious potato excellence – at one time the valley produced more potatoes than all of Idaho, says Kleckner. During the silver boom trains brought in miners and equipment, and left full of potatoes bound for the rest of the country, but when the silver dried up, so did potato farming. Scanlan planted seven historic varieties and they made vodka from all and in combination before settling primarily on Rio Grande as the best. “It’s not at all what you’d expect – the classic reaction we get at the tasting room is, ‘I’m not a straight vodka drinker, but this is great.’ We call it a sipping vodka.”

Read the full article at Forbes.