32 FEATURE
SEVEN DAYS
07.23.14-07.30.14
SEVENDAYSVT.COM
Spirits Rising « P.31
Mad River Distillers
Sheldon Foley
THE ARTISAN SPIRITS MOVEMENT IS ALL ABOUT USING LOCAL INGREDIENTS TO MAKE A LOCAL PRODUCT. PHOTOS: NATALIE WILLIAMS
Mad River Distillers, a small artisanal spirits producer on a wooded hilltop in Warren, got this still up and running in May 2013. It produces small batches of rye, bourbon, rum, corn whiskey and apple brandy from local, organic and nonGMO ingredients, including corn from Aurora Farms in Charlotte and apples from Champlain Orchards in Shoreham. Ingredients that cannot be sourced in Vermont come from regional, organic or sustainable sources. For example, the cane sugar the company uses to make rum comes from a fair-trade farm in Malawi. Indeed, Mad River Distillers seems to be all about building sustainable and symbiotic relationships. MRD’s First Run Rum, a 96-proof “sipper” with a warm, buttery finish, is aged in used maple-syrup barrels swapped with a sugar maker in Derby. The sugarer, in turn, reuses the distillery’s rum barrels to produce a rum-infused maple syrup. The spent mash from this and other fermentations isn’t thrown away or composted; it’s sent up the road to a dairy farm to feed the cows. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and wearing wire-frame glasses and a Red Sox cap, the 30-year-old Foley looks like he’d be more at home at a college tailgate party than making liquor with his childhood friend from Warren, Alex Hilton. For his part, Hilton, a carpenter by trade, fell into his job as general manager after MRD founders Brett Little and John Egan hired him to renovate two decrepit horse barns into the distillery’s headquarters. Teeth marks from the barn’s former occupants are still visible on the stall doors where barrels of whiskey now age. It’s not surprising that four guys in their early thirties are now earning a living making booze. A new generation of young people has discovered the pleasures of hard liquor, fueled in part by the influence of such TV shows as AMC’s “Mad Men” and HBO’s “True Detective.” “You see a lot of younger people, male and female, ordering very whiskey-centric cocktails at bars — Manhattans, Old Fashioneds, bourbon on the rocks,” Foley says. But this small craft distillery combines old ways with new. Though the crew is psyched about the recent purchase of a bottle-capping machine, which has saved them lots of calluses, the distillery uses no conveyor belts or bottling machines; all the liquor batches are labeled and numbered by hand. The still itself, manufactured in a small town in Germany’s Black Forest, looks steam-punk chic but is completely computer controlled. “None of us had ever distilled before. We were all self-taught,” Hilton explains. “But we’ve definitely done our homework and done a lot of research and seminars and classes.” Not that their product didn’t undergo plenty of trial and error, Foley adds: “I’d be lying if I said we didn’t dump a lot of stuff down the drain.”
THAT’S WHERE I’M COMING FROM.
Elm Brook Farms’ Rail Dog and Literary Dog
DAVID H O W E
These days, however, most of their product ends up in bottles, and it’s winning critical acclaim. In its first year alone, MRD took home two gold medals for its First Run Rum — one at the Spirits of the Americas competition in south Florida, and another in Las Vegas. “That goes a long way,” Foley says of the awards. So does getting help from the DLC, Hilton emphasizes. The department has been instrumental in getting MRD’s spirits approved for sale in state-run liquor stores around Vermont. In June, Gov. Peter Shumlin signed into law a bill that allows bartenders to serve customers a “sampler flight” of up to four ounces of different spirits — a boon to Vermont distillers trying to get customers to taste their products. How much liquor will MRD bottle this year? “It’s kind of early to say,” Hilton says cautiously. “In 2014, if we can come close to maybe producing 1,000 cases, that’d be huge … I think we can produce that much. But I’m not sure if we can sell it.”
Elm Brook Farm: Dogged Pursuits
Elm Brook Farm in East Fairfield isn’t a distillery that tourists discover by accident. It sits in the midst of a 550-acre family farm owned by David and Lisa Howe. To get there, visitors must drive to the
end of a long, winding private dirt road, through woods and past rolling fields and vineyards. There’s no formal tour, tasting room or gift shop, but on a recent weekday afternoon, David Howe is eager to show off his operation. Driving to his home, I pass a maple pump house. There, underground lines draw sap from more than 13,000 tapped maples. Elm Brook Farm has another 4,000 to 5,000 sugar maples waiting in the wings. At the main residence, Howe emerges from the woods on an ATV, trailed by four exuberant Braques français, aka French pointers. “They’re great hunting dogs,” he says, greeting his visitor with a sweaty handshake and a five o’clock shadow. Howe apologizes, explaining that he’s been busy working on the maple trees, which took a serious beating during last winter’s ice storm. Those trees, from which Howe produces about a quarter million gallons of sap annually, are crucial to his operation. He produces two signature spirits. Literary Dog is a small-batch artisanal vodka that’s distilled 23 times. With each distilling, Howe says, another “flavor compound” is stripped away, until all that remains is a creamy, sweet finish, what he calls “our maple signature.” Elm Brook’s other product, Rail Dog, is a 100 percent distilled maple spirit. Unlike
a maple liqueur, which is essentially vodka with maple-syrup flavoring, Howe explains, “This is pure, 100 percent maple [sap] that’s been fermented, distilled and then barrel aged.” The result is a spirit that tastes more like cognac or single-malt whiskey, with a maple finish. Because Rail Dog is so different from traditional spirits, Howe claims, it took the U.S. Treasury Department months to figure out how to classify it; it didn’t meet the legal definitions of whiskey, rum, gin, vodka, wine or liqueur. “This is nothing written in a book,” says Howe, who grew up on a Minnesota farm and discovered Vermont as a ski racer while attending Cornell University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, then a master’s in business, before spending years working in international finance in Europe. About 20 years ago, Howe and his wife bought this longneglected farm in Franklin County. Howe spent about five years tinkering with his spirits formula in his hayloftturned-chemistry lab. His efforts eventually paid off. Today, about 90 percent of Elm Brook Farm’s spirits — the company produces fewer than 2,000 bottles a year — are sold to repeat customers. Rail Dog goes for $94 for a 750-milliliter bottle; Literary Dog, for $56 a bottle. “This one guy from Chicago flies his private plane in just to pick up his vodka,” Howe reveals.