NEWPORT CR AFT BREWING & DISTILLING CO. WRITTEN BY DEVON TREVATHAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY AMANDA JOY CHRISTENSEN
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t’s no surprise brewing/distilling operations are picking up steam. After all, a brewery already has much of the equipment that a distillery needs to get started and vice versa, so a combination of the two does make sense. Many examples of these hybrid businesses, however, tend to favor one side over the other, but to hear Brent Ryan tell it, that’s not the case at Newport Craft Brewing & Distilling Co. in Newport, Rhode Island. The separate arms of their businesses certainly support one another, but the founders seem to have taken genuine care to build them up equally. Newport Craft Brewing began just before the turn of this century. Cast your mind back to 1999 and think about the brewing industry then: The craft movement was already underway, with small operations that had some financial muscle behind them. More importantly, there had been an explosion of homebrewers. Many of the professional brewers who would go on to start successful beer brands started out that way, and the market was already beginning to feel saturated in just about every sense of the word. As they picked up momentum brewing in Newport, Ryan and his partners heard tall tales of the area’s distilling history. They began looking into it further and found that many of these stories held water: There were 22 operating distilleries inside city limits in 1789, making some of the best rum in the world at that time. By 2006,
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Ryan and the rest at Newport Craft were convinced — they had to bring the distilling tradition back to the city of Newport. One of the key differences between starting a brewery and starting a distillery, however, is access to information. As homebrewers themselves, the founders of Newport Craft Brewing had a bedrock of knowledge to work off of when they decided to get into the commercial production of beer, as well as a pretty developed information flow elsewhere. The same could not be said for distilling. Back in 2006, there weren’t many forums online that could answer their questions. Still, they persevered with the idea and were eventually granted a distilling license, the first in Newport in 135 years. Ryan said that they knew right away what spirit they would begin distilling. “One of the reasons we actually started the distillery, probably the biggest reason we started the distillery, is because in the seven years of brewing beer here in Newport, Rhode Island, we started to hear more and more about the history of rum,” he explained. Naming their brand Thomas Tew after the famed pirate who originally hailed from Newport was one way of honoring the traditional roots of distillation. Newport Craft also chose blackstrap molasses from Florida as their base product, and aged their rum in once-used bourbon barrels as similar nods to past practices. WWW.ART ISANSPI RI TMAG.CO M