Written and photographed by Gabe Toth
Three-Chamber Everything Todd Leopold expands three-chamber operations well beyond just rye whiskey
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hat started as an experiment in historical rye whiskey production has spread across the Leopold Bros. product line like a viscous, delicious virus. Corn, malt, various fruits — it seems like the only thing not in production is a three-chamber vodka. After commissioning the first new three-chamber still since Prohibition and beginning rye production with it in late 2014 or 2015, Todd Leopold decided five or six years ago to put up a few barrels of malt whiskey — calling it “kind of dumb to have a floor-malting operation and not put any barrels of malt whiskey down.” It’s not necessarily a big part of his planning, since the American market still hasn’t quite caught up with malt whiskey, but he can sit on it in the warehouse and worry about it later or use it as a blending component. “We knew going into it, tasting the distillate, this whiskey isn’t going to be anywhere where we want it to be for eight, ten years. The flavors are just so big, everything is amplified,” he said. He’s also put up some Irish-style whiskey, using a blend of malted and unmalted barley.
The Old Becomes New Later, Leopold learned that the still had also been used for bourbon, opening another conceptual door. He cited a pre-Prohibition newspaper article from Louisville, Kentucky, that described the six kinds of whiskey being made in the state. “They said, by far and away, the most common way to make bourbon was in a three-chamber still,” Leopold said. “It turns out the original Old Fitzgerald, the original Old Judge, the whiskies that made Pappy van Winkle famous before he opened Stitzel & Weller in 1935, that was three-chamber bourbon.” He’s continued to pair the three-chamber still with his ability to malt grain onsite, W W W . ARTISANSPIRITMAG . C O M
using malted corn for his three-chamber bourbon. Corn contains a great deal of oil, and the three-chamber is designed to pull oils out. The heavy oil presence softens the whiskey considerably, and a single-infusion mash is enough to convert the corn after it’s malted. “You find in all sorts of recipes, including the original Dickel whiskey, was malted corn, malted barley, and in some cases malted rye,” he said. “It softens your perception of ethanol, gives it more palate fullness. The white dog is much more like cornbread and less like that agricultural, raw corn flavor. The whiskey that is not four years yet, I’m very happy with. From where I sit, [it’s] more remarkable than the rye.” He’s been applying the same approach to corn as he would for making Munich or Vienna malt, incorporating a stewing process in the kiln — closing up the system and recirculating hot, moist air that creates sugars and high level of Maillard reactions before opening the kiln to blow off the moisture and drying the malted corn. “When we open it up, it smells like a mixture of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and peanut shells and hazelnuts,” he said. “From a lab perspective, I’m trying to understand why, after going through this process, that cinnamic acid is much higher.” Leopold tried running unmalted corn as well but simply didn’t like it as much. “It wasn’t bad, [but] I can tell you this: Because you pull so much of the raw corn flavor out, that’s an eight- to 15-year-old whiskey. That flavor that makes bourbon taste young, it is amplified, so it will take a lot longer for the wood sugars to catch up,” he said. It reminded him of the first time he ran rye on the three-chamber still. He told his brother Scott, “There is absolutely zero chance that this will be palatable after two years. I told him that the 45