midst the seemingly endless fields of trees and rocks about 90 minutes north of Green Bay, Wisconsin, Peter Connor began to chase his passion. “We don’t have agriculture here … what we have is a lot of maple trees.” One particular August, back in 2019, during his annual retreat to the Northwoods where he eschews modern comforts, the self-described “gin enthusiast” found inspiration in his surroundings and undertook the task of designing a gin unlike much else on the market. He would distill it from maple sap. We sat down with Connor, and he shared with us a bit about how he works with this unusual base and why he would use it to create his 100 Mill St. Gin from it. AARON:
How did you get started?
So back in 2019, a couple of things that kind of came together to set me on this path … one of those things was a retailer knew that I was a gin enthusiast and was bringing me in because they were being just inundated with lots of gins. ‘Peter, PETER:
MAPLE SAP GIN
An Interview with Peter Connor WRITTEN BY AARON KNOLL
we’re wine guys. Come in and tell us what the story is with these.’ I gave them a ‘good, better, best kind of deal, or terrible.’ I was seeing all these new gins and some of them were interesting. Some of them were [...] not all that interesting. But some of them were very, very good and during these times … there was a great gin that started in Wisconsin called Death’s Door. For a lot of people, they don’t taste [the base spirit]. Like it’s not there. But for some reason, that corn ethanol thing doesn’t work for my palate personally. So that really struck me right away, that what you start with makes all the difference to what you end up with... Those two confluences came together and I was like, OK, I’m going to try to make some gin.
BOTANICALS IN 100 MILL ST. GIN Juniper, vanilla, anise, lavender, licorice root, cassis, rose petals, coriander, orris root, fresh citrus peels (orange, grapefruit, and lemon), fennel, cardamom, angelica root, cardamom. W W W . ARTISANSPIRITMAG . C O M
PHOTOS PROVIDED BY 100 MILL ST. GIN
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AARON: So creating your own base, locally inspired, in a way similar to how Death’s Door was using red winter wheat, was important to you. PETER: We’re in the maple business. Maple trees are what I know. I know guys that have sugar shacks.1 I know guys that sell the equipment, the modern equipment that they use now … unfortunately it’s not as romantic as it used to be with the buckets and the hoses and all that stuff. It’s kind of an — it is an industry now. Not kind of an industry. It is an industry, and it takes a Herculean amount of effort to get the quantity we need. Say we need 750 gallons to make 500 cases. So to make 3,000 bottles, we need 750 gallons of maple syrup. Okay, but it takes 40 gallons of maple sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. That’s 30,000 gallons of sap we need to ferment to distill 500, 750 ML cases. That’s a lot of sap. We make life for us a little bit harder than we should. But it is — we think — worth it, and we aren’t willing to really deviate from it. … So I’m going to use maple sap as the sugar... Now you’re going to think this sugar content is really low, because it is. But it has about a 4-5 percent sugar content, which is considered very, very high for sap.2
1 Sugar Shacks are traditional facilities, often cabins, where sap is boiled, in order to turn it into maple syrup. They are common in regions where maple trees are present and often associated with a craft approach, or older ways of syrup production. 2 Peter notes that sap generally ranges from 2–5 percent overall across different regions.
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