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t Bainbridge Organic Distillers outside of Seattle, being organic isn’t rooted in some health crusade or making a philosophical statement. It’s all about finding the best flavor and tying that back to the best ingredients. Founder Keith Barnes has had a 40-year career in the spirits industry through his marketing company Motive Marketing Group, helping some of the largest spirits companies such as William and Grant, Pernod Ricard, and Diageo, with brand development and programming. He was familiar with the commodity ingredients being tapped by the big players when he opened Bainbridge, and he knew that he wanted to do something different. “The challenge and the goal was to figure out how to distill organically, which isn’t easy, and to kind of prove the case that you can make spirits that are every bit as good or better than the other high-end spirits that are out there now being made conventionally and with the benefit of modern inputs,” he said. He said this approach allowed them to harness some of the things that organic agriculture is good at, primarily that it has a smaller footprint and taps into the flavor of heirloom grains. “That’s really tough to get when you’re using commodity inputs,” he said. “You taste the difference between heirloom grain just eating it out of the bin, and commodity grain if you’re brave enough to eat it out of the bin, with all the crap that’s on it. The difference is night and day.” He said the raw material character in spirits constitutes some of the most persistent flavors, among the last things to get distilled out of neutral spirit. He noted the first vodka boom in the 1960s, when vodka went from being a more flavorful niche product to a neutral, industrially produced spirit. “The vodka industry had to learn how to distill vodka neutrally. It was kind of neutral, but it wasn’t neutral the way that the industry needed to make it,” Barnes said. “Vodka production shifted from being spring and fall into year round, [and] started having to use inputs that they’d never used before. They struggled for two years trying to make vodka that every batch and every season tastes the same way. The simple answer is, let’s distill the tar out of W W W . ARTISANSPIRITMAG . C O M
“The challenge and the goal was to figure out how to distill organically, which isn’t easy, and to kind of prove the case that you can make spirits that are every bit as good or better than the other high-end spirits that are out there now being made conventionally and with the benefit of modern inputs.” — Keith Barnes it and get rid of everything, including as much of the flavor of the grain as possible. And it’s the flavor of the grain that’s the last thing to go. You get rid of everything else, and the grain’s still there.” His takeaway was that, if it takes so much effort to remove the grain flavor from a spirit,
then he needs to have more desirable grain flavor going in to lead to better flavor in the spirit. The other factor that drove him toward organic was the realization that a lot of the inputs, including yeast, enzymes, and even chemical salts or acids, are all prepared as simply as possible. His enzymes, for example, 37