FEATURE
In Good Spirits
BY WENDY GUILD SWEARINGEN An array of products from Niagara Craft Spirits Photos courtesy of Niagara Craft Spirits
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’ve driven by this new-ish storefront on Route 104 in Cambria many times and was curious about what was happening inside. I was pleased to speak with Niagara Craft Spirits co-owner Todd Snyder, 49, about a hobby that has turned into a thriving side business.
Forever Young: How long have you been making spirits? Tom Snyder: I can remember my brother and I trying to ferment various grains as a child based on articles for fuel alcohol in Mother Earth News. Our first still was my mom’s pressure cooker. I think I was only ten or twelve years old. FY: Describe your life preNiagara Craft Spirits. TS: I came to University at Buffalo from a small town near Binghamton, New York, as a grad student and stayed on to work in the department after obtaining a master’s degree in environmental engineering. I still work at UB in Civil Engineering, the distillery is a weekend/extra/fun job. FY: What got you interested in distilling? TS: As any of my childhood friends will tell you, my life has been a never-ending quest for alcohol. When I was nineteen, I 12
started brewing beer at home—at the time at my fraternity at Cornell. I love the process of making it and the interesting history involved in the various forms of alcohol that we as a human race have come up with over the centuries. Distilling came back into the picture when I met Joe Nardecchia through the local homebrew club. There was home distilling happening in the club and we enjoyed the results. I can’t say much more than that, because the distillation of spirits at home is still a federal crime! FY: How did you learn about distillation? TS: Ninety-nine percent of the process actually happens prior to distillation. The agricultural crops are raised—in our case we use local Niagara County corn and wine from grapes on the Niagara Wine Trail. Those are whole professions all their own, and we support those farmers by buying directly from them. These are fermented to make
www.foreveryoungwny.com | July 2020
good drinkable alcohol. That is the secret to making great spirits, start with good mash or wine. We already had over forty years of experience making good clean drinking alcohol between us through beer- and wine-making. The distillation step that follows is fairly straightforward and easy, and if we aren’t happy with the result, we can always re-distill it. FY: Tell me a little about the spirit-making process and what sort of equipment you use. TS: For our vodka and whiskeys, the corn and, depending on the product, barley malt, is mashed at our distillery by hand from scratch. We have a small grain bin at the distillery and a mill to grind the grain. We use steam jacketed kettles purchased at surplus auctions to boil the grain with water in order to convert the starches into fermentable sugars. After fermentation, the waste corn mash is picked up by a local farmer
to feed to his chickens. For our liqueurs and gin, we purchase wine from New York Farm Wineries on the Niagara Wine Trail and distill that. We use three thirty-gallon copper stills made in Kentucky; we are a very small distillery. It’s important that people understand the difference between a “from scratch” distillery such as ours and one that is buying bulk alcohol in totes or drums or whiskey in barrels and barrel finishing it or sending it for a quick trip through their still to flavor it into gin. In the worst cases, the alcohol is simply carbon filtered or simply bottled and called “vodka.” FY: How do you develop recipes? What products do you offer? TS: Both Joe and I are National rank Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) beer judges, and that experience has helped us a lot in tasting our products and with recipe development. We will typically research the style, sample as many
