DERBY PARTY DAZZLER

and put it in the barrel and ultimately in the bottle. And yet, the process is infinitely more complex. Distillers are often diving just as deep into the complexities of the grain as the farmers themselves.

“Every year, every grain is a little bit different,” explained Joe Bidinger, one of the co-founders of Echo Spirits Distilling Co. “We’re always looking at things like starch content, protein content, things like that impact the yield when it’s going through the fermentation process and then coming off the still. Sometimes the little difference here or there can be as much as 5 or 10 percent difference in alcohol coming off the still, and that makes a big difference for us at the end of the day.”

Chances are, you haven’t given much thought to the starch and protein content of the grain that goes into your favorite whiskey. But for distillers like Joe and his partner Nikhil Sharoff, those are important variables in the process of making a great product.

Bidinger continued, “What does it taste like getting our hands on it? What does it feel like? What’s the moisture level in there? Because all of those things go a long way for us, to changing up our process a little bit, to make sure that we are getting the best qualities out of that grain.”

Understanding what influences these qualities is also why they value a close relationship with the farmers who supply their grain, like Matt Cunningham from Rustic Brew.

“Matt’s been great to work with,” Bidinger said. “We’ve been buying grain from him since our first grain-based products. Being big beer nerds, we thought that somebody malting grain here in Ohio was the coolest thing ever. [So] let’s talk to him and see if we can work with him in a distilling capacity, even though we don’t use that much malted barley.”

OHIO-GROWN, OHIO-DISTILLED

Bidinger said sourcing local grain is important to him as a distiller for a lot of reasons. For one, he and other local craft distillers put a premium on spending their money with local business and “keeping the Ohio economy alive and keeping money flowing around families here in Ohio.” But it’s more than just the economic aspects of buying local — there are solid agronomic reasons for buying mostly Ohio grain.

“So we talk about terroir a lot. It’s very common in the wine industry to talk about, or even in beer sometimes,” he said. Terroir, a French word pronounced tare-WAH, is the complete natural environment in which a particular product like wine or cheese is produced, including factors such as soil, topography, climate, and microbiology.

“And there’s this kind of myth that once you go through the distillation process, and once you go through barrel aging, that those kind of unique notes sort of start to disappear; and I don’t think that’s true at all.” Bidinger continued. “Ohio has high limestone-content soil. So it’s a fairly neutral pH, which means that the grain has the optimal conditions to grow in and creates the most flavorforward, flavor-rich grain you can find anywhere in the world. And that transfers directly through into when we’re mashing and fermenting and distilling; that distillate coming off the still is more flavorful and more interesting than anywhere else in the world.”

With art and science working in tandem, the partnership between farmers and distillers of Ohio couldn’t be more important to crafting the exceptional spirits that we enjoy.