Developing a Taste for Specialty Distilleries

Distiller Colton Weinstein at Corsair Distillery in Nashville. (Image Credit: Corsair)

For Austin, skillful blending is key. “The number one thing I focus on for quality control is determining, after the barrels have matured, which ones are ready to come out and which barrels are going to be blended together to create the product. Blending is a lot about nosing and tasting, knowing what you are aiming for, setting rules and parameters for yourself, being committed to not taking a shortcut and just dumping barrels in a tank because you have got to bottle,” she says.

The art of spirit making is the nosing and tasting rather than a scientific analysis. “There is no scientific test for delicious. So much of that process is the brain making sense about what it is smelling, putting together vanilla, cinnamon, and fruit smells, and interpreting that to mean apple pie. That’s where the artistry comes in,” Austin says.

Flavor Begins in Ingredients, Oak Barrels

Selecting high quality ingredients is the first step in quality and consistency. Craft distilleries are known for being willing to experiment with a variety of ingredients to build in unique flavor. Corsair Distillery in Nashville, for example, uses quinoa in a whiskey and has started its own malting facility so that it can establish specifications for malting, according to distiller Colton Weinstein. Corsair buys barley but is hoping to start growing its own in the future to have even more control over the quality of the raw ingredient.

Achieving consistency of ingredients is a concern, Erenzo says, given that each batch of raw material is different. A distiller may start with one crop of rye and the next season have a different crop, grown during a different weather cycle. “That’s where the blending comes in to get your desired flavor profile,” he says.

Ralph Erenzo and Brian Lee, founders of Tuthilltown Spirits Farm Distillery, Gardiner, N.Y. (Image Credit: Tuthilltown)

Distilling begins with selecting ingredients, of course, but it’s in the charred oak barrels where the spirits are aged that the flavor notes develop. Getting enough of those barrels can be a challenge, however. The rapid growth in craft distilleries began at about the same time as the housing slowdown, a slowdown that trickled down to the wood harvesting business and led to a shortage of dried oak for coopers, who could not keep up with the increasing demand for aged barrels.

Erenzo says that when Tuthilltown started distilling spirit, it was one of only about 10 in the country, and getting barrels wasn’t much of a problem. Now, with between 700 and 800 distilleries operating in the U.S., cooperages are working around the clock to keep up with the demand, and some have an 8-month waiting list.

The wood in the barrel comes with its own history—whether it grew slowly or quickly, its age when cut, whether it was air dried or kiln dried, how long it sat in the cooper’s yard protected or unprotected, or how it was charred. Barrel making is an art, distillers say, and a good barrel isn’t made in a day.

“You can’t get around the fact that it is a natural product, and you can’t get around the fact that when you fill it in September or in November, the weather will be slightly different, even if all the barrels are kept in the same room together,” Austin explains. But those differences are desirable because the finished product should not have just one note. “You build that complexity by bringing those barrels together.”

Temperature interacts with the wood barrels during the aging process. If whisky is placed in a barrel in October, it will take longer to age than if it is placed in the barrel in May because the temperature will drop during the first months of aging, according to Erenzo. Tuthilltown has no climate control in the building where its barrels are aging, so “whatever happens outside is what is happening inside, which is absolutely necessary,” he says.