This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
The folks at Dry Land Distillers have spent this lively year heating up grains older than Christ himself in a worse-for-ware toy chest to find a new, fine, warm, inviting spirit for the holidays.
Aaron Main and Nels Wroe of Dry Land Distillers have been working their fingers to the bone in the distillery, fully engaged in creating a rare, 100 percent heirloom wheat whiskey. It is now time to open up Barrel #3. In a season of giving, it will be the only new whiskey Dry Land releases before the holidays on December 1st.
“We first discovered the heirloom wheat when we were doing some baking and we were looking for some different flours to bake with, quite a while ago as a family,” said Nels Wroe. “We found this heirloom wheat randomly from the middle of Arizona. It was just a small little mill and we had some shipped up just to try it out and it was just a lovely flour. This was 4-5 years ago.”
When brainstorming in the distillery, they had the idea to try something unique for a new whiskey. Wroe wondered if they could get that particular ancient grain wheat his family used to bake with to see if they could even make a spirit out of it. They decided to contact the specific mill where they make the flour and purchased their whole wheat berries, but that mill had never done that before.
“The grain itself, they were trying to recover the grain. They were trying to rediscover it, it’s been around for they think 2,500-3,000 years. They have done genetic testing on it and they believe it is the mother strain of all the commercial wheat that we grow in the western U.S. now. It has fallen out of favor because it is not a hard winter wheat protein. So, it is not cultivated at all. They saved the crop itself and we got the wheat berries,” Wroe said. “But Aaron and I had to figure out, because it had never been malted before, malted to grain, so it had to be malted to convert the sugars. We used a toy chest.”
They had to get a little creative to prove that the process could work before moving forward with malting the grain on a larger scale.
“We had to get a lot of 5-gallon buckets, kind of like several brewers will do too, and sprout it. Then we had an old toy chest that we got from the Habitat for Humanity, a heat gun set on a thermostat. We built these chafing trays inside a toy box, ran the heat gun up to 132 degrees and just malted it,” said award-winning master distiller, Aaron Main.
After proving that this would work, Troubadour Maltings in Fort Collins agreed to malt the heirloom wheat. They are working directly with the grower in Arizona, shipping the grain straight to Fort Collins, and now they have over 22 separate brewers that are seeking the same malted grain.
Dry Land intentionally crafted the whiskey to be in the barrel for twelve months or less, and it will be about nine months old by time they pull it. They wanted to be careful not to damage it by over-aging, over-charring, or over-oaking the whiskey because the grain is very delicate and has a soft protein structure.
“We had a pilot barrel and then our founder’s barrel. That was basically what we started with. We have a big waiting list right now for the whiskey,” Wroe said. “It’s a big release because it is the first true release since we’ve been open that has not been our founder’s barrel. Our founder’s barrel was pre-opening, so this is the first barrel that has officially been released since we have been open. There is a lot of demand for it right now, more than we may have bottles.”
According to Main, the flavors are more floral toward cinnamon, maybe vanilla a little bit, but way before butterscotch and caramel. It gets some of the notes from the barrel, but no butterscotch. They tried hard to make sure the grain characteristics stay in the glass. They said ordering it neat is probably the best way to go, but it would also go beautifully in a Manhattan or as a whiskey sour.
Describing the flavor, “I would start with the heat profile, that’s because of the wheat, it is so much lower. It’s still whiskey, it’s still 40% alcohol so you get a burn, it’s a much later burn than that spike that you would get from a typical bourbon rye,” Main said. “It’s delicious.”
Dry Land was thinking about the holiday season back when we didn’t have to, back in Christmas in July, teaming up with select farmers and businesses to bring their customers something special.
They partnered with the Longmont Dairy and Savory Spice to create homemade hometown eggnog kits which include their Barrel #3 Whiskey and a holiday rum aged since June, along with fresh whole milk, fresh whipping cream, and fresh eggs from the Longmont Dairy. Savory Spice will provide the vanilla bean and the nutmeg for the kit.
Included in the kit is an eggnog recipe. They are taking reservations for the eggnog kits now because they are perishable. They will be available the beginning of December for pickup at the Dry Land Distillers on Main St.
They originally had no plans to make a holiday rum until a competition began to brew between the staff over who had the better eggnog recipe and they needed a quality rum to go with the eggnog.
“We thought if we are going to do a rum, we want to do something different and something that honors the roots of what Dry Land is about, which is going back to the core main ingredient for the spirit and that is sugar cane,” Wroe said. “We decided to get some raw sugar cane and raw cane syrup and see if we could make a rum without the classic molasses and sugar.”
Acquiring sugar cane turned into a troubling task, but they found a place in Florida and one in Alabama, and only one of them shipped raw cane syrup. They already had the proper shredders and equipment to use that they used with cactus.
“We thought, ‘Why not shred the whole thing and use the entire sugar cane, pulp and all, as part of our cane raw.’ What we didn’t know at the time, was that that is a rare form of rum, it is called an Agricole rum, where they use the raw sugar cane and cane syrup. It’s a French island rum which we were not familiar with until we made it,” Wroe said. “We actually ferment the sugar cane itself. It’s a very rare style of rum that we make. We wanted to go back to the roots of the plant. The Agricole style of rum, it makes it a much rounder, sweeter more vigil rum. There are a lot more highlights in it than the classic rum burn.”
According to Wroe, compared with their silver rum, there is more depth to the barrel aging than the silver rum, so it brings out more caramel/sugars, and they have a darker char on the barrel for the holiday rum. They decided not to spice the holiday rum and figured patrons can add spices to their liking and for how they use the rum. They wanted it to be a holiday rum purely off how the sugar and the barrel work together to create its own combination.
And last but not least, on the Dry Land Distillers Colorado horizon, a recipe for their next big release, a true native Colorado botanical gin. Made with only native Colorado botanicals, they let the botanicals guide them toward a very rounded, warm style of gin, and not a dry, citrus style.
“Our gin has been kicking our butts. We committed ourselves to using only native Colorado botanicals for our gin. That has been really challenging, it is a great idea, and we didn’t realize how difficult that was going to be. Gin botanicals are usually cardamom, orange peel, lemon peels, there’s a lot of citrus, a lot of spice. But we have none of that in Colorado,” Wroe said. “We had to really work hard, and we have dozens and dozens, and dozens of experimental bottles of gin because we couldn’t get the botanicals right. We finally got it. We are just waiting on approvals, our gin, we wanted to release it in the fall and probably won’t be released before Christmas.”
Dry Land Distillers plan on only selling their bottles at their 471 Main St. location as opposed to putting it in liquor stores for a specific reason. “We want to drive people to downtown Longmont for the holiday season,” Wroe said. “We are invested in downtown Longmont for a reason, there are some really cool places down here. So, if we must bribe you with a drink, we are going to bribe you with a drink.”
