Northern Colorado has been quickly becoming one of the best regions for Microbreweries in the country with New Belgium, Odell’s and Oskar Blues anchoring the booze heavy region.  Newcomers Grimm Brothers’, Spring 44 and Dancing Pines have been quickly anointed into the alcohol industry for making great products.  More on Grimm Brother’s  and Spring 44 in the near future.

Dancing Pines is a new distillery crafting artisanal spirits right in the backyard of my hometown Loveland, Colorado.  They started their operation in 2010 and have been gaining great notoriety in Northern Colorado for their great tasting bourbon, rum, gin, brandy and liqueurs.  They have gone so far as to win double gold medal at the San Francisco World Spirits competition, one of the most prestigious spirit competitions in the country, for their Chai Liqueur.

Kristian and Kimberly Naslund came up with the name for their distillery when renovating an old cabin in the Colorado Rockies.  Being stuck in their cabin from a massive blizzard they looked outside to the movement of pine trees swaying back and forth to the music inside their cabin.  There trapped in a snow covered cabin, they found comfort from the trees swaying side to side.  To them, the meaning of “Dancing Pines” has a meaningful name which was creating serenity in their lives.

If you are ever in Northern Colorado I recommend taking a tour of the Dancing Pines distillery in Loveland, Colorado.  They have great tasting spirits for all different kinds of people.  I am a huge fan of their bourbon, one of the best micro-distilled bourbons I have ever had.  With their bourbon they use sweet corn in their grain bill and age them in small oak barrels.  Typically I find that micro-distilled bourbon have a harsh alcohol taste because the spirit hasn’t had enough time to react with oxygen in the barrels.  However, Dancing Pines’ bourbon is very smooth which makes me a raging fan.

The pioneers of canning microbrews, Oskar Blues brewery from Lyons, Colorado, is making plans to start canning its own Whiskey. This brewery has provided the mash to Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey in the past and has family history distilling whiskey in Alabama.

The brewery will house a new distillery called Lyon Soul distilling. The still is already ordered and will be ready by this summer. The first two products to be sold will be an Organic Agave Nectar tequila using local Madhava honey, and a whiskey made from brewery mash, aged in french oak barrels for 2 years.  Oskar Blues has teamed up with the Ball canning corporation to make a resealable lid for the 16 oz cans they will use to sell their spirits.

Farmers during the colonization of the US were very big in to fermenting and distilling their crops.  It made sense, when farmers distilled their produce into whiskey they didn’t have crop spoilage, the load to take to market was much smaller and to top it all they gained a much higher profit.  Farmers were able to receive 10 times more by selling whiskey compared to selling their unprocessed grain.

After the United States won the revolutionary war, it became very apparent that the war was extremely costly and sank the US into a lot of debt.  The total cost of the war was $52 million and trying to pay that off in a newly established country would not be easy.  Alexander Hamilton devised the plan to tax whiskey based on the idea that whiskey was a type of luxury item and taxing the production of it seemed natural.

The tax on whiskey was 9 cents/gallon for small distillers and 6 cents/gallon.  Farmers with less efficiency took the burden of this tax while larger distillers (such as George Washington) were able to mass produce their liquor without a large financial struggle.  Smaller distillers opposed this tax bitterly.  In 1794 opposition was at its highest when protests turned to fully fledged rebellions where the opposition wrote threatening letters, robbed mail carriers, stopped court hearings and in one case tarred and feathered a tax collector.

George Washington and Alexander Hamilton thought this was a great time to impose the authority of the new American government and Washington personally commanded 12,950 troops to Pennsylvania to bring order to the area.  Not much fighting happened and most ran away.  Some minor charges were brought to a few rowdy rebels but in the end no one died from the altercation between the rebels and the militia.  The whiskey rebellion was never largely enforced outside of western Pennsylvania and the tax was repealed in 1803 after a great deal of failure. 

 An alcohol cleaning process called TerrePURE is growing in popularity recently.  TerrePURE is a technical cleaning process that takes out unwanted minor alcohols in spirits such as isoproponol.  For example in whiskey distillation, distillers use pot stills which leave a lot of good tasting flavor in the final whiskey product but it is necessary for the spirit to sit in barrels for a few years to round out the whiskey’s harsher tasting flavors.  The spirit naturally reacts with air, by breathing in and out of the barrel as the temperature changes.  Through this process, it cleans the whiskey of the minor alcohols and adds vanilla flavors and color.

TerrePURE works by moving the alcohol through an oxygenated chamber and where it is subjected to high-intensity ultrasonic energy.  It takes anywhere from 4 to 12 hours to get the necessary purification. This process takes out multiple different minor alcohols that do not taste good. The finished spirit is considered a product that tastes great and has a light and more delicate aroma.

One of the biggest challenges of new micro distilleries is that trying to age a whiskey in barrels and getting a whiskey that tastes good requires aging them for years.  But put that same whiskey in a smaller barrel it will get the flavor and color much quicker but will still taste “harsh”.  That is because the spirit has not had time to react with the oxygen in the barrel which alters the chemical compounds in the spirit to make it taste much better.

A Brief Overview of the TerrePURE® Process from Daniel Hewlette on Vimeo.

This weekend I was able to get up into the mountains and distill myself a batch of corn whiskey.  For this recipe I decided to cheat a little and add a little bit of sugar to my mash and go all out and make moonshine rather than try to age my whiskey into a bourbon.  After watching the show “Moonshiners” I was inspired to try out a recipe for apple pie moonshine.  The recipe was okay after I made it but a few days later the recipe tastes great, just like apple pie.  The cinnamon is much deeper and spicy and the apple slice that is placed in the jar gives it a fresh apple taste.   

WhiskeyPro’s Apple Pie Delight

·         6 oz Moonshine (Corn Whiskey)

·         6 oz Apple Cider

·         1 tbsp sugar

·         1 stick of cinnamon

·         ¼ apple slice

Put all the ingredients in a 16 oz mason jar and shake until sugar is dissolved.  The longer this liquor sits the better the flavor, it will allow the cinnamon stick and apple slice to infuse its freshness into the liquor.  Make sure to drink the moonshine directly out of the jar as that enhances your inner hillbilly.

If you have drank enough whiskey to notice the all the unique flavors, you might wonder why does most aged bourbon taste so much like vanilla?

It all starts with White American Oak barrels and the char that each distillery uses to make their distinct bourbon taste.  For bourbon to be legally called bourbon, it needs to be aged in new charred oak barrels for at least 3 years.  The wood, American white oak has a large amount of wood sugar within the wood.  When the bourbon barrel is charred on the inside it creates a few organic compounds and one of these flavor enhancing compounds is called vanillin. 

“Vanillin”, C8H8O3, is found in nature not only in wood but also in vanilla beans, maple syrup, banans and even butter.  The highest concentration of vanillin found in nature is in vanilla beans where 2% of their body weight is the organic compound vanillin.  You will notice that vanilla extract consists of a large percentage of alcohol in the extract.  The reason for this is that vanillin has a high solubility in alcohol.  While bourbon is sitting in barrels (at least 3 years legally) it has a long time to dissolve all the available charred vanillin in the wood.  By charring the bourbon barrels at different degrees of char it will create a different tasting vanillin compound ranging from a light flowery vanilla to a deep toffee flavor.  Other spirits can contain some amounts of vanillin and if you can taste a flavor of vanilla in the flavor profile there is a good chance there is vanillin in the spirit.