The volunteers were appropriately tattooed, and the music they blasted, aptly punk. A man shouted into a bullhorn, and people laughed. Another lad, Jake Norris, a bearded fireplug of a guy who would look at home on a Scottish moor, trumpeted the team’s progress as he stalked the warehouse, occasionally hopping into a forklift and moving stuff around.
“A hundred gallons!” shouted Norris, head distiller for Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey. “Five hundred bottles left, guys! You’re doing awesome!”
This, technically, was a day of labor. This partying, raucous lot, was — appropriately — bottling whiskey. The LoDo distillery where they spent the morning and afternoon smelled like someone’s idea of heaven — like cognac, a wallop of vanilla and caramel and nasal-searing alcohol.
The scene — the restaurant-worker volunteers paid in bottles of booze for their toil, the roaring music, the whiskey perfume — never would have happened if not for a fire in an Aspen barn, and for Jess Graber, one of the people who helped put it out.
The owner of the barn, George Stranahan, also owned Flying Dog Brewery. Graber, 57, who calls himself “an old moonshiner,” became friendly with Stranahan, and one day he noticed in Stranahan’s house a few leftover kegs half-full of beer.
This gave Graber an idea.
Maybe he could turn that old beer into whiskey.
“A light bulb went off,” says Graber. The French make cognac out of wine. Why couldn’t he open Colorado’s only whiskey distillery and make whiskey out of beer, or at least something beerlike?
Stranahan invested in Graber’s idea, and now Colorado supports one of the more unusual distilleries in the nation, crafting something that is not bourbon, not scotch, not Canadian or rye. But something unique — straight Rocky Mountain whiskey.
For the mash or “wash,” the brewers at Oskar Blues in Lyons custom-make for Stranahan’s a malted barley alcoholic elixir and send 3,000 gallons of the stuff to the LoDo distillery every week. Graber and Norris then turn each batch of wash into 300 gallons of whiskey.
“We’re a totally new classification,” Graber said one afternoon in his rambling LoDo distillery and warehouse, full of copper and stainless steel stills, bottles and 50-gallon oak barrels.
“We are starting with a barley mash, which is Scotch or Irish style. We’re distilling in a combination scotch-bourbon still, and aging bourbon-style in new oak.”
Their approach is paying off. At its annual competition in April, the American Distillers Institute gave Stranahan’s whiskey the gold medal in the category “malt whiskey.”
“It beats working for a living,” said Graber, after sharing a small afternoon shot with a reporter.
Norris calls making whiskey “the original alchemy.”
“Turning grain into gold,” he says.
It takes a while for the gold part to take place.
Making whiskey is nothing like making cupcakes: You can whip up a batch of batter and have chocolate cupcakes with strawberry icing half an hour later. But with whiskey, you need to sit on your liquor for at least two years before you get paid for a single bottle.
“Then,” says Graber, “you become a for-profit company.”
After the whiskey has aged at least 2 1/2 years, Stranahan’s brings down the proof from 110 to 94 with Colorado’s Eldorado Natural Spring Water, and then those volunteers show up for the bottling party. Stranahan’s fills about 2,500 bottles a month.
“This is what it’s all about to us,” said Kyle Cantrell, 30, as he worked in the assembly line of volunteers filling, capping, labeling and packing whiskey bottles. “Supporting these people and their endeavor. I’m just trying to participate in my community.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
