Something Awesome Is Happening in Oregon

Unless you are in or a frequent visitor to the Pacific Northwest, you’ve probably never heard of McMenamin’s, and certainly not their Edgefield Distillery. Yet it is quite possible that Edgefield has made some of the best whiskey of the young craft distillery era.

A few years back, a four-year-old Edgefield rye won gold at the annual American Distilling Institute (ADI) competition. According to the distiller who accepted the award, Booker Noe (Jim Beam’s grandson, himself a legendary whiskey-maker) helped them with the recipe. It was superb. Asked if, when, and how it would be sold, they answered, “It won’t be. We kind of drank it all.”

Brothers Mike and Brian McMenamin started with a pub back in 1974. Today, McMenamins is a chain of resort hotels, restaurants, bars, music venues, golf courses, movie theaters, and probably a few other endeavors. They brew beer, distill spirits, and vint wine. They grow a lot of the food they serve in their restaurants and grow the grapes from which their wines are made. They’re way into preventing waste and promoting energy savings and efficiency.

The distillery was established in 1998. It is part of Edgefield, a 100-year-old historic McMenamin's resort hotel, located about 20 miles outside of Portland.

Last month, at their annual St. Patrick’s Day blowout, they released a whiskey called Devil’s Bit, made from malted wheat and barley, and aged for twelve years. It is heart-breakingly good, clearly recognizable as malt whiskey, yet different from anything you’ve ever tasted before. The nose alone is a revelation. They could sell it by the sniff.

If you want to become a distiller, and make great whiskey, get thee to Troutdale, Oregon. If you just want to taste what the craft distillery movement can become, same advice.

New Group, the American Craft Distillers Association, Is Announced

The existence of the new American Craft Distillers Association (ACDA) was announced on Tuesday, from Denver, Colorado, just four days after the conclusion of the American Distilling Institute's (ADI) annual conference in that same city.

In Tuesday's announcement, Rory Donovan, interim president of ACDA, explained that ACDA was formed "of, by, and for licensed craft distillers" in order to "promote and protect craft distilling in the United States."

It noted that craft distilling is a phenomenon that is sweeping the country. With more than 320 distilleries in existence and more on the way, products run the full gamut from brandy to bourbon, and all are gaining popularity with mixologists, restaurants, and consumers around the country.

According to Penn Jensen, ACDA executive director, "Our focus will be on brand building, public outreach, and legislative action on national and state levels to support the entrepreneur craft distillers everywhere in the U.S."

Officers and directors of the new organization are: President Rory Donovan, Peach Street Distillery; Vice President Ted Huber, Starlight Distillery; Secretary/Treasurer Brett Joyce, Rogue Brewing and Distilling; Ralph Erenzo, Tuthilltown Distillery; Lee Medoff, Bull Run Distillery; Tom Potter, NY Distilling Co.; Chip Tate, Balcones Distillery; Rick Wasmund, Copper Fox Distillery; Andrew Weber, Corsair Distillery; and (Ex Officio) David Pickerell, Oakview Consulting.  

The ACDA website is AmericanCraftDistillers.org.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the aforementioned ADI, which would seem to occupy most of the same space ACDA is claiming for itself. Penn Jensen, ACDA's new executive director, just retired from a similar position at ADI. Many of the new organization's directors have been active in ADI, some since its formation ten years ago. Huber Distillery, represented by ACDA Vice President Ted Huber, has been the site of many past ADI conferences. Unless the two groups differentiate, there's probably no need for both of them. The marketplace will decide who survives.

If you've read this far expecting to get the inside skinny, you're about to be disappointed. All will be revealed in the fullness of time, perhaps.

Clay Risen Stirs The Pot. Good For Him.

In a posting today on The Atlantic.com, Clay Risen takes on what he calls "The Microdistilling Myth." He was reacting to an article on New York Times.com by Toby Cecchini. A link to Risen's post was posted on ADI Forums.com, where a lot of microdistillers hang out. It elicited some immediate, knee-jerk, hostile reaction.

You probably should at least read Risen's article to make sense of what follows.

Risen’s article is intelligent and well-informed, and makes a worthwhile contribution to discussion about the relationship between micro- and macro-distillers and their respective products. He made the choice to take a provocative tack. I suggest the reader look past that and consider his actual points. It's a short piece. (Shorter than this commentary about it.)

He goes off the track with his proposition that while 'small is better' was automatically true with beer, it's not automatically true with distilled spirits. It wasn't and isn't true with beer either. What is true with beer is that a skillful brewer can make and bring to market, in a relatively short amount of time, a product that to the average, experienced beer drinker will be recognizable as beer and better in identifiable ways than a product such as Bud Light.

Since that is not true with craft whiskey yet his main proposition is correct. There are some micro-distiller whiskeys on the market that are admirable for what they are, but they can't stand toe-to-toe even with Jim Beam white label let alone with Four Roses Mariage, which is in fact one of the best bourbons on the market.

I know all distillers have to believe in their products but if any micro-distiller thinks he or she has made and brought to market a finished whiskey that is clearly superior to Four Roses Mariage, that person is plain and simply delusional.

As for Jim Beam white, surpassing it is certainly an easier goal, but head-to-head as a straight bourbon? Sorry, no. Not yet. The problem isn't anyone’s skill with a still, it's time in the barrel. There are few micro-distiller whiskeys with at least four years in wood and even fewer, if any, bourbons.

The best micro-distiller whiskeys are, at best, excellent works-in-progress.

Jim Beam white isn't just a four-year-old whiskey, that's the minimum age. The profile includes whiskey that is older, whiskey that has been "pushed" through aging in the most intense warehouse locations. It takes an operation like Jim Beam to make a product like Jim Beam white. You may think it’s too young. You may think it’s too bland. You may not like the foxy yeast signature. But you can’t argue with the quality.

There certainly are whiskeys on the market that are superior to Jim Beam white label, including most of the other bourbons Beam Global makes, but in a head-to-head comparison there is no micro-distillery bourbon that is broadly superior to Jim Beam white.

The contrary argument is not that there are such whiskeys, but that it is the wrong standard, especially at this stage in the micro-distillery industry’s development. Making a Jim Beam-like whiskey in a micro-distillery makes about as little sense as craft vodka, but that’s a different argument.

Unlike with beer, where beer drinkers always had the opportunity to taste 'other' beers, even after that opportunity became extremely limited, the American whiskey industry was so devastated by Prohibition, then WWII, then by the market's collapse in the 1970s and the intense consolidation that followed, and there was such a high barrier to entry, that there was very little incentive for anyone to serve the demand for idiosyncratic and original American-made whiskey products.

So much more so than micro-brewers, micro-distillers are starting from scratch with regard to whiskey. Small isn’t necessarily better but small has the opportunity to be more interesting, more creative, and more fun. And some micro-distilleries are taking that opportunity. That’s the rebuttal.

Where Is The Craft In Craft Distilling? Part Whatever.

There is no whiskey-making tradition in the world in which the whiskey-maker uses beer made by someone else, yet that is one of the precepts of Bill Owens, President and High Priest of the American Distilling Institute (ADI).

I kid Bill with the High Priest thing because he and ADI could do all of their fine work without ever making the outrageous suggestion that micro-distillers should make whiskey using wash supplied by a brewer. Instead he has not only made the suggestion, he has elevated it to an article of faith.

"We already have 1,500 micro breweries in this country making wort/wash from barley," says Bill at every opportunity. "Why reinvent the wheel?"

No one denies that there are many places where one can obtain a barley malt wash and in the most technical and literal sense, a person who runs something through a still is a distiller, but I maintain that such a person is, at best, half a craft whiskey-maker. "Half" is probably too generous, because all of the flavor that will be in the final distillate is created in the fermenters. All the still does is concentrate flavors that are already there. How can you say you are the creator of a whiskey if you didn't create any of those flavors?

Since all whiskey except corn whiskey must be aged, the oak barrel is the other source of flavor, but you didn't make that either, did you? So where exactly is the craft in what you are doing? I won't say there is none, but since every major whiskey-maker makes its own beer, how can you claim to be more craft than they?

There are many micro-distillers in America who do not follow Bill's guidance on this matter. I do not want to suggest that all micro-distillers buy wash. They don't. Many are grain-to-bottle producers and I salute them.

An inevitable corollary to Bill's "buy beer" precept is "make malt whiskey," since what most brewers use to make beer is barley malt. Malt whiskey is what they make in Scotland, Ireland and Japan, but rarely in the USA. That means a fledgling American micro-distiller who follows Bill's advice is going against the grain in two critical ways. By not using the primary and uniquely-American ingredient in American whiskey: corn. And by not making the beer, which is contrary to every whiskey-making tradition in the world.

ADI does not mention this, an oversight I hope I have just rectified.

You Meet the Most Interesting People.

When I brought the mail in today there was in it an envelope from a New York art gallery. I opened the envelope and extracted a large card with this image on it.

I stared and stared. Great image, I thought. Then I thought, “it’s Bill, it has to be Bill, let it be Bill.” I turned it over.


I’ve always known about Bill’s photography because of his most famous work, Suburbia, a now-classic 1972 book of photographs that was reissued in 1999. To explain it beyond the title would be redundant.

But I know Bill Owens for a completely different reason.

Bill is the founder of the American Distilling Institute (ADI). ADI calls itself "the collective voice of the new generation of progressive beverage, medical, and aromatic distillers, and is dedicated to the mission of disseminating professional information on the distilling process." You can find out more at www.distilling.com.

There are quite a few fascinating people in ADI, and Bill Owens is one of them.

Bill is from Northern California. He began to mess around with cameras in the 1960s while in the Peace Corps. He later worked as a photographer for various San Francisco-area newspapers, but shot fine art photography in his spare time.

At some point, Bill also began home-brewing, then started a brewpub called Wild Bill’s. If not the actual first it was one of the very first brewpubs in the country. Then he started a magazine called American Brewer, a journal for professionals and home-brewers, which spawned a short-lived (1995-96) enthusiast monthly called BEER, The Magazine, for which I wrote a few articles about whiskey.

Born in 1938, Bill decided a few years ago to sell everything and retire. He quickly became bored and started the ADI, which now has several hundred members in 36 states and Canada. Bill has thrown himself into it completely, like he does with everything.

Bill’s other books of photography are Our Kind Of People (1975), Working - I Do It For The Money (1977), and Leisure (2004). The events at the James Cohan Gallery are timed to coincide with the release of a new book, titled simply Bill Owens.

Not long ago, Bill came across a black-and-white picture of himself as a very young boy, wearing nothing except a pair of jockey shorts. He wanted to share the discovery with all of his friends but felt it needed a companion shot of the boy today in, naturally, nothing except a pair of jockey shorts. He’s very fit for a 70 year old man, but I really didn’t need to see that.

Some time later I said something to him about it and his reaction was like, what else could I do? The boy in the first picture had required that the second one be taken.

That's Bill.