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“Booze for breakfast eh?” Karissa is squinting at me in the tender morning light, her coffee cup tucked between her knees as we begin our drive. “Its lookin’ like it.” I’m sure my tone conveys that the idea is not exactly appealing at this hour. We’re headed out to Dry Fly Distillery where without a doubt there will be sampling. I’m trying not to think about it, instead focusing on the road and doing my best to keep my own hot cup from spilling onto my lap. Fortunately, we don’t make it to Spokane until after lunch. The drive wasn’t any longer than we had expected but our hunger certainly surprised us 3/4 of the way there. A Subway sandwich shop tucked inside a massive truck stop complex would suffice. It was for the best, to begin drinking on an empty stomach (before noon nonetheless) sounded disastrous. Black coffee & booze does not strike me as a good way to start the day (although Im sure plenty would disagree).

Dry Fly Distillery is tucked away…we drive by it twice. Its housed in a small non-descript business strip right off the highway. Visually, the space inside is exactly what one would expect- big tanks, thick pipes, wood casks. I meet the guys behind the operation- the two founders, Kent & Don and their full time employee Patrick. In a smaller room off the main space I begin my tour with Kent. There’s a refrigerator, some boxes…it looks like a break room/ storage space. “Just the three of you running this whole operation?” “Yep…just the three of us.” he replies. “We do have a girl that comes in and helps part time- she works on our minis, we’ve given her the huge title of Vice President of Miniature Packaging Operations. We pay her like crap and she loves us because she drinks for free. She handles all of these..you’ve seen these things- these are a pain in the ass to do” He pulls up three or four tiny bottles of booze…the sort that you hope to find in your stocking every Christmas. “I would assume that actually..” “Yes, they are. Every step is done by hand. Labeling, filling, safety sealing caps.” I pick one up…eye the packaging. Cute. “Who gets these? Airplanes?” “No, actually they re available here in Washington State at the liquor stores but we also give them away when we ship out pallets to our distributors. So we package them up 60 in a case and then I usually put out 3 cases of each when we send out an order. What that does is just allow samples of our products so we can keep selling more big bottles. Let me show you around.” He opens up the refrigerator, grabs a gag silicone arm from atop a six pack of soda and uses it to point. “Well, if you’re thirsty…in with this severed arm are all the sodas and stuff like that. I don’t know where you keep your severed arms but we keep ours in our fridge. The water cooler is that way, there’s some cups here. Ladies room over there.” We begin walking out toward the main floor…Karissa scurries off to begin snapping photos. “You guys do gin, whiskey, vodka…?’ “Yep…those three.” “And you started out with just gin?” “We started out at the same time doing vodka and gin because that’s essentially a 10 day process. 5 days of that is in the fermenter- so its real fast. Vodka and gin kind of pay the bills and the whiskey takes 2 years to age until we can sell it. One problem we’ve had is the demand for whiskey is so great that we don’t have enough time to put up enough barrels. Every month or so we would get a barrel in and try to ramp that up because we need to be in the whiskey business. The world doesn’t need another vodka…the world needs another gin and definitely needs another whiskey. We sell a lot of vodka…well, we sell a lot of everything we make. You see these pallets here..those are going out…so that will leave us with 27 cases total.” Patrick pokes his head in- “Tours going to be about 15-20 minutes late” he says with a huge grin on his face. I can tell that this is probably a duty they jokingly volley back and forth. “Oh yeah? Oh well by the way…that’s now your tour- congratulations.” Kent laughs and continues. “So, gin is becoming a little bit more popular which is great. We just started shipping to Boston. Boston is kind of a no vodka town.” “Yeah?” “So they tell me. They are the anti- vodka city…they order a lot more gin but we still sell about equal amounts of vodka and gin. Our biggest problem is the bars don’t have space on the shelf for another vodka although ours would be better than what they have up there. You can just look behind a bar and there’s so many flavors of vodka. Have you tried our product yet?” I tell him that I have not had the pleasure and we start walking toward a tasting counter near the entrance. “Our vodka just won an international award. This year in San Francisco we entered and beat out 250 other vodkas from around the world to get best vodka and a double gold medal. In our industry that’s like winning best picture at the Oscars. Its a big deal.” “What do you drink Kent?” “You know, now I’m a vodka guy. I never used to be…I was more of a single malt scotch guy. I started really getting into our vodka. I like it on the rocks with a little splash of cranberry.” “What makes your vodka different? Why do you like it so much?” “Most vodkas historically have, well sort of an evolution that have become a base for other drinks.There’s 5 different plants around the country that produce most of the vodka labels that exist. They all come from the same place- about 20 different vodkas originate in the same plant in Rigby Idaho. So it starts out as a neutral spirit and if you look at the back of bottles in the liquor store it will say that. What that means is that they re produced in an ethanol plant where it gets to 95% pure and you can buy it in big barrels. The problem with small distillery’s is that the majority of them buy those big barrels and further process that, but they’re buying something that is neutral. The reason its neutral is, if you take everything that comes out of the still and drink it, its not going to taste good even though you’re making vodka because there’s a lot of fusil alcohol- that’s a by product of the stuff that’s good for powering cigarette lighters or rubbing on sore elbows. The brain does not like that and that’s what causes the hang over. So if left in…the more of that left in- the greater your chance of a hangover. Think about it- if you buy a $10 bottle of vodka-how does that get to ten bucks? Well they keep everything that comes out of that and they filter it very intensely through charcoal. Charcoal neutralizes all those flavors. You know, when you drink water in your house through a Brita system? it gets rid of the chlorine flavor but it does not get rid of it- it just neutralizes that flavor but you’re still absorbing the chlorine. Same thing applies to the fusil alcohol- so if you neutralize that through charcoal filtering it just tastes like what it is…nothing. That’s what most vodkas are- its defined as a neutral, odorless, flavorless spirit. But we have the ability to take out those fusil alcohols so we use maybe 60-70% of what comes out of the still. That cant be done in a mass production facility where wheat’s going in one end and bottles are coming out the other end because you cant cut out those fusil’s. As a batch producer we can…because we do it slowly and instead of ours being neutral…well, since we don’t use those- we don’t filter that way so ours is not a neutral product. Ours has hints of vanilla, rich butterscotch and caramel. So..yeah..you want a taste?” The vodka is good. For me to say that about vodka is huge. I sip it…the liquor goes down nice and smooth, hot in my throat. “So, even if you’re not a vodka lover, you’re going to see what I mean. As we were talking about earlier- this is why we won an international award for best vodka..we beat out so many great vodkas to win it. So that, what you just drank (the vodka) is the base for our gin.” “What? Are you serious?” This is the kicker for me- I’m shocked, feeling a bit naive. Come to find out gin is nothing more than flavored vodka…could that be true? “A lot of people think its distilled from juniper berries which it isn’t.” Kent explains. “So what it is is basically taking a neutral spirit and then flavoring it with juniper and most of them do that in a big vat scenario where you can actually take this (juniper) and put it in a mesh bag and soak it in that neutral spirit for four or five days and that would make gin. Here, we don’t like gin too much so we make it differently. We do use juniper but we use five other ingredients. So we have apple, coriander, lavender, mint and hops. What those ingredients have in common is that they are all grown here. So its all local stuff that we use. Like the wheat…it comes up from a farm 25 miles from here. A lot of small distilleries don’t make from grain to glass they just buy that neutral spirit to process and maybe try to cut out some of those fusil’s which they cant and then they may flavor it with juniper or whatever and make gin. You want to smell it while its in the process?” We walk over to a large steel tank. Kent pulls the lid to the side and I stick my face in, take a big whiff. This is the first phase of the gin and I can really smell it. Its pungent to say the least. There is a prevalent earthy aroma and the alcohol tickles my nose. “So what we make is a gin that’s not, you know, slap you in the face pine tar gin. Because, really, that’s easy to do. What we wanted to make is something that would appeal to gin lovers and to non gin lovers. And we did it..we aced it. This is the first phase and we do one other phase of the gin which is top secret…sorry, cant tell you.” We walk back over to the counter where Kent begins to pour the gin for a taste. “A lot of people think that vodka is made from potatoes- its not, its made from wheat. You know, 90% of the vodka in the world is made from wheat…you can make it from potato but its really very hard to do.” He hands me my glass. This gin is certainly different from others Ive had. Immediately I can taste the hops and a trickle of coriander. Kent tells me it makes a kick ass martini and I cant help but get a little thirsty. Our time at the distillery feels like a flash in the pan. Soon, its time to wrap up the chitchat and head back towards home…four hours of driving and a stop in Roslyn for dinner lie ahead of us. It makes me proud to know that this top notch liquor is made in our very own backyard. Dry Fly Distillery is indeed a cozy operation- wonderfully small scale and intimate. I have a feeling these boys will stay true to the art and quality of their craft despite the success that has come and will hopefully continue to flood their direction. They make a damn fine product- unique gin, a notoriously in demand whiskey and vodka even I can love. That being said, I would happily raise a glass with these fellows any day of the week. Interview with Don Poffenroth, co-owner/founder of Dry Fly Distilling. Well alright…you been busy distilling while your pal’s been yapping with me? Yep, someones got to work around here right? We started this morning at about 7:30ish. So different things happen on different days…it just depends on what we re trying to accomplish that day. So today we started processing grain for the next batch of either vodka or gin. We started distilling gin and we started what will ultimately will become vodka next week. So three different processes going on at the same time. Can you give me a quick run through of the process from the beginning to the end? Certainly. Everything starts here from a grain perspective…actually everything starts in the field but ultimately it comes here. So our grain comes from a 105 year old family farm that was homesteaded near here. So its been in one family its whole existence…which is kind of cool. This is soft white winter wheat comes straight off the combine…its not cleaned its not processed in any way shape or form and it comes to us in those big white bags you see sitting over there so the farmer basically fills those up they re 1500 pounds- that’s our batch size for grain. We pick that up with a forklift and hold it over this and mill it in. This mill turns this into a heavy flour. Blows it into this tank and we have a base of water sitting in here…and a large agitator. You can climb up and look into that tank and you ll see it sloshing around in there. So what we re doing now is we re in the process of running it through a temperature change which basically makes the starch convert into a fermentable sugar. You can just lift up that lid and take a look. So that’s the wheat in water. Its all been liquefied. So we re trying to convert the starch now into that fermentable sugar- that takes about 5 hours to do form beginning to end. We started this morning and it will be done here in another hour and a half, two hours and what we do is we add some enzymes that make that conversion process happen. Convert the starch to a sugar so when its done ultimately we have something that we can add yeast to and ferment. 5 hours in the tank and then we transfer it to the fermenter. What happens in there is we add yeast and ultimately that ferments. Its about 22% sugar when we put it in we get about 13% alcohol when we re done. Basically its the same strength as wine, however all the grain is still there…we’ve taken all the grain over with us. We try to keep it on the grain as long as possible that way we get more grain flavor. 4 day fermentation time two things happen in fermentation- you create alcohol and let CO2 bubble off (so no different than a brewery or winery)…you see these tanks bubbling- that’s CO2 coming off. When its done fermenting we ll hook it up like we’ve done here and we ll pass it off and if you look in here…its kind of hard to see…there’s this grain material that we ve just added this into and we re heating this up now. This is about 13% alcohol about 35% solid…what we re doing is trying to heat it up and boil the alcohol off…leave everything else behind. That’s what the still does…we can control the temperature of the still to about a tenth of a degree Celsius…alcohol boils at about 25 degrees less than water does so if you can control that temperature really precisely you can vaporize the alcohol and leave everything else behind. Its called stripping- we re stripping the alcohol out of the fermenter…takes us all day to do that…so about 8 hours/9 hours to take one of those fermenters, get all the alcohol out of it and collect it. We collect it right there…that’s what we’ve been collecting so far today. That’s called low wine its about 100 proof or 50 percent alcohol after one distillation. We went from 13% in the fermenter to 50%..we’ve just removed half of everything basically, if that makes sense. Then once we have that done and its been distilled one time somewhere making it around 100 proof then we finish. We do all the finishing on this still. Today we re making gin- we’ve taken that low wine and we’ve actually run it through that column and taken it up to about 190 proof then taken it back to the still…so this is the third distillation. Now we re running it through botanicals so you can see the piping going through that little silver tank that has all the botanicals that Kent showed you over there- the juniper, apple, coriander, mint and hops all in a bag. The alcohol vapor is literally passing through those botanicals, picking up the flavor and re-condensing back out. That’s what he was showing me earlier. So we ll distill this again. Its been distilled one time…we ll distill it again with just a little bit of juniper berry to give it aromatics. So this run will go another couple hours probably give the other run tomorrow. Then we ll chill it, run it through a really quick filtering process and then it will be ready to bottle on Saturday. So from grain to bottle- 10 days…on vodka or gin. Whiskey takes 2 years of aging- the processing time is just as quick…we can get it out of the system in 10 days but then its going to sit in the barrel for a couple years. How did you get started doing this? I would like to be romantic about it but it was very much a calculated business decision. What did you do previous to this? I was the director of marketing for a food company. I used to own part of a small brewery so I understood that business a little bit and decided that this was going to be kind of the next “thing”. It was the only alcohol category that hadn’t had an artisan approach to it. So then you got Kent in on it? Yeah, Ken is my business partner. Ultimately, the business was formed with the help of this equipment company. All the equipment is imported from Germany so its a 150 year old German company and that’s all they do is manufacture small distilling equipment. Family owned and operated and really just a cool group of people. They helped us out a lot when it came to formulation, figuring out how we wanted to present products, what we were going to do. We knew what the raw material was going to be because we had these great farming resources so close to us so that was the easy part. Figuring out what we wanted to do in terms of products and how we wanted to move those ingredients through took us a little longer to decide. How long ago did this start? How long has Dry Fly been around? We moved into this building in May 2007. Started distilling in September 2007 so we re just a little over 2 years old. You said, this was all a very calculated thing…you mentioned that you knew that this was a neglected alcohol category… I knew that it was a category that no one had made flavor the major component of. Most alcohol brands are marketed just by the look of the bottle…so its not generally marketed by whats in the bottle- what it tastes like/whats the flavor. I knew that opportunity existed. It was a huge broad category with really old companies with fairly old brands that leaves itself open to smaller guys coming in and interpreting it all differently. We knew that if we could move flavor through the system that’s something we could do that a lot of large manufacturers cant. Whats the hardest part of this? The hardest part of this business is sales and marketing. You are dealing with a very well established marketplace, huge companies that have been around a really long time and have a lot of money to spend in promoting their brand. So its not uncommon to walk in and see neon signs and bar mats and all the other stuff from the liquor manufacturer that a small guy like us…we cant afford to do any of that. Do you have promoters at all? We don’t…I mean, we do that ourselves. Its much more organic and much more ground level. Our brand ambassadors are our customers for the most part. It makes it stronger really. This market has been amazing for us…it is a strong state and its a strong local supporting state. The fact that we define things very agriculturally was a good decision for us because the farming community is incredibly strong. All those things are factors, I think, into really getting us going. The fact that we’ve won some pretty cool awards along the way just helps bolster us as we go. The hardest thing is growing…we re in 18 states now. We’ve grown a lot…in 2 years to do what we’ve done is pretty amazing actually. But its just a lot of hard work plain and simple. Whats the best part of it? The best part of it is really peoples reaction to our product. I mean when you’re a marketing person, to see someone react to something you made and took from its origin all the way through- that’s the best part. Just seeing things come to fruition. We’ve had some great days in here. When we released whiskey for the first time a month and a half ago we had people lining up at 4:30 in the morning and to see that type of customer support…it just makes it all worthwhile. Seeing people so passionate and really into what you’re doing. What do you think the biggest misconception is as far as distilling goes? I think people believe its more about production where it really is more about how you take your product to the market. Manufacturing it is 10% of the equation- making it is the easy part. Getting it out into the market and making people want to buy it- that’s the hard part. That’s what people underestimate the most. There’s this groundswell of people wanting to get into small distilling and they’re all coming from the standpoint of “I think I can make something better” which they may indeed may be able to do but if they don’t have the ability to go into the marketplace and move it then nothing will happen. Its not one of those things where you can create a product and the world will be at your doorstep. Here, they wont…in this business they’re getting disillusioned by information from larger manufacturers all the time. So the little guy has to be thinking all the time of guerrilla level ways to get in there and let people know who you are. We’ve been really fortunate because we were the first distillery in this state in 90 years so we got a lot of exposure and a lot of press that we would have never been able to purchase. But, it really helped build our brand up. People that have come after us don’t get that same attention…the second or the third guys don’t get that same attention. It makes it a lot harder for them to get started so its been a little easier for us to get out there and just work it out. What do you drink? I drink our vodka and our whiskey. Generally our vodka. Do you feel like your sales have been effected by the recession? I don’t think so at all. You know, our business in Washington this year doubled so that’s our biggest state, where we have the largest concentration/distribution. But what we’ve done this year is added a bunch more states. Our business has doubled in totality mainly because we’ve added all those distribution. We re just going to keep growing…we re only in 18 states, we still have 30 or so states to go talk to. Who is your second largest state? Great question…well, this year I would guess its probably Minnesota. I think next year our bordering states are going to grow more than they have in the past. But we have had some states that have really engaged…Minnesota, Georgia- that have just jumped in and jumped in big. Generally, its because of one person that has decided to make it their mission to move it forward. When you get to states outside of the Northwest its because of the branding proposition…so generally its someone that’s a really avid fly fisherman who happens to own a liquor distributorship who thinks we re the coolest thing ever. So, those companies tend to not be very democratic…you know, when the owner of the company says “We re going to start selling this product.” It just happens. What do you move most of? More vodka now since we won that big world spirit competition award which was in April. Our vodka business went up 20%. We used to be close to 50/50 (vodka & gin)…we re probably 60/40 now. Vodka is such a huge and broad category and to have a award like that. There are people in some states that brought our product in just because of that award. Also, its a much bigger market than gin. Gin is more funky…you can be more unique. Its like whiskey- whiskey and gin the distiller has a lot more input. Vodka is just a process of taking something to a purity level and then putting it in a bottle. Not a huge amount of art that goes into making vodka…a lot more art goes into gin or whiskey. If you’re not drinking your label- which labels do you like? You know beyond that I drink a little bit of bourbon…I drink a Pappy Van Winkle…I like that. I have a great appreciation for great spirits. I like things that are really definitive in their category. Why “Dry Fly”? Kent and I met fly fishing in Montana. His company was a client of my company so he was invited to go on a fishing trip that I hosted- we were the two drunkest people on the trip. People always ask why we got into the business and I like to tell them we were avid consumers so then we decided to become avid producers. What does the future hold for Dry Fly? We re going to grow…we re running out of room here. We need to make more whiskey. Those are the two most critical things we’re facing right now. We have the ability, because we re distributing in 18 states, to put whiskey in all 18 of those…we could do it tomorrow if we had it. So we just need to get to the point where we have enough to do that.