The Spirit World

Wooo Hoo!

Washington State FINALLY has a fully operational distillery that is actively manufacturing spirits. We’ve had a few licensed distilleries for a while, but they weren’t in the business of producing things like Gin, Single Malt, Bourbon, or Vodka. All of which are now being produced in a new craft distillery in Spokane Washington.

Dry Fly Distilling Company is the brainchild of Don Poffenroth and Kent Fleischmann. They hatched the idea a couple of years ago on a fishing trip (hence the name), and in just a short time have gone from concept to cocktail in what I can only think must be record time, especially since there hasn’t been a full distillery of this type in operation in Washington State since before Prohibition.

The hoops which are necessary to jump through in order to get a distilling license here can be often insurmountable. They have signaled the demise of at least one attempt that I am aware of (Rouge Spirits, from Oregon, tried to open a distillery in Issaquah a while back), and I expect several others as well. Besides needing to get approval from the Federal and State governments, it is also necessary to get signoff from County and Municipality as well. As I understand it, any one of them can object to anything they want to without needing to have specific or documentable reasons. To top it off, approval of license is based on an inspection of the finished construction and not just the plans. So you first have to spend all of the necessary cash up front to set things up, without any sort of guarantee that you’ll even be able to fire things up once you’re done.

So it’s probably not surprising that we haven’t had a distillery for all of this time.

Dry Fly is currently bottling both a vodka and a gin. And are also working on a Single Malt Scotch, as well as a bourbon whiskey, which due to the necessity of aging, won’t be on the market until 2009.

I attended a release party last night in downtown Seattle, and had a chance to meet with both Don and Kent to discuss their product, and process. I was quite pleasantly surprised to learn that their entire product is distilled on premises. They have both a pot still and a column still, which are a necessity for taking on that level of operation. Many vodka and gin producers will actually buy the bulk of their alcohol from large commercial/industrial distilleries, and then either further rectify and/or filter the product in their facilities before getting down to bottling the product.

Their alcohol is totally based on locally grown wheat. After distillation and filtering they then add highly filtered water to make their vodka product, or combine it with juniper, coriander, lavender, mint, dried apples, and hops to make their gin. Yes, you heard right. Mint, dried apples, and hops. We aren’t talking traditional “London Dry” style of gin here, but something rather unique. Other “Pacific Northwest” gins (from Oregon, our sister to the south), which tend to be heavier on the coriander, resulting in a dryer, almost savory flavor. Dry Fly then has chosen to create something very uniquely their own, with a crisp “green” flavor to it which differentiates it in a special way.

I am very much looking forward to not only their two whiskies when they come out, but I’m also curious to see if they are going to be just the first of many distilleries who may be coming to market in the years to come.

To get a idea of the process it took to bring Dry Fly Distilling Company to life, you can check out their blog.