More on Portland Distilleries

In my last post, I surveyed the explosion of small craft distilleries in Portland, the start of what will no doubt be a national wave. I mentioned that because of a flight delay, I missed a scheduled lunch with Steve McCarthy of Clear Creek Distillery, an old college friend and the Grand Old Man—or maybe, Grumpy Old Man—of Portland spirits.

I’ve known Steve for years – we got drunk together at Reed College in Portland in the mid-1960s. Steve was chair of the campus Young Republicans (he later saw the light), whuch favored solidly liberal positions for the time—recognizing Red China, getting the heck out of Vietnam, and so on. I headed up the campus Young Democrats, whose positions were, dare I say, a bit farther to the left. Years later, when I got into the adult beverages racket, I visited Steve’s stillhouse a couple times and wrote him up. So for my immediate purposes, I figured I could fill in his recent story with a phone call (I still owe him lunch).

McCarthy’s trajectory is different in just about every respect from that of the new wave distillers—which may be part of why the two generations aren’t much in touch. When Steve started Clear Creek in the mid-1980s, he had already made a mark in both city and state politics (for the record, as a Democrat) and run a successful family-owned business, supplying parts for hunting rifles. Deciding he needed a business with more regulation than gins, Steve turned to alcohol, inspired by the love of fruit brandies he had discovered while traveling in Europe for the rifle thing. He figured that if he could figure out how to make and market domestic eau de vie, he could have a third career that was a lot more fun. It turned out to be harder than he thought.

There was only one place to go in the US to learn this peculiar trade, and that was from Jörg Rupf of St. George Spirits in Alameda, California, a transplant from Germany’s Black Forest tradition of exquisite fruit brandies. Steve didn’t ask Jörg for a few tips over a couple of beers; he ponied up some serious money to master the craft. The two considered partnering for a while, then went their separate ways.

Steve started making his own Clear Creek eau de vie, including pear brandy from the fruit grown in his family’s orchard. This at a time when there was essentially zero market for the stuff in the U.S., and certainly not from a domestic producer.  Between them, Rupf and McCarthy created the niche market for these glorious, fruit-pure distillates over the next 20 years, hand selling the stuff, bottle by bottle—taking most of those years to start showing a profit. It’s a radically different market proposition from the one facing the folks on Portland’s Distillery Row, who aim to succeed by making a better version of types of spirits—vodka, gin, whiskey, rum—that are already multi-billion dollar industries. No one has to explain what vodka is to a prospective consumer; not so if your product is Mirabelle Plum Brandy.

These days, in an expanded new facility, Clear Creek puts out a little over 18,000 gallons of proof spirits a year. That’s not much in the wide world of spirits, but it dwarfs the rest of Portland distilling combined. McCarthy has added a whiskey and a line of fruit liqueurs. (St. George, meanwhile, has gone head over heels into the vodka business.) But a clue that his heart is still in the quirky universe of eau de vie is the years he put into his Douglas Fir distillate—yes, Douglas Fir. Making this stuff requires picking the greenest springtime buds off the fir trees, macerating them and distilling the fermented mash, then re-infusing theclear result with more buds to put the green color back in before bottling. It’s insane. It is about as far as you can get from flavored vodka and still be an adult beverage.

McCarthy is happy to see these other folks doing their thing and wishes them well. On the other hand, he hasn’t jumped at the chance to join the newly-formed Oregon Distillers Guild. And he’s bemused if not thrilled by the requests that come in the mail and over the phone, almost daily, from people around the country asking him to divulge his secrets—for free. Right after I called him, the day after my Portland walking/drinking tour, he got a letter from an aspiring distiller asking whether Steve, as a “fellow Alchemist,” could help him locate used stills for his Absinthe project.

The new kids in town credit Steve with leading the fight to change Oregon’s liquor laws and moving the Oregon Liquor Control Commission to a much more local-product-friendly orientation. Several mentioned they’d love to know what he knows. And so the two generations of distillers roll along in their parallel universes, joined only at the pot still.

Lucky Portlanders, “the world’s smartest drunks,” get to have it both ways.