Once I heard that Portland, Oregon had become the epicenter of a resurgence in craft distilling, I had to check it out. I am fond of Portland (college daze) and, of course, fond of distilleries; better yet, I can usually find a way to get paid to check such things out. And so armed with a bunch of phone numbers and addresses, I flew up that way this past Thursday to spend the afternoon on Distillery Row.
The trip did not start auspiciously. My flight on Southwest was an hour and a half late taking off (those pesky mechanical problems, due no doubt to never doing inspections). This delay cost me my first appointment of the day, lunch with Steve McCarthy, founder of Clear Creek Distillery, Portland’s first, launched back in the 1980s. (Steve will get his own post, soon.) So I moved on to destination two. When my Former Eastern Bloc cabbie took me from the airport to what was supposed to be my destination, I quickly realized he had gotten the address wrong, despite many repetitions, so I ran after him, yelling and flailing till I got his attention, and finally reached the right address.
All this driving around gave me a good feel for this part of Southeast Portland, and glamorous it ain’t. The existing economic base consists of transmission repair shops, auto body specialists, discount office furniture outlets and metal stamping businesses. Made me thirsty just reading the signs.
First stop was House Spirits, widely regarded as the epicenter of the epicenter. Partner/head distiller Lee Medoff loves to talk booze, and seems to know his stuff. We did the 30-second tour, then tasted through House’s Aviation Gin (their biggest seller), Medoyeff Vodka (honoring his family’s Russian origins), and the Krogstad Aquavit (named for co-distiller Christian Krogstad). All quite tasty. One wall was lined with barrels, whiskey and rum in the making. As we were finishing up, four beverage staff gents from a local chain restaurant came in for a briefing on how they might incorporate House’s spirits into their mixological program. They seemed headed for an interesting, if somewhat raucous, afternoon.
The House stop raised most of the themes that ran through the rest of my visits. Almost all of the new crop of distilleries have been around for only two or three years, if that. Almost all of them have started with clear spirits—overwhelmingly with vodka—because they can be turned around quickly, putting product on the market and starting some cash flow. (Vodka is thus the Chardonnay of the distillery boom.) All of them have ideas about making brown spirits—whiskey, rum, and other barrel-aged products—down the road. All of them stress the tie-in to the rise of a new cocktail culture, of which Portland is also a hotbed. And all of them cite the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which operates all the state’s wine and spirits outlets, as a major factor in this boomlet, since the OLCC is predisposed to giving local products placement on its outlets’ shelves.
Mildly lubricated and much better informed, I took Medoff’s directions and walked the 7 or 8 blocks toward New Deal Vodka. I ignored Christian’s suggestion to stop at the two brewpubs on the way. I soon realized that the address I had gotten from a magazine article was wrong—right street, just 30 blocks off. A phone call clarified that the listed address was the business office, as well as distiller Tom Burkleaux’s home. The vodka production facility itself, right where Medoff had said it would be, was a glorified storage locker, not a whole lot bigger than the garage in which I make my amateur wine. Needless to say, Burkleaux, like most of the other mini-distillers, has a real day job; distilling for this cohort is somewhere between a hobby and an obsession, even though it is also a commercial enterprise. (Full disclosure: like me, and like Steve McCarthy, Burkleaux and New Deal partner Matthew Van Winkle are graduates of Reed College, an educational institution renowned for the non-linear qualities of its alumni.)
New Deal makes three vodkas, all different, including the Hot Monkey, a chili-infused number that would make a memorable Bloody Mary and which was awarded a Gold Medal at the 2008 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. (I tasted more different vodkas in this one afternoon than in the last ten years—it’s not my drug of choice.) New Deal also has a nifty line of non-standard liqueurs, full of things like lavender and lemongrass.
Then a few short blocks to Integrity Spirits, holding down 20 times the space of New Deal. Integrity will eventually both make spirits and run a tasting room, and it shares space with a brewery/brew pub, the Green Dragon. (I would advise them to put in an auto body concession, too, to blend fully into the neighborhood.) Head distiller Kieran Sienkiewicz has years of experience in brewing and distilling, all of it, remarkably enough, at legally bonded concerns.
Here’s distilling’s Catch-22. Amateur distilling is illegal, period, so there is no legal way to figure out if you really can do this or want to do it commercially—except to take the plunge and go commercial, with the mountain of paperwork that entails for licensing and permitting. Your local community college is unlikely to offer classes. Would-be distillers have to be much more, uh, creative in honing their skills than us home winemakers.
In any case, Sienkiewicz and partner Rich Phillips make—you’ll never guess—a vodka, a hazelnut-flavored vodka, and a gin. Several other projects are in the works. From a quick tasting, they know what they’re doing, too. Absinthe will join the lineup any day.
Still able to walk a straight line, I headed for Highball Distillery, the brainchild of Michael Klinglesmith and Michael Heavener. They’re on the verge of releasing a . . . vodka, designed to split the difference, they say, between the substantial, Eastern European classic Stolichnaya and the lighter, squeaky clean Grey Goose. The vodka is made from organically grown grain, and in fact the last hurdle before going public with their effort is organic certification for their distillery premises, due momentarily.
My last stop was another-distillery-in-the-making, Artisan Spirits. Artisan is still conceptual: owners Ryan Csanky and Shane Thatcher have some permits, some ideas—and a space they had occupied the day before I arrived. Csanky is a longtime mainstay of the Portland mixology scene, having held down the bar at Wildwood restaurant for some time. One of their inspirations comes from a bottle of vodka Thatcher brought back from a trip to Russia, made from honey—and that will be their first product once they get rolling—which they swear will be soon. Another vodka made from Oregon wine will be close behind.
All these guys (and they are almost exclusively guys) insist that their mission is not to make Portland the vodka capital of the West Coast; it’s to make Portland a center of distillation for anything anybody thinks is worth a try, made from top-notch, local, often organic ingredients. They’re a passionate bunch, and so are the local consumers, who have flocked over the years to local Oregon wine, local Oregon brews, locally-roasted coffee, whatever. I’m not claiming Portland’s consuming class is hipper than the folks anywhere else, except . . . maybe they are.
Finished with Distillery Row, I told Ryan and Shane I was headed for the Teardrop Lounge, one of Portland’s trendier watering holes, and they asked if I wanted company, and we headed off. The house makes about four zillion kinds of custom bitters, plus its own tonic water, which I had in a welcoming gin and tonic. Various other concoctions flowed. Ryan and I kept talking about the nagging question, “Why Portland?” We chewed over the fact that Portlanders seem especially concerned about exactly where the things they put in their mouths come from and how they’re made. Then Ryan put it all together:
”Portland has the smartest drunks in the world.”
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