In partnership with the University of Kentucky, a new coalition of distilleries aims to promote the advantages of local sourcing and sustainable production, in part by offering a certification for whiskeys that meet an “estate” standard.
On behalf of the seven North American founding members, the university announced the creation of the Estate Whiskey Alliance on August 22. “Estate whiskey refers to a unique category of whiskey that is produced entirely on the distillery estate, using grains sourced from estate-owned or controlled land,” says the news release from the university, located in the heart of bourbon country and home to the James B. Beam Institute.
The announcement says that planned EWA initiatives include support for research and education in agriculture, manufacturing, and sustainability, and that the alliance plans to begin offering a licensed designation to authenticated Estate Whiskey Certified products in 2025.
The founding EWA members are Black Fox Farm and Distillery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Heaven Hill in Bardstown, Kentucky; Hillrock Estate Distillery in Ancram, New York; Maker’s Mark and Peterson Farms, both in Loretto, Kentucky; Thousand Acres Distilling in Springfield, Kentucky; and Western Kentucky Distilling in Beaver Dam.
While the founding members are all in North America, the alliance has applied for trademarks for Estate Whiskey Alliance and Estate Whiskey Certified in the European Union, Japan, and the United Kingdom, in addition to Canada and the United States. The idea is for the producers of all types of whiskeys to be eligible for the certification if they meet the estate requirements.
Shared Concerns, Best Practices
Alliance director Landon Borders says that distilleries had approached them at the university to put together a certification program for products—whiskeys, in particular—that would meet an “estate” definition.
“Some of our partners felt that the toothpaste has been out of the tube for ‘small batch,’” he says. “There’s no real definition for what that is.” When he began polling distilleries about their level of interest in an estate designation, he found a wide spectrum of folks working toward what he had in mind—or, in some cases, already with products in place.
“We realized quickly, having talked to a few of our partners, that there is a pretty vast spectrum of distilleries out there, as it relates to working toward estate whiskey products,” Borders says. “When I first started reaching out to folks, I was expecting about a 50/50 [split between], ‘That sounds great, we’re interested,’ or ‘Not for us.’ I would say it’s been more like 80/20. That’s very exciting for us and gratifying that there is so much enthusiasm for this.”
The alliance plans to certify products on a per-SKU basis rather than distillery-wide, allowing distillers who offer a variety of spirits to qualify specific products. Now that the EWA has officially launched, the members themselves will make decisions about requirements for compliance, certification programs, marketing, and other tasks. “There’s a lot of details we have to work through,” Borders says.
Anyone is eligible to join the alliance and, at the discretion of members, distilleries that qualify will be able to license the estate mark. “It all starts with establishing a consistent definition of estate whiskey,” Borders says. There may also be some flexibility in that definition; Borders notes the diversity of grain bills in the industry and that not all grains can be grown in all locations. “We don’t aim to make it a requirement that all grains are estate-sourced or from nearby farms.”
Jacob Call, recent founder of Western Kentucky Distilling and the former master distiller at Green River Distilling in Owensboro, Kentucky, says the alliance was a natural fit for his operation. He is an eighth-generation master distiller and eighth-generation Kentuckian; his new distillery is on 81 acres of mostly farmland, which is adjacent to a 1,200-acre industrial park that also includes a good deal of operational farmland.
“A lot of the things that they [stand] for, we were doing anyway,” Call says. “We grow our own grains and buy local Kentucky corn from five or 10 miles away. We’re surrounded by corn in this part of the state.”
The research advantages of partnering with the University of Kentucky are a great aspect of the program, he says, as well as the opportunity to push the industry toward greater transparency in labeling and ingredient sourcing.
One of the biggest draws for Call, however, is that the EWA aims to be a global initiative. “That’s what was attractive to me—to get to work with other distilleries around the world and share some best practices from around, maybe expose some of those folks to what we do,” he says. “It’s a good mix of the big names and the smaller guys, too. It’s going to be a fun group to collaborate with and do something neat.”
Why State “Estate”?
Jeffrey Baker, owner of Hillrock Estate, has been touting the estate approach since founding his distillery in 2011, making whiskey out of their own grains—and even offering special single-field releases.
“That’s our commitment: to make whiskeys that are totally unique to our operation, our farm, that can’t be duplicated anywhere else,” he says. “I’ve got 12-year-old whiskeys that are estate. When we started growing small grains back in 2010, there literally wasn’t another farm in the region growing rye or barley or wheat. But if you go back to the early 1800s, basically half the grain for the whole country came from New York. It’s a fascinating evolution. Back when we started, they couldn’t even tell you what variety of rye seed you were buying.”
Baker notes the parallels to the wine industry’s estate designation.
“I do think it’s really a critical movement for the whiskey industry, and I think that it is going to become, over the next five or 10 years, as important as it is in the wine world,” he says. “It was my view that the whiskey industry should be very similar to wine, and I was, in some ways, amazed that there wasn’t a common estate distillery nomenclature being used. I think there’s a very clear understanding of what estate production means in the wine world, and in the whiskey world there haven’t been any guidelines for it, and I think that creates a lot of confusion with consumers.”
Baker says he expects that whiskey consumers will appreciate the clarity that comes with an official estate designation and that having the certification program will help lead to more transparency. “I think many consumers now don’t even realize when they walk down the shelves in a liquor store that a good percentage of the brands that they’re looking at all came from the same distillery but have different labels and names,” he says.
His own whiskey, by comparison, is an exercise in another wine concept: terroir. As an avid wine and single-malt drinker, he says he believes that whiskey should be similar in terms of representing a place—and that was a founding tenet at Hillrock.
“There’s no question in my mind that the grain I’m growing on my fields here, and the whiskey I’m making from that grain, is clearly going to be different than the spirit made in Omaha or Kentucky or some other location,” he says. “I think that these regions had unique whiskeys that were representative of the grains and the conditions where they were coming from, and I think the whiskey industry would [benefit] by going back to that, to a large degree. I think all these regions should have unique, different products.”
Photo: Courtesy Black Fox Farm and Distillery/Instagram @blackfox_farm
“From Crop to Connoisseur”
At Black Fox in Saskatchewan, cofounders Barb Stefanyshyn-Cote and John Cote have been growing the grains that go into their bottles since founding the distillery in 2015. Stefanyshyn-Cote says she knew the EWA was a fit for them as soon as she heard about it.
“For years, the wine industry has had an estate designation, and it’s really come to signify quality and the ingenuity and craftsmanship of the people of that place,” she says. “And I felt that that was really critical that we should have the same thing in whiskey. The way we describe our whiskeys and products is ‘from crop to connoisseur.’ We control the entire process, which gives us a really good handle on everything. It really comes down to the flavors, and we can really control what’s going on and going into the distillery.”
The farming practices at Black Fox have a strong focus on sustainability—minimal tillage, crop rotations, integrated pest management, and many aspects of regenerative farming (without livestock, so far). Stefanyshyn-Cote says the EWA could potentially encourage these types of environmentally impactful practices.
“We are 100 percent behind including a sustainability portion, and I think that is how we can differentiate ourselves from the wine designation because they don’t have anything along those lines,” she says. “This would be a really good way to start incorporating sustainability actions. Everybody talks a good game, but you need to prove that you’re doing what you’re doing.”
Black Fox focuses on producing single-grain whiskeys—“100 percent single-grains, and they’re 100 percent grown on our farm,” she says—using primarily triticale, but also wheat, rye, and oats. They farm about 5,000 acres, after selling a much bigger family farm so they could move closer to Saskatoon.
“We wanted a business that would work with our agricultural expertise but was closer to the customer than what we were doing,” she says. “We felt that we could do breads or pasta or cookies, things like that, but whiskey was a lot more fun.”
She compares the uniqueness of their grain to growing the same wine-grape variety in California, France, or Chile. The environmental factors inevitably play a role in the flavors of ingredients, and an estate designation helps to showcase that.
“It’s a signal to the customer that there is complete control and attention to detail from crop to connoisseur in the production of whiskey,” she says. “I think that that’s important for people to understand. It also signals to them that the grains that we’re using really reflect the terroir of where we’re located, and that’s what makes it unique to any other whiskey anywhere else in the world.
“What I think this is doing is setting the bar, and people should be striving to meet that bar.”