For distillers making gin and naturally flavored vodka, using unique infusions of local or novel raw ingredients can be a valuable differentiator. Some nano distillers, meanwhile, choose to stay small, so they don’t have to make any compromises.
“I often get asked if I’ll expand, why don’t I produce more bottles,” says Justine Schroder, owner of Mt Fyffe Distillery in Kaikōura, New Zealand. “And the answer is in the volume of botanicals that I can forage for in any one season.”
Her distillery is a one-person operation, and Shroder produces 1,800 bottles by hand each year. “Juggling life on a farm with kids is busy, so the benefit of staying this size is obvious,” she says.
There are also limits to how many botanicals she can pick, dry, and store safely, she says, while contending with limited space and variations in weather. By staying small, she can rely on foraged botanicals, which she speculates would be more difficult to do if she expanded the distillery.
“The biggest benefit for staying nano, for me, is the enjoyment of what I do,” Shroder says. “No pressure to sell a bottle of gin in any one day.”
Botanicals, Balance, and “a Careful Ballet”
It’s a similar story for Jules Hoyle, master distiller at Beech Mountain, a nanodistillery in Lower Beechmont, Queensland, Australia, nestled in the hills of the Gold Coast Hinterland. Hoyle chooses to stay small and focus on using locally sourced ingredients.
“Small batches and moving with the seasons allow us to wild harvest,” Hoyle says. “The mountains we reside in are remnant Gondwanaland ecosystems and provide a host of truly unique and spectacular flavors.” Among the distillery’s spirits is a gin made with lemon myrtle, which contains the highest content of citral—a lemony aroma compound—of any known plant in the world.
In the Philippines, meanwhile, near the city of Calamba, Full Circle is a family-owned and family-operated distillery working closely with farms across the tropical archipelago to source their botanicals. Head distiller Matthew Westfall cites quality sourcing and timing as challenges that he and his team are continually working to overcome.
“The Japanese black bamboo is sourced fresh, a day or two before we distill,” he says. That comes from a five-acre farm that cultivates more than 45 species of bamboo, about two hours from the distillery. Their Archipelago Black Bamboo Gin also incorporates cardamom and black pepper. Meanwhile, their flagship Archipelago Botanical Gin, gets 28 different botanicals, 22 of those sourced locally.
“Organic, fresh lemongrass comes from our own greenhouse or from our family farm in Antipolo, a day or two before use,” Westfall says. “Our fresh Benguet pine is sourced from a women’s farming cooperative in Sagada, in the mighty Cordillera mountains to the far north, and these fresh pine buds are harvested and shipped down to the distillery, where they are fresh-frozen in our freezers prior to each distilling run.”
Exotic flowers, meanwhile, come from about an hour away. “Our operations team goes out to collect these on their motorcycles in the early morning of each distillation,” he says.
These ultra-fresh and carefully selected ingredients are what sets the distillery’s products apart, Westfall says, and it’s a level of attention to detail that only works on such a small scale. “In sum, it’s a careful ballet,” he says. “Very costly and inefficient to manage, but on balance we feel it’s very much worth it.”
Courtesy Full Circle Craft Distillers
Westfall uses a 450-liter Christian Carl still that can produce 330 bottles worth of spirit. “Each run involves about 125 liters of whole-kernel French winter-wheat ethanol, which comes off our Carl still at around 93.5 percent ABV at 20 liters per hour,” he says. “We then rest the distillate for a few weeks, and then blend, bottle, and label, all by hand.”
Meanwhile, Full Circle’s 25-liter R&D still is perfect for experimenting on an even smaller scale. It was made by a retired German engineer from Mueller who builds one still per year in his garage.
“We have the one from 2013, which we used for many of the 66 distillations that brought us to the final ‘Philippine’ flavor profile for our flagship [gin],” Westfall says. It’s also a great training tool for the young distilling team, he says, allowing them to take chances, with any mistakes made being relatively low-cost.
Flexible for Flavor-First
From an operational standpoint, microdistillers can make decisions that are harder for larger distillers to justify.
For example: At Orkney Springs Distillery in Alexandria, Virginia, David Clark says that in his mission to ensure the highest quality, he sources northern European wheat that’s not genetically modified, distilling it in his 20-gallon copper still.
“It makes a huge difference on the sulfites,” he says. “We can do things in small batches that large [distilleries] can’t do.”
Orkney Springs produces its Mountain Hop Gin using hops grown on their own farm in Shenandoah, Virginia, and its Siberian Fir Gin using the extract of fir-tree needles from Siberia.
Doing everything by hand on a small scale means that experimentation is always within easy reach. “When we do runs, we’re only making about, anywhere from five to eight cases,” Clark says.
Having a wider range of products—and holding less inventory of each one—allows Clark to adapt to demand with agility. He says he typically designs each of his flavored vodka varieties with a specific cocktail in mind.
“When I sell it to restaurants, I’m selling it on its flexibility as a product,” he says. “If you want to make a cool cocktail … there’s two or three things that you don’t have to buy to make that cocktail, when you use our products.”
Yet being a small distiller in Virginia isn’t easy, Clark says, with liquor distribution controlled by the state. As such, the distillery’s tasting-room bar in Alexandria—just south of Washington, D.C., and not far from the Pentagon and Reagan National Airport—is a crucial part of the income stream. Clark says he’s working on adding snacks to increase the value of that arm of the operation.
If the distillery were simply producing spirits without that on-premise element, “we’d probably go out of business,” he says.
Customized for Quality
At Dripping Springs Distilling in Dripping Springs, Texas, master distiller Jason Davies is using custom equipment to make their gins and vodkas. “We have these very, very small 50-gallon pot stills with a reflux chamber on the top of it, before it goes to a condenser,” he says.
The distillery currently has 18 of these small pot stills, with room for a few more. Davies says he believes that these smaller stills make a big difference.
“It’s all about the copper contact for us,” he says. “The smaller pot still gives us much more surface area per alcohol vapor … to interact with that copper than it would in just one big, huge pot still.” Using copper mesh for condensing further refines the liquid.
The copper produces a clean alcohol that is soft and smooth, Davies says. “Our distillers [are] very much artisans. They have to go out and constantly check on these small stills, feel them … and monitor the production precisely every hour.”
Meanwhile, in Maine, the team at Wiggly Bridge Distillery also customized their distilling kit. They made their own copper pot stills after teaching themselves welding by watching YouTube videos. The DIY is part of the approach at this family-run small distillery, where there’s always work to do.
“Being in a family business is not for the faint of heart, as every aspect of our lives connects to business in some way, just as family dinners become extensions of the workday,” says Amanda Woods, who leads marketing for the brand. “But when you enjoy what you do, you can’t talk about it enough.”
Wiggly Bridge uses a white whiskey base made from a sour mash of 58 percent corn, 37 percent rye, and 5 percent malted barley to make their gin, along with Croatian juniper and botanicals that include jasmine and coriander. For them, sticking to small batch sizes is key to producing the liquid they want to make.
“Our smaller scale allows us the freedom to experiment, perfecting our craft and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” says David Woods, Wiggly Bridge’s cofounder and lead distiller. “We don’t want to lose that.”