Wood’s High Mountain Distillery Makes Colorado Malt Whiskeys

Twenty years ago, the distilling landscape in the United States consisted of a few dozen distilleries, mostly in Kentucky. Today, depending on whom you ask, there are more than 3000. Thanks to a craft distilling boom that began about 15 years ago, most people in the United States are today within a few hours’ drive to a distillery, at least in the lower 48. In Colorado, the brewing tradition and grain production of the San Luis Valley made it a natural place to start a distillery. That’s exactly where P.T. Wood and his brother, Lee Wood, decided to build Wood’s High Mountain Distillery in Salida, Colorado.

Inspired by Colorado & A Love of Whiskey

“This is a common thing you've heard over and over again,” says Wood’s High Mountain Distillery co-Founder and Lee Wood. “Ten years ago when we started, in the early days of craft distilling, PT came to me, he had spent a lot of time as a river guide, and after 15 or 20 trips down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, spending many nights around the campfire saying to his buddies you know, I could make whiskey, finally, they called him on it and said, are you going to do this or not? So he called me up and said, hey, I've got a great idea.”

Lee Wood had spent his career selling services and wanted to get into the manufacture of a tangible product as the next step in his career. While he wasn’t focused on the beverage alcohol as much as the manufacturing, he says he liked whiskey, so it was an easy sell.

“But you know the landscape back then was so different,” Wood recalls. “The sense that if you had an idea and could rub together two nickels, you could start a distillery, and so that's what we did. We bootstrapped the whole thing, and we're still in that situation today. We launched it in Salida, Colorado, which is the river rafting capital of America. He pulled me into this project and ten years later, we're still a ten year old startup. We’re working every day to put back more whisky and supply the tasting room. We’re happy to do a little bit of distribution in Colorado.”

Finding the Right Still

When the Woods brothers first began distilling, it was in a 19th-century German still they’d lucked into that they call Ashley, which appears on the labels of their whiskeys.

“We started with an old German pot still, which was built roughly 1880 or so,” recalls Wood. “It came to us from a friend in Salida whose father brought it with him from Germany to Louisville, Kentucky in 1960. He was an industrial ethanol distiller, and he brought this tiny still with him with the hope of putting it in service at some point, but he never did. His family was tired of moving it, so they made us deal on it. We did a ton of production on it; all of our whiskey, all of our products ran through it. We quickly discovered it did not have anything like enough capacity for what we needed to do, so we supplemented it with two additional 600 gallon pot stills. We did all of our original production, including our current gin production, on that little 1880s hybrid pot-column still.”

Production

Wood’s High Mountain Distillery is currently producing about 150 barrels of whiskey a year, though their maximum capacity if they were to run 24-7 would be 300 barrels a year. They produce four core whiskey expressions — two malt whiskeys, one American Single Malt, and a rye whiskey — as well as gin, vodka, and three RTD canned beverages. They also produce a Colorado elderflower liqueur.

Interestingly, every single one of their whiskeys is made with all malted grains.

“When we started this, we said, well, what do we like? We like malt whisky and we like gin, so those are the two products that we started with,” Wood recalls. “Most people will start with a clear spirit of course because you've got to keep the lights on. Colorado's got a really strong craft brewing history, so we said, well, let's see what the brewers are doing. They were working with specialty barley malts and all these different malted grains, so we started playing around with some of the different elements. Within the barley piece, we started playing around with the specialty malts, and we settled on a cherry wood smoked malt and chocolate malt. That really informed the house style. Pretty much everything we do has one or two of those components in it.”

Choosing to make whiskeys exclusively with malted grains from the get-go is not a typical choice for new distillers, and even finding a space to belong on the liquor store shelf ten years ago was a challenge.

“Why we did that is a great question,” Wood laughs. “There were really no American malt whiskeys at that point. We were very nascent because our whiskey has wheat and rye in it, it is not a single malt. Even those were really unheard of at the time. We had really huge challenges. We go and put our whisky on shelves and stores would have no idea where to put us. There was no local section, there was no malt whisky section. There still isn't today. There was always a Scotch section. We really didn’t belong there. It certainly didn't belong in the bourbon section. And so you know in hindsight, you look at this and essentially what we were trying to do was create a creative niche market.”

Sourcing Malted Grains

Sourcing malted grains other than barley was a challenge, even in barley country.

“We were able to source everything from Briess early on,” Wood says. “There's a growing area in Colorado called the San Luis Valley, which sits at about 8000 feet, and it grows a huge amount of barley, potatoes, and wheat. But the barley was all being bought up by Coors. They had contracts with basically all the barley producers in the state. There was always plenty of barley around, but getting it malted was a real challenge. But they're actually two maltsters down in the San Luis Valley now that do pretty much everything we need. We do a cherry wood smoke malt that we're still source from Greece, but other than that, everything comes from the San Luis Valley. We work with our primary malting house, Proximity Malt, and they're just 50 miles south of us and grow all of our grains here in Colorado.”

Finding that partner in the community was an exciting moment for the Wood’s High Mountain Distillery team. Getting specialty malts in smaller quantities is a tough thing to do, and distilling those specialty grains is even more of a challenge. But once the initial challenges were sorted out and the process dialed in, the team hit their stride. This includes a longer than industry-standard 8-day fermentation to get all the secondary fermentation out of the unique mashbills.

“We haven't done any raw rye, although we have a pallet of it that hasn't gone back yet that we're still debating about maybe we'll go ahead and distill, but it is definitely a tricky grain to work with,” Wood explains. “We do use some additional enzymes in it that kind of help break down all the long chain molecules that it's fermentable sugars. And that was a real challenge to kind of get sorted out initially. That was a bigger challenge than the foaming. The foaming really isn’t that big of a deal. We do a long fermentation, an 8-day fermentation with all of our whiskies.”

Aging

The unique challenges associated with distilling at altitude in Colorado have largely been sorted out by now, but the maturation component has not been as easy to figure out.

“We're seeing a lot of interesting stuff around not just with us, but with all of the distilleries that are at altitude,” Wood explains. “The maturation of whisky at altitude is really, really interesting. And it's not well understood. I mean, anecdotally, from a sensory standpoint, you can certainly pick it out, but there's not a lot of very detailed scientific kinds of rigorous studies that have been done on it. We mature in new oak and we have a range of barrels between number one and number four char, depending on what we're doing, and we get really a very intense maturation because of what we think, anyways, is because of the dry air, we get big changes in temperature. I think we benefit, it's not, certainly not better than Kentucky or better than Scotland, but it's different.”

Connecting with Customers

Visitors to the area are generally there for outdoor activities and stop into the distillery for a cocktail before dinner and oftentimes end up returning for a tour. But it’s still a relatively tiny operation.

“It's an old mining supply town and railroad town that was settled in the late 1800s, but it has evolved over the years,” Wood explains. “ The mining is gone. There's no more railroad. And so it's had to reinvent itself really as a tourist town. And PT was really involved in a lot of that over the years. In fact, he was the two-term mayor of Salida. And now he's a county commissioner.”

Currently, the majority of distribution for Wood’s High Mountain Distillery is within the boundaries of Colorado, but the Wood brothers hope to be able to support additional distribution someday, but for now they are happy with being known in their own backyard.

“Between the tasting room and our front range Colorado distribution, that sucks up most of our production, and so we really don't have a lot of excess capacity to focus on additional states,” Wood says. “So we've been happy just to kind of take care of our friends here in the state of Colorado.”

Tours at Wood’s High Mountain Distillery are available six days a week, Monday thru Saturday, at 4pm. The tasting room is open Tuesday- Saturday noon to 10 pm and Sunday-Monday noon to 9 pm. Learn more at woodsdistillery.com.

In The Woods

1 large ice cube

1.5 oz Tenderfoot American Malt Whiskey

4 dashes orange bitters

3 dashes molasses bitters

2 dashes aromatic bitters

Maple syrup

Oak chip and torch for smoking

Orange zest and sprig of thyme for garnish

Build in a brandy snifter. Swirl (~ bar spoon) maple syrup in glass. Garnish with heavy orange zest and a sprig of thyme. Smoke with oak wood chip through cocktail smoker then capture the smoke in the glass with a coaster, swirl and serve.