Places like the Pacific Northwest can be a cornucopia for distillers—a place where it feels like anything will grow.
But when the farmer’s work is done, the distiller’s work begins. And for those who work with fresh fruit, schedules and processes must be in tune with the harvests.
Fresh Fruit at Clear Creek
The founders of Clear Creek Distillery in Hood River, Oregon, first fell in love with fruit brandies while traveling around Europe, says master distiller Caitlin Bartlemay.
Courtesy Clear Creek Distillery, Hood River, Oregon
To make their brandies, she says, the distillery buys “the ugly fruit”—such as pears that are too big or small, scarred, sunburnt, or oddly shaped. Locality is important to the team, and they can source their raw materials from within 200 miles of the distillery.
“The only reason it’s as wide as that is . . . the cranberries come from the Oregon coast,” Bartlemay says.
For Clear Creek’s flagship Pear Brandy, the team uses 20 pounds (9 kilos) of pears per bottle. Pickers harvest the pears when they’re still green and put them into cold storage, which triggers a genetic response that helps them to all ripen at the same time. The team uses a progressive cavity pump to move material around the distillery; when the Bartlett pears are ripe enough, Bartlemay says, the act of pumping them also crushes them.
Cherries are an especially volatile fruit to work with at the distillery. The problems start with the supply uncertainties: Not every year yields a great harvest for farmers.
“I’m told that, for a cherry farmer, if they have one good year in seven, they’re doing alright,” Bartlemay says. “We hold space in our production for cherries, but we never really know exactly the day, until maybe two or three days in advance, when the cherries are actually going to get to the distillery.”
The challenges don’t stop there.
“For cherry fermentation and distillation, it’s very important that it’s fermented and distilled on the pits,” Bartlemay says. “A great portion of the flavor and aroma that is attributed to cherry brandy actually comes from those pits.” She says the team developed an industrial spaghetti strainer to strain all the pits out. “They wreak havoc on plumbing.”
Apple Brandies at Bellewood Farms
In Lynden, Washington, about nine miles south of the Canadian border, Bellewood Farms & Distillery grows apples on 62 acres. Its distillery opened in 2015.
Across two orchards, there are about 25,000 trees, including 22 apple varieties planted as high-density, semidwarf trees, plus Honeycrisp apples and pears. “Every year, we bring bees in to help pollinate,” says head distiller Chris Baetz. In recent years, Baetz says, warmer winters have led to earlier harvests.
Making true farm-to-glass spirits starts when the apples are harvested, processed, and juiced. Bellewood Farms makes its vodka from Honeycrisp apples, while other products get various apples that add different flavors. Baetz mentions a beautiful pink apple called Mountain Rose as a particular favorite.
“They juice the apples over at the farm; I bring the totes over to the distillery,” Baetz says. Next, he adds 200 pounds (91 kilos) of cane sugar and a yeast starter to each tote. After two weeks of fermentation, it becomes a cider of about 11 percent ABV, ready for distilling.
Courtesy Bellewood Farms & Distillery, Lynden, Washington
Baetz loads 125 gallons (473 liters) of cider into the copper pot still, focusing on slowly collecting high-quality hearts from the run over several hours. The resulting liquid is an unaged brandy, aka eau-de-vie.
“To produce neutral spirits like our vodka and gin, I run the eau-de-vie through our column still until it reaches 190 proof,” Baetz says. “This high-proof spirit serves as the base for our vodka, gin, and liqueurs.”
For the aged brandy, Baetz matures it in bourbon barrels for two years. Sometimes, however, he’ll also put this aged product into wine barrels. “French oak will give you different flavors,” he says, adding that these barrels often impart some vanilla notes to complement the leather notes from American oak.
He’s worked with local wineries and breweries on occasion, turning rejected wine into port and distilling unwanted batches of beer into spirits.
“I even teamed up with a cheese factory … to make vodka from their whey,” Baetz says, adding that its nice being close-knit with other local beverage producers. “A lot of the breweries reuse my barrels after the brandy has been in there.”
In Wine Country at Rock 12
In Lompoc, California, in Santa Barbara County, the founders of Rock 12 also have symbiotic relationships with the community—they’re making spirits right in the middle of wine country.
In a column still, they use wine to distill the base spirit used to make Rock 12’s vodka, gin, and brandy.
“We’ve kind of become the default recycler for undesired wine in our area,” says cofounder Sarah Suput. “When a winemaker, for whatever reason, decides not to put his or her wine in a bottle, they have to dispose of it correctly, and that doesn’t tend to be down a drain.” By taking the wine and distilling it into a neutral grape spirit, Suput saves the winemaker the hassle of disposal.
The team also distills from fresh fruit. After falling in love with the region, Suput says they learned that a county requirement stipulates that they can only distill from fruit. They started planting an orchard of apricots, apples, quince, and yuzu—but if she could start over, Suput says she’d plant fewer apricots.
“They grow and develop beautifully in our climate,” she says. “However, it is such a difficult fruit to work with because it spoils so quickly.”
To make Rock 12’s apricot eau-de-vie, the estate-grown apricots are de-stoned, fermented, and distilled on-site in a custom, hand-hammered copper kettle still; a master craftsman in Serbia designed it specifically for whole-fruit fermentation and brandy distillation. They pump pre-crushed fruit into the still.
“We hand-pit all our apricots, and they just go right into there and soak for about 30 days,” Suput says. The distillery doesn’t typically refrigerate or freeze fruit except for some limited apricot that is used in amaro. “We don’t make any plans in the months of June and July because we are right here to pick the fruit and process and ferment immediately.”
That’s the only way to make apricots work—they need to ripen on the tree, and picking them early doesn’t work well. Meanwhile, to use up the very early or late harvest fruit, the team produces an apricot liqueur using the grape spirit as a base.
When it comes to apples, careful variety selection is paramount because the region doesn’t get the frost that many apple varieties prefer.
“Most of the best apple brandies are going to abide by the same vision and design as, say, a cider,” Suput says. “You do want a balance of bittersweet and tart when you’re looking for your apple mash.”
Meanwhile, they use the estate’s yuzu to make a limoncello, and Suput also has experimented with making nocino, an Italian-style walnut liqueur.
“We’ve had this ‘why not try it?’ philosophy,” she says. For now, though, the distillery isn’t planning to introduce any new products—instead they’re focused on delivering high quality for existing SKUs.
“We’re also not planting new trees this year,” Suput says. “This is kind of a time for us to settle into it a little bit, see what’s working well for the farm.”