Learn to Make Spirits at Local Distilleries
BY CHRIS SANDS
If you want to learn how to make beer or wine, it is very easy to gain hands-on experience. As long as it is for your own consumption, you can legally make up to 100 gallons in Maryland. Most home brew supply stores even sell kits that have everything you need. Distilling spirits is another story altogether. While it is legal in this state to own a still, unless you plan to distill water or essentials oils, it is illegal to operate one without proper licensing. Thankfully, two Frederick distilleries offer hands-on classes that let you experience distilling firsthand, where everything is on the up-and-up.
Dragon Distillery’s class focuses on making bourbon, while McClintock Distilling’s teaches you how to make rye whiskey.
At McClintock’s class last month, co-founder Braeden Bumpers detailed the science behind distilling spirits. This could have easily been boring if not for his entertaining teaching style and humor, coupled with his keen expertise. One of the best quotes of the day came from his explanation about yeast and fermentation. Bumpers put it quite simply that yeast “eats simple sugars, farts CO2, and pees ethyl alcohol.” He wove interesting facts throughout his scientific explanations; Maryland, for instance, was the third largest producer of rye whiskey before Prohibition. The only states producing more were Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
Class wasn’t all sitting in a chair, listening to Professor Bumpers, and taking notes. After he explained the steps of the distilling process, we went into the production area, where Tyler Hegamyer, McClintock’s other co-founder, demonstrated them. Anytime it was feasible, the class was given the opportunity to participate. They even let us play with some of their expensive test equipment, such as their density meter (used to measure alcohol content) and refractometers (used to measure sugar content). The words “please be careful” were used quite a bit.
In addition to lecture and hands-on time, we also got to participate in what proved to be the class’s favorite activity: taste testing. The first series featured several brands of whiskey so we could experience the various flavor profiles that spirit can have.
The second round of tastings accompanied instruction on barrel aging. We were given a vertical flight of McClintock whiskey to compare the taste after different periods of aging—nine days, three months, five months and one year. This really highlighted how a whiskey smooths out as it ages and picks up flavors from the barrel. I found it very interesting how much science and art is involved with barrel-aging process. Through a detailed “family tree” of major whiskey makers, Bumpers explained that some of the most notable whiskeys start out from “juice” produced by the same supplier, and only differ in the way they are barrel aged.
The final activity of the day entailed filling up two bottles with the rye whiskey we had made. We were then taught the proper way to label and seal the bottles so that it would be legal for us to take them home. In addition to the bottles, we each got our own two-liter oak barrel to age our whiskey.
As if all that wasn’t enough fun, we also got to use words like bunghole and dephlegmator.
Read all about Dragon’s bourbon workshop at UnCappedNews.com.