Beyond beer and wine: Boulder County home to three custom spirits distillers

Want to start making beer or wine at home? Easy enough. All you have to do is spend a little money for equipment and supplies, and off you go.

Longmont’s Alex Nelson describes how his copper kettle is used to distill gin. Nelson’s small craft distillery, Roundhouse Spirits, is one of three custom spirits makers in Boulder County.

But if you want to distill your own spirits — whiskey, gin, vodka, rum — it’s an entirely different story. Suddenly, government will take a keen interest in what you’re doing; it’s even illegal to do it in your own home.

And the process of distilling spirits is more complex, requires more attention and takes longer than creating your own wine or beer.

So why bother doing it yourself? Mostly, say three Boulder County distillers, because it’s fun.

“It’s obviously a lot of work,” says Longmont’s Alex Nelson, 31, founder of Roundhouse Spirits, which produces Roundhouse Gin and Corretto, a coffee liqueur, using a diminutive copper still that perks away in a small warehouse space. “I have always been a spirits drinker, and I just thought it would be fun. It’s creative, kind of like cooking.”

Roundhouse Spirits is one of three (legal) Boulder County distillers, along with Altitude Spirits and 303Vodka, that have begun producing small amounts of “artisanal,” “small-batch” vodka, gin and a coffee liqueur in recent years. Each is a family operation — growing, but still clearly a labor of love.

Nelson, who creates his two products using ethanol bought from an outside source, spent countless hours adding “botanicals” — things like coriander, chamomile, lavender — before settling on Roundhouse Gin’s smooth, unusual flavor.

“It doesn’t have that juniper bite you might expect,” he says. “A lot of gins are really astringent and taste like a pine tree. (Roundhouse) has some ‘floralness’ that really softens it.”

Nelson not only does all the brewing, but also slaps labels on bottles and slips them into boxes for shipping to about 125 clients up and down the Front Range.

“To tell you the truth, I am getting a little tired,” says Nelson, a lawyer by day who is spending 20 to 30 hours a week on his distillery. “There are definitely days when I could use another set of hands.”

Roundhouse served its spirits at Longmont Humane Society’s fall fundraiser, the Animal Affair.

“They were a huge hit with our guests,” says Julie Kunkel, who oversees the event, which drew more than 300 people.

Craft distilling takes time and effort long before a still is lit. State law requires distillers to have a dedicated facility and there are all kinds of other regulations. But Colorado is behind only California and Oregon in the number of licensed artisanal distillers, with 16 (of about 170 nationwide).

“It’s been growing, probably by about eight to 10 percent since 2005 or 2006,” says JoAnne Carilli-Stevenson of Boulder, executive director of the Colorado Distillers Guild, created last winter to “promote and protect” the state’s fledgling craft distilling business. “Unlike brewing (beer) or making wine, there are significant barriers to entry. But Colorado has a substantial culture of beer and wine making, and people have a real affinity for local products.”

Boulder County’s distillers say their “art” runs in the family.

“For some reason it just gets in your blood,” says Steve Viezbicke, 44, founder of 303Vodka, which sold its first bottle in May and now sells to some 150 bars, restaurants and liquor outlets. “It’s an art.”

In Viezbicke’s case, making vodka from potatoes, Polish style — including the brewing of what he calls “potato wine” to create ethanol, instead of “getting it off a rail car” — is a family tradition. 303Vodka is distilled from his Polish grandfather’s recipe, which was discovered in a steamer trunk recently discovered by the family. Viezbicke started 303Vodka in 2008. ¶
“I’d been playing around with it, and my wife said, ‘Why don’t you just start making vodka?’ Hey, when your wife gives you the OK to start doing something you would like doing, you take advantage of it,” he says.

Then, after being laid off from his job as a design engineer last spring, he plunged into running the distillery full time with his wife and daughter.

“I could go to work at Burger King, or I could pour my heart into this,” says Viezbicke, who calls his stills — “Bertha” and “Medusa” — “my babies.”

The county’s oldest and largest distilling business is Altitude Spirits, which produces and sells Vodka14 to some 500 clients. But the Boulder-based company’s actual distillery is located on the Idaho side of the Teton Range in Wyoming.

Founder Matthew Baris is used to answering questions about that.

“Just because Crocs makes its shoes in Mexico, does that mean it’s not a local company?” says Baris, 30, a Boulder High School graduate who started the company with his father, local psychiatrist Mitch Baris.

Vodka14 — so named to evoke Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks — is made with water from an aquifer charged by the wild Snake River.

“The water source is the primary reason we’re up there,” Baris says. With vodka, “there is nowhere to hide bad flavors, so you really need good water.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, each of Boulder County’s small-batch distillers is into the “loca-vore” ethic, using local, and in most cases, organic ingredients.

“It’s fun to support local food production,” Nelson says. “Everybody is doing farmshares and shopping at farmers’ markets, supporting harvest week. People want to know where their food comes from, whether its the farmer who grew the cattle or the guy who makes their gin.”