Something Awesome Is Happening in Oregon

Unless you are in or a frequent visitor to the Pacific Northwest, you’ve probably never heard of McMenamin’s, and certainly not their Edgefield Distillery. Yet it is quite possible that Edgefield has made some of the best whiskey of the young craft distillery era.

A few years back, a four-year-old Edgefield rye won gold at the annual American Distilling Institute (ADI) competition. According to the distiller who accepted the award, Booker Noe (Jim Beam’s grandson, himself a legendary whiskey-maker) helped them with the recipe. It was superb. Asked if, when, and how it would be sold, they answered, “It won’t be. We kind of drank it all.”

Brothers Mike and Brian McMenamin started with a pub back in 1974. Today, McMenamins is a chain of resort hotels, restaurants, bars, music venues, golf courses, movie theaters, and probably a few other endeavors. They brew beer, distill spirits, and vint wine. They grow a lot of the food they serve in their restaurants and grow the grapes from which their wines are made. They’re way into preventing waste and promoting energy savings and efficiency.

The distillery was established in 1998. It is part of Edgefield, a 100-year-old historic McMenamin's resort hotel, located about 20 miles outside of Portland.

Last month, at their annual St. Patrick’s Day blowout, they released a whiskey called Devil’s Bit, made from malted wheat and barley, and aged for twelve years. It is heart-breakingly good, clearly recognizable as malt whiskey, yet different from anything you’ve ever tasted before. The nose alone is a revelation. They could sell it by the sniff.

If you want to become a distiller, and make great whiskey, get thee to Troutdale, Oregon. If you just want to taste what the craft distillery movement can become, same advice.

Some Thoughts On The ADI Craft American Whiskey Competition.

Last week, when I published the results of the American Distilling Institute (ADI) 2010 Craft American Whiskey competition, I wrote that I would post my thoughts on the brouhaha later.

Here are two.

First, ADI's on line bulletin board has been silent on the subject. The ADI has not even posted the results, there or on its primary web site. Nor has anyone on the bulletin board (which is open to the public) started a thread about that or any other aspect of the conference. Odd?

Whiskey Intelligence, a web site dedicated to posting any whiskey-related press release they receive, (I'm not being snarky, that's their mission statement.) has posted last week's ADI email in its entirety here.

Second, ADI with its dysfunctional competition seems to be saying this: "As the collective voice of a new generation of progressive artisan craft distillers, we would like you to actually make, from scratch, the products you enter in the Craft American Whiskey competition. But if you want to go down to the corner store, buy a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, put your name on it and enter that instead, that's cool too."

American Craft Distilling is a young movement. In being critical, I'm not trying to strangle the baby in its crib. On the contrary, I'm trying to convince the baby not to commit suicide.

Want To Learn About Distilling? Apply For A Michael Jackson Internship.

Readers of this blog are one of the few audiences that won't immediately associate the name "Michael Jackson" with the recently-departed King of Pop.

Our Michael, also deceased, was a writer, lecturer, thinker, and champion of beverage alcohol. The English-born Jackson made his reputation educating the world about beer, then became the world's leading authority on whiskey too.

The Michael Jackson Education Fund was initially created by the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Wine & Food (AIWF) in the early 1990s. The Fund is now managed by the AIWF Foundation which has partnered with the American Distilling Institute (ADI) to develop an internship program. Applications are being accepted now.

The Michael Jackson Internship is intended to foster scholarship in all aspects of distilled spirits manufacture. Though based in the United States, international applicants and international hosts are welcome. Applications for the internship are reviewed by a committee of distilled spirits professionals drawn from the spirits production, sales and writing communities. Depending on the availability of funds, there will be at least one internship awarded per year. The internship will be awarded at a special dinner in honor of the Michael Jackson Fund in conjunction with the annual ADI meeting.

For more information, contact:
Daniel Farber
Chair of the Michael Jackson Internship Committee
Osocalis Distillery
5579 Old San Jose Rd.
Soquel, CA, 95073

So You Want To Be A Distiller? Read This:

The American Distilling Institute (ADI) is the largest association of micro-distillers in the United States. Among its services for present and aspiring micro-distillers is its hands-on distilling workshops.

The next one on the schedule is at Stillwater Distillery in Petaluma, California, December 6 – 11, 2009. The $3,500 tuition includes lodging and meals. Also included are tours of St. George Spirits/Hangar One Distillery in Alameda, Anchor Distillery in San Francisco, and Cahill Winery in Sebastopol (where they distill a pomace brandy).

Then in the Spring, ADI will return to Huber Starlight Distillery in Borden, Indiana, for the ADI Whiskey & Moonshine Distilling Conference, May 2 – 5, 2010. Attendees will stay in nearby Louisville and tours of Vendome Copper & Brass Works, Kelvin Cooperage, Buffalo Trace Distillery and Woodford Reserve Distillery are included. Costs have not yet been announced.

For more information go to http://www.distilling.com/.

You Meet the Most Interesting People.

When I brought the mail in today there was in it an envelope from a New York art gallery. I opened the envelope and extracted a large card with this image on it.

I stared and stared. Great image, I thought. Then I thought, “it’s Bill, it has to be Bill, let it be Bill.” I turned it over.


I’ve always known about Bill’s photography because of his most famous work, Suburbia, a now-classic 1972 book of photographs that was reissued in 1999. To explain it beyond the title would be redundant.

But I know Bill Owens for a completely different reason.

Bill is the founder of the American Distilling Institute (ADI). ADI calls itself "the collective voice of the new generation of progressive beverage, medical, and aromatic distillers, and is dedicated to the mission of disseminating professional information on the distilling process." You can find out more at www.distilling.com.

There are quite a few fascinating people in ADI, and Bill Owens is one of them.

Bill is from Northern California. He began to mess around with cameras in the 1960s while in the Peace Corps. He later worked as a photographer for various San Francisco-area newspapers, but shot fine art photography in his spare time.

At some point, Bill also began home-brewing, then started a brewpub called Wild Bill’s. If not the actual first it was one of the very first brewpubs in the country. Then he started a magazine called American Brewer, a journal for professionals and home-brewers, which spawned a short-lived (1995-96) enthusiast monthly called BEER, The Magazine, for which I wrote a few articles about whiskey.

Born in 1938, Bill decided a few years ago to sell everything and retire. He quickly became bored and started the ADI, which now has several hundred members in 36 states and Canada. Bill has thrown himself into it completely, like he does with everything.

Bill’s other books of photography are Our Kind Of People (1975), Working - I Do It For The Money (1977), and Leisure (2004). The events at the James Cohan Gallery are timed to coincide with the release of a new book, titled simply Bill Owens.

Not long ago, Bill came across a black-and-white picture of himself as a very young boy, wearing nothing except a pair of jockey shorts. He wanted to share the discovery with all of his friends but felt it needed a companion shot of the boy today in, naturally, nothing except a pair of jockey shorts. He’s very fit for a 70 year old man, but I really didn’t need to see that.

Some time later I said something to him about it and his reaction was like, what else could I do? The boy in the first picture had required that the second one be taken.

That's Bill.