Since I had done a tour of three wineries in conjunction with my friend’s wedding in March, I decided to see if there were any distilleries in the area. A quick Google search led me to a short article that profiled five Hill Country distilleries: two were fairly close to where I would be staying in the wine country and one was in northern San Antonio. And just like that, I had planned a distillery tour.
I had originally planned to visit Hill Country Distillers the day after I arrived in Hill Country. However, when I looked at a map, I realized that Comfort was only a short detour south on my way into Fredericksburg. So after a work teleconference and a hearty lunch at Rudy’s in Leon Springs, I headed into Comfort and found the distillery on Front Street across from the U.S. Post office.
When I walked into the tasting room, James, the head distiller, was already entertaining a group of super friendly folks. He spotted me hanging out behind the group, and offered to start me at the beginning of the tasting order. First up were the spirits: Prickly Pear Spirit, which was their flagship spirit, and Jalapeño Spirit. Originally, these spirits were called Moonshines, which is technically just any illegally distilled alcohol, but that labelling seemed to deter consumers. So they changed the name to Spirits because, when they sent the recipes off to the federal government as part of their licensing process, the federal government didn’t know how to classify them. So the federal government came up with a new classification of “specialty spirits.”
To make the Prickly Pear Spirit, James takes almost half a ton of prickly pear cactus pads - thorns and all - mixes that up with sugar and yeast and, through their process, it becomes a clear spirit. He had said that they had tried using thornless prickly pear, but the results weren’t as good. He does the same with their Jalapeño Spirit, except he starts with a base of jalapeños, sugar, and yeast. To me, each tasted like a good vodka.
After the spirits came the Texas Revenge Gin. Essentially, the Prickly Pear Spirit gets evaporated through a basket of juniper berries and other aromatics to make a really interesting gin. I’m not one to drink gin straight, so it was tough for me to tell how good it was, but I did get two small nips of it to take home and mix with tonic or juice or whatever strikes my fancy.
After the gin came the dulces. James infuses the Prickly Pear Spirit with something fun - lemon, lime, grapefruit - and then adds some simple syrup and water to sweeten the mix and lower the proof. These were easier to drink straight than the others. The spirit really took to the flavor of the infused material, and he used just the right balance of sugar syrup and water so that it didn’t taste too harsh.
Finally, James wrapped up the tasting with the coffee dulce. Like the other dulces, this was made by infusing the Prickly Pear Spirit with coffee beans. The interesting part about this to me is that, when faced with the decision as to which coffee beans to use, James opted to go with the Hill Country Blend from the local supermarket chain. Therefore, unlike other coffee liquors, this one had undertones of cinnamon and pecan. I really liked it, and regretted my decision to buy a small bottle of the lime rather than a small bottle of the coffee.
Of course, the most interesting part of the afternoon was after the other group left and James was trying to entertain me. He told me the story of how the distillery got started. He and a friend found a guy who was making alcohol from prickly pear cactus in his garage. Since it was really good stuff, the two offered to partner with the guy to make the spirit on a larger scale. Unfortunately, after James and his friend bought all the equipment, the guy backed out. Even more unfortunate was that the equipment manufacturer refused to take back the equipment. But he did offer to teach James and his friend how to use the equipment to distill spirits. After a few trial runs, they were in business!
In addition to the production and the experiments - James said they were working on a tea dulce which was really good - Hill Country Distillers partners with wineries to distill their bulk wine into brandy. The first winery that they partnered with provided over 4,000 gallons of bulk wine, which they distilled down to 700 gallons. They split the product 50/50 with the winery. They put their product away in barrels to age as a brandy, and the winery used their product to fortify an existing wine into port.
Even though I didn’t get to tour the operations, which were in a separate building from the tasting room, I had a terrific visit. Not only were the products very good, but the conversation with James was super interesting.
The twenty mile drive from Fredericksburg to Hye on Route 290 was quite scenic; I was amazed by the number of wineries that had sprung up on the outskirts of Fredericksburg and in Stonewall. About fifteen years ago, my good friend Joe and I were in a class in San Antonio together, and I had the bright idea that we should cycle from Fredericksburg to the wineries. Since he was familiar with cycling through the California wine country, he agreed to accompany me. The first winery that we reached was Grape Creek Winery, almost ten miles outside of the town center. We had to stop on at a peach orchard stand our way out to fix Joe’s bicycle - I took advantage of their peach ice cream! - because there was nothing else out there. On my drive out to Hye, I must have passed at least five wineries between Fredericksburg and Grape Creek - and almost as many peach orchard stands!
At twelve years old, Garrision Brothers Distillery is the oldest legal bourbon distillery in Texas. Yes, contrary to popular belief, whiskey can be called bourbon even if it is distilled outside of Bourbon County, Kentucky. What makes a whiskey bourbon is that it follows the federal bourbon recipe and requirements. So all bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon.
I found the story of how the distillery was founded to be very interesting. Prior to founding the distillery, Dan Garrison worked in software and the bulk of his income came from one large Texas client. When that Texas client went catastrophically down hill, it took its third party vendors like Dan with it. So, broke and clueless as to what to do with his life, Dan left his wife and kids - they didn’t divorce or separate, he just went on a solo trip - and went on a two week bender on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. At some point during his touring and drinking, he realized that making bourbon was what he wanted to do with his life. Dan found himself some mentors, including one at Buffalo Trace, and stayed an extra month to learn all he could about the craft of making bourbon. After that month, his mentors sent him home to Texas where he raised money from his friends in order to buy the land and set up the operations. And the rest is history.
The tour of the distillery operations was pretty fascinating. Under a huge live oak tree, I learned the ABCs of bourbon - and managed to remember most of them! Bourbon is an All-American spirit, thanks to a declaration in 1964 by Texas native President Lyndon Johnson. It can only be made in the United States and must follow the federal recipe and requirements. One of those requirements is that bourbon must be barrel aged, but not just in any barrel. It must be aged in charred American oak barrels that haven’t been used for any other purpose. Believe it or not, that makes the barrel the greatest expense in bourbon making. These barrels may go on to live other lives - like aging wine or beer - but they can’t be used again for making bourbon. The barrels as Garrison Brothers are one-inch thick American white oak, which is thicker than the barrels used in Kentucky because the constant variation in heat in Texas makes the barrels contract and expand more frequently and more drastically than in Kentucky. This variation in temperature is also what makes a Texas bourbon taste older than a Kentucky bourbon. Bourbon must be made from a minimum percentage of corn - Garrison Brothers uses 74-percent white corn in their recipe - with wheat, malted barley, and water being the only additional ingredients. Bourbon must be a distilled spirit, with a maximum of 125 proof entry proof into the barrel and an approximate 80 proof fill proof into the bottle. Finally, bourbon is a genuine or honest spirit, because the federal recipe and requirements permit no additives, such as coloring or flavoring.
There is a very funny story about how Ferdinand the Bull became Ferdinand the Steer, but I’ll leave that one for the tour guides to tell.
Since the tour at the Garrison Brothers distillery was approximately half an hour in one hundred plus degree heat - and the trip to the gift store was even hotter - my water bottle wasn’t cooling me down enough. (Yes! I had one with me.) Lucky for me, I remembered that one of the wineries we visited in March served frozen sangria. Even luckier was that it was on the drive back to Fredericksburg and still open when I rolled in.
While the frozen sangria and air conditioning at the winery definitely cooled me down, by the time I reached the hotel, I was hungry. I had a good breakfast at a German place in town, but I had skipped lunch to finish a project. So I drove past the hotel and went to one of my favorite places in town: the Fredericksburg Brewery. Yes, I was well behaved; I only had one beer and lots more water with my burger and onion rings.
During my first Texas residency, I bought my brother a bottle of Rebecca Creek whiskey in the package store next to the grocery store that I always shopped at. It was meant to be a Christmas gift. I’m not really sure what happened to that bottle - although I know I gave it away at Christmas - but Rebecca Creek has been synonymous with Texas whiskey in my mind ever since. So it was just a stroke of luck that the distillery happened to be about fifteen minutes north of my San Antonio hotel. My luck turned south when I discovered that they only had openings on their 3pm tour, which was going to force me to cut my flight time really close. But I came up with a plan: I would register for the 3pm tour, show up at the distillery when it opened at 1pm, and beg to be let on to the 1pm tour. If that didn’t work, I’d beg to be slotted into the 2pm tour. If that didn’t work, I’d have a difficult choice to make.
I arrived at the Rebecca Creek compound at about 1245pm, and found it to be much smaller than I expected. I later learned that all four products - Enchanted Rock vodka, Enchanted Rock peach vodka, Rebecca Creek whiskey, Texas Ranger whiskey - were all made on the same line in the same building. But the outdoors area was quite pleasant: picnic tables with umbrellas in front of a music stage where some musicians were setting up to play later in the afternoon. The bar area was small, but both staff members were super cool. The bartender generously poured the vodka into my Bloody Mary and the tour guide gave me absolutely no problem with switching my 3pm tour to 1pm. I didn’t even have to mention the fact that I had a 530pm flight.
Inside the Rebecca Creek facility, we started at the mash tanks. Despite the four product lines, they only do two types of mash: one for vodka and one for whiskey. The vodka mash is made from pure corn, making their vodka products gluten free. The whiskey mash is made from 75-percent corn, 21-percent rye, and 4-percent malted barley. After the mash is made, the mixture is pumped into a fermentation tank, where yeast is added. Each mash is let to ferment in the tank for about a week, making a distillers’ beer. To make vodka, the distillers’ beer is pumped into the pot still and distilled once. Then the “hearts” of the spirit - which is the middle 60-percent - is pumped into their column still and distilled again through that. The new spirit which results is then either transferred to the filtering/proofing/blending station for those processes, or mixed with the peach flavoring and then transferred. Unlike some of the other distilleries I’ve visited, Rebecca Creek doesn’t infuse the new spirit with the peach flavor. A third party vendor creates an all natural peach flavoring from local Texas peaches. For the whiskey, the distillers’ beer is only distilled in the pot still. The entire beer is run through the pot still, and then the “hearts” are run through the pot still again. To make the Rebecca Creek whiskey, the new spirit is put directly into charred American white oak barrels. To make the Texas Ranger whiskey, caramel flavoring and vanilla flavoring are added before the spirit is put into barrels. The barrels are then shipped up to a barrel house in Indiana to avoid the Texas heat, which can cause up to 30-percent of the spirit to evaporate out of the barrel. After four years or so, the barrels are brought back to the facility for filtering, proofing, and blending. Of course, they use good old San Antonio public water to proof down the spirits.
I had great fun touring the three different Texas distilleries on my trip. I learned the most at the Garrison Brothers Distillery; after that, Rebecca Creek Distillery was pretty much a variation on the same process. But the Rebecca Creek folks were super knowledgeable and super friendly. Even though I didn’t see the operations, I probably had the most fun at Hill Country Distillers because James was so wonderful to talk with. Of course, if I only could recommend one, I’d recommend taking an early tour at Garrison Brothers on a cool day, and then slowly making your way through the various wineries back to Fredericksburg.
No comments:
Post a Comment