Since 2013, Copperworks has been making American single malt whiskey in Seattle, Washington. The founders, Jason Parker and Micah Nutt, bonded over a shared passion for brewing beer and realised they could turn those skills into making really good whiskey. Nearby distillery Dry Fly in Spokane had successfully campaigned to change Washington state’s laws in 2008 to allow for craft distilling, including tasting rooms and self-distribution, and not far away in Portland, Oregon, Westland Whiskey had begun making American single malt with a craft brewer’s ethos. The time was right, the duo decided, to test the waters on this new-fangled craft distillery movement.
Parker had started in 1989 as the first brewer at Pike Place Brewery. He loved being a brewer and decided to go back to school to get a BA in chemistry and a BS in microbiology. From there, he worked with two other breweries, discovering a love for making things from malted barley. He later spent several years working in IT and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation before it finally became legal to open a distillery in Washington state.
“I had been following carefully what was going on in the world of craft distilling in America and realised a lot of the people who were opening distilleries had no beverage alcohol production experience,” Parker recalls. “In this area, there were people who were Boeing engineers, Microsoft retirees. They were not technically qualified to open up a spirits plant. So, I started looking at friends and neighbours who might be interested in investing, and my friend Micah Nutt. He and I had been homebrewing for years together. He was a very qualified brewer and extremely thoughtful and consistent, unlike a lot of homebrewers. So, we decided to form a company with the concept of making perfect beer and turning it into whiskey.”
Parker and Nutt decided to lean into the beer-brewing ethos and figure out which parts of the fermentation process they could make their own in order to craft a superior American single malt whiskey. One of those is extending the fermentation cycle to include a conditioning cycle, bringing the period from cooking to sending it to the still around three weeks, as opposed to the two to five days of fermentation with no conditioning at most distilleries. Conditioning is a secondary stage of fermentation which allows for additional flavour development after a sanitisation process that includes boiling.
“A standard pale ale might condition only for five or six days, but a Scottish ale or a traditional German Bock might condition for six months,” Parker says. “So, there are these long waiting periods for the beer to get ready for not green flavours, but delicious coalesced flavours. It's just part of the process, and it's been part of the process for hundreds of years. Distillers can't typically enjoy that time because the mash is going to sour. It's going to lose the alcohol and turn into vinegar. That's the process of not boiling, that product has to go right into the still after just a few days of fermentation. Beer flavour-driven wort takes all that time to get those flavours.
“We brewers have always done the long, slow fermentation to develop flavours. What you have to do is let the yeast slowly settle to the bottom, pick up some of the compounds that it excreted during fermentation. It's using them to rebuild cell walls, and all of that flavour is reabsorbed into the yeast. It sits in the bottom, and the beer begins to coalesce into a delicious flavour. That's called conditioning.”
At Copperworks, the fermentation is done off-site at one of two local breweries — a third they had used for years, unfortunately, went out of business recently — before the wort is trucked in for distillation. In Scotland, in particular, so-called “beer boilers” are frowned upon in the making of Scotch whisky, and single malt Scotch is required to be produced fully at a single distillery using pot stills. This differs significantly from the recently codified definition of American single malt, which can be both fermented elsewhere and distilled on column stills.
“I was the founding member of the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission who asked for that clause to be added,” Parker says. “The original definition we had written was brewed, fermented, and distilled in a single location because we took the Scottish definition. I said, ‘Wait a minute, guys. What we're doing is stifling innovation. Think about how many brewers there are.’ At that time, there were 10,500 brewers in America. Think about what they can offer, both in getting small distilleries started up, but also in becoming distillers themselves. We want brewers to understand the process of mashing, fermenting, and getting ready for a non-hopped product to become a whiskey because that's where our innovation is going to grow the fastest.
“I'm excited about what's going to happen. It won't be in my lifetime, but I feel like we've set the stage for a transformation that is the first time in a long time that whiskey has had such latitude for experimentation. And that's because brewers have been doing a completely different thing than mash men have been doing in Scotland or in Kentucky. It's going to lead to new flavours in whiskey.”
Copperworks Distillery has now grown to include a farm-to-table restaurant on site, complete with a popular cocktail bar. While the industry is struggling, smaller craft producers are looking for ways to engage the local population as well as tourists to get their product in front of more people.
“That has been our local growth strategy,” Parker says. “We're all aware that the three-tier system is suffering, restaurants are suffering, distribution is suffering, not only from the consolidation of distributors, but also because of the lack of drinkers. Older drinkers are ageing out; younger drinkers are choosing not to drink. So, we're community-focused, and we're going to ride this way for however many years it takes for folks to get back into buying beverage alcohol for their house and going out and drinking more. We've got a 10,000-year relationship with alcohol. We'll get back to it. But right now, we're community-focused, and that's been our growth and survival strategy for probably the next five years.”
Tours of Copperworks Distillery are available on Fridays and Saturdays and reservations are recommended but not required. The tasting room at the distillery in Seattle is open daily at noon, and the restaurant in Kenmore, Washington, De La Soil, is also open daily. For more information visit copperworksdistilling.com.
