One arctic Sunday morning last month, the unmistakable aroma of juniper and lemon perfumed the normally musty air behind a heavy steel door in an industrial space on the west side. There “Roger,” a young guy who makes his living with his hands, was committing a time-honored and storied felony.
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“I got into this just because I like the science of all that stuff,” he says. “I like process. I like all the ins and outs of making this very specific thing. I like coming up with all of the systems to get to a goal. Distilling can be very much like that.” Roger’s also a history buff, and he likes the lore of the spirit, its medicinal and naval origins. He makes labels for his “Idler” gin, so named for the skilled sailors with specific trades who weren’t required to swab the decks. I had the pleasure of sipping my way through a bottle of the final product as part of the research for this story.
You could say Roger is among the people Matthew Rowley, author of the how-to Moonshine!, calls “technical” distillers—”gearheads striving to make the most efficient distillery setup they can, forever tweaking and adjusting their rigs, never quite satisfied with the results.” In a speech before last year’s annual conference of the American Distilling Institute, Rowley described two other species of “hobbyist nano-distillers,” practicing their craft in secret but contemporarily with the young guns of the nascent legitimate craft-distiller movement. There are the “economical” distillers, he wrote, who make booze because it’s cheaper than buying it in the store. And then there are the “artisans” who strive to make great-tasting spirits.”
Two Sundays ago Ali and his friend and business partner “Ben” had their $500 mail-order column still set up in the snow in the backyard of his North Shore ranch house. They were in the middle of making a run of apple brandy distilled from five gallons of unpasteurized Wisconsin cider, fermented with champagne yeast. They’d hoped to have a little something to sip on by the time the Packers and Steelers took the field. Over ten hours, while a propane burner heated the cider to a steady 80 degrees Celsius, 150-proof applejack vapor slowly condensed in the column.
