(light ambient music) (glasses clinking) (machine hissing) - We're the only distillery
in North America that makes a hundred percent of their malt. We make millions of pounds
per year for our use on site. The Three Chamber Rye whiskey
is basically a revival of a style of whiskey that
completely disappeared after Prohibition. We produce about a thousand barrels a year and we're distributed all
throughout the United States and a little bit into Canada. We're starting with a
couple of raw grains here. This is raw barley that
we get from Colorado and malting barley's different
than for cattle feed. It's much higher quality,
it's lower in nitrogen. It's really been tailored to
the environment in Colorado which is very dry. And then the raw rye that we
have is called Abruzzi rye. This was actually brought over from Italy in the 1800s. The Abruzzi rye disappeared
because it has such a low starch content and modern distillation
in brewing has been pushing for higher and higher starch
content at the expense of flavor and aroma over the years. It's an intensely, intensely
floral variety of rye that just makes remarkable whiskey. Floor malting is the
traditional way to make malt. The entire floor malting
process takes about a week. The purpose of the steeping
process is to hydrate the grain. The idea is to trick it into
thinking it's in the ground so that it begins the germination
process and starts to turn into a plant. There are fewer than 10
distilleries in the world that make their own floor malt,
and the reason is, it's so labor intensive. So this is Danny, he's our head maltster. He handles everything really
on this side of the building. - So this grain has been
sitting for a matter of a few days. Today, really what I'm looking
for is a nice, healthy root. These roots start kind of growing together and to prevent that,
we drag these grubbers through the pile just to kind
of break up those rootlets, break up some of the CO2 and
the heat that's happening during the germination process. - The embryo, it's
synthesizing enzymes to break down the starches and other components and it's those enzymes that are used in the mashing process to
convert the starches into sugars. You can order enzymes out of a jug and pour it in the mash tun. That's not necessary. We're in the very last part of the process anywhere between four and
six days on the floor. You can see how grown those rootlets are. So this little temperature
difference between the top and the bottom gives it a
little bit of unevenness. It's making it so that there's layers of aroma that you don't get
using modern, automated malting. So we're going to lean into the differences in
the seasons and breathe as much life into our
whiskey as we possibly can. - We're gonna use this sled and a winch, I'll move it into the kiln over here. It definitely gives us a lot of hands-on control in
kind of a chaotic process. We call this Colorado CrossFit here. (speaker chuckling) It's a lot of shoveling. (light instrumental music) This is the last step in the malt journey. It's called a Doig-style kiln. The shape and the size of
it's really traditional to kind of old-world-style malting
and kiln of cereal grains. We're gonna fill this area up with hot air and we're gonna bring it from
about 50% moisture content, drop it down to about 5% by
the end of its kilning process. We can go all the way up
to 103 Celsius in this kiln a little over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Start using that Maillard
reaction to get some of those nice biscuit-y notes. Getting some really, really
deeper flavors in the kiln. Now that we've got our
grain modified and kilned, it's all nice and dry. We're gonna bring it through
a series of cleaners. It's gonna do vibration in
two different size screens. The grain itself is gonna
fall through here and then out to the silo, and being
kind of a zero waste facility, we send all of our
agricultural rejects to farmers and ranchers as cattle feed
and to feed their horses. The next step in the process
is gonna be to mill it so we can actually turn
our grain into flour. It's just a bunch of hammers that run around
really, really fast. When the grain comes in, it
just kind of pushes that grain up against these screens
and just pulverizes it. So if we pulverize that grain and just completely bust
out all of those starches, the yeast has just got
a ton of food to attack. What we're gonna do is bring all the flour and mix it in with some hot water, put it in this mash tun and let it
sit for about 45 minutes. The temperatures we're using in that water are gonna start
activating those enzymes. We're talking about 140 degrees Fahrenheit so it can start actually
breaking down those starches. After that, we're gonna drop the temperature
down as quickly as we can. And the 60 degree mark
is kind of right around where the yeast really
likes to really ferment. And once we've got it
to the right temperature we're gonna transfer it
over to fermentation tanks. - What we're doing with
these fermentors is trying to breathe as much life in here as possible. So we've got wild yeast and bacteria that's accrued
here for over 10 years. This wouldn't be sanitary for beer but we're gonna take this
and we're gonna distill it. We're gonna turn everything
that's in this fermentor into a gas, so you don't
have to worry about that. These are open cypress fermentors. It's a softer wood, so that when you fill it
with liquid it seals so there's no nails holding
this together, or glues. This is being held
together by the pressure of it swelling from the liquid
that you're putting into it. These things will last
much longer than I will, which is pretty exciting because the microbiology that's going on in this wood itself, that's gonna make the whiskey
a little bit more complex as the decades roll by, that's gonna be a little bit over 12% sugar, so that's
gonna be nice and sweet. We're intentionally
splashing as we're pumping it in to generate a little bit
more oxygen into the mash so that the fermentation
is a little bit more aggressive and thorough. And what that's gonna do
is create daughter cells. Craig is gonna come along and add the liquified yeast into it. He's our production manager and he's been with us for over a decade and his shift starts
at 3:30 in the morning. He's been in for over 10 years. He's never been late once. There are hundreds of yeasts that you can use to
make both whiskey and beer. We use a mix between
them to get more nuance and finesse into the whiskey. Yeast is what's called a
facultative anaerobe, which means once the oxygen is done, it
switches over to fermentation. Instead of creating daughter cells it's gonna consume that sugar
and turn it into alcohol and hopefully some really
delicious flavors. All works in concert to make a whiskey
that's gonna be ready in another 10 years. We have a total of 16 fermentors in our cellar, open fermentors, you're basically saying that you want mother nature
to have a little bit more say in the finished whiskey. This is yesterday's mash. So this is about 24 hours later. This is what's in called high krausen which is just saying really
it's most-active state. So this is probably five or
6% sugar right about now. After the decades of doing this roll by, you can tell when there's an issue simply by looking at the pattern of the foam. So now you can see another
24 hours has passed. It's dying out, which tells me there might
be 1% sugar left here, maybe but the sweetness is gone. It's nice and dry. This is normally when we'd
be running to the still but we're gonna let this sit for the next 48 hours to let what's living in this wood get to work on this mash. So that leads to the last
day that we have here. So now you can see that this
is really dead in the water. Really, nothing's happening at all. Malt has lactobacillus living on it. What's gonna happen is, it's
gonna start to drop the pH and it's now starting
to get noticeably sour, and those organic acids are
gonna turn into esters that that are gonna taste like
orange marmalade and plum and fig that add depth to
that whiskey as we distill it. So as the years and the seasons roll by, we're gonna get more and more complexity. I went to German brewing
school many years ago and opening up a brew pub with my brother. He wanted to make what's now
called a sustainable factory. That wasn't even a word back then. He went on to Stanford to get his master's in environmental engineering. We're incredibly lucky because
our two skills fit together and it's just been a
wonderful partnership. We added distillation just
two years in to diversify what it is that we were selling, and once I got my hands on a pot still, I fell in love with it. This is the only three-chamber still in the world that's being
used to make rye whiskey. This is about 20 feet high,
five feet in diameter. We had this built for us
about eight years ago now. So as you can see here
in the bottom chamber the alcohol-laden vapor is gonna travel up and bubble up through the second chamber. It's gonna repeat that process
through the third chamber. It's gonna go up through a pre-heater, come over into line arm
here, down into the thumper. And from the thumper, it runs over into our condenser where
it's -- you can picture a a pig's tail that runs down
the center of that column with constantly circulating
cold water running. So you have a hot vapor
hitting a cold surface and it condenses and comes out as alcohol in our spirit safe. And you turn that into a
modern continuous still, you could get about 200 barrels a day. This yields two. In a continuous still, the mash enters and exits the still in 90 seconds. For a three-chamber still,
it's in there for a total of 90 minutes at 30 degrees hotter, and as a result, it pulls oils and aromas out of the
rye mash that you can't get using a continuous
still -- lavender notes and rose notes and all of these big big floral flavors and
aromas out of the rye, and it makes it so the whiskey
is completely different from any other modern rye whiskey. So we're taking a new charred barrel. It's been charred on the inside. So what we have here is the tank full of the new-make spirits. So we're gonna dilute it
to 50% alcohol and then we're gonna fill it here in
a newly charred American oak. All spirits are clear as
they come off of the still, but the beautiful reddish
and brown and sunlight notes that you get in the
color of a whiskey comes from taking this wood and
they literally char it. Charring is a distinctively
American process, and it's a legal requirement if you wanna label it as rye whiskey. The char is imparting color. It's gonna release very
specific components and we're using American oak. Its defining characteristic
as a compound called vanillin, which shockingly tastes like vanilla. It's also adding sweetness
as the years roll by from the wood sugars that you get. The problem with oxygen working its way in, is that you also have evaporation. We're losing about 4.1% volume per year. We're gonna move this into our dunnage warehouse for maturation and basically catalog it
and then forget about it. I mean, tell me that's not satisfying. It's satisfying. In here, we have about
3,000 barrels that are maturing whiskey right now. The Three Chamber Rye
whiskey ages anywhere between eight and 15 years. What happens during maturation in our dunnage warehouse
is, we're taking advantage of the temperature differences
between summer and winter between day and night. So when it starts to get cold the whiskey is gonna contract and pull out of the wood,
pull out of the barrel. And when it gets warmer, it's gonna push its way into the wood. And this constant movement
of working its way in and out of the barrel
is pulling the coloring that you get, it's pulling the aromas and wood sugars that you're
looking for out of the whiskey. Where you make it makes a difference. The temperature that you age it at and the amount of moisture that you have in the air dictates the angel's share. So I could take this distillery
and put the entire thing in Kentucky and the whiskey's
gonna be different, even if I kept everything else the same. Mother Nature is gonna have its say and all we're trying to do is shepherd it in the directions that we like. I've been in this industry
for 28 years now, and my favorite thing to do really is is tasting the whiskey as
it comes off of the still. I mean, it's beautiful. (speaker chuckling) There really is no other
whiskey like this in the world. And this particular bottling has been in the barrel now for six years. As the years progress you're getting more and
more layers of the esters. It's just intensely
floral and the lavender and the elderflower and the rose together with all that fruit, you
immediately understand that this has nothing to
do with modern whiskey. It's an entirely different paradigm and and we're very proud to be making it. I started studying the three-chamber still and came across it 15 years ago. I had to take a leap of fate. You can get what are called dusties, so these are vintage bottles and a couple other whiskey writers, David Wondrich did a side-by-side with a bottling from 1913 and mine, and he's like, "Todd, my God,
the notes are all there." That was a very good day. We have a very small crew that we're very lucky to have who really
care about what they do. (light ambient music) And that's about eight
years of hard work there. - [Producer] How's it feel? - Indescribable. I'm the luckiest man in the world. I can't believe I get to do this. It gets better every year. Our customers most commonly
drink our rye whiskey neat, or on the rocks, sometimes in a Manhattan. It also makes a really nice Old Pal. I'm a fan of Old Pals. It's been a long and hard journey. There's an awful lot of art
to it, but that's the part of my job that I just
love, understanding how all of these puzzle pieces fit together to make something that's delicious. I'm aiming for a target on a tree that that's 10 to 15 years out, and when I hit it, it's
incredibly gratifying. The payoff of adding these extra steps is, we're making unique whiskey. The Three Chamber Rye
whiskey is a true unicorn. That's it, there's only one. (light ambient music)
