Oregon's Whiskey Rebellion

This month, Food & Wine magazine takes note of the burgeoning whiskey distillery industry in Oregon - calling our local product "America's Best New Whiskeys". And it's no accident.

Sometime in the late 18th century, a band of small-batch distillers fled to the Kentucky countryside, where corn was abundant and a new liquor tax—which had just spurred a bloody rebellion—was rarely enforced. They shipped their whiskey in charred oak barrels, which imparted an amber coloring and a pleasant, sweet-smoky flavor. Recognizing a good thing, they made some more and, with a stroke of marketing ingenuity, stamped the barrels with the whiskey's region of origin: "Old Bourbon."

Two hundred years later, Kentucky bourbon is still the king of American whiskey. But another band of small-batch distillers has settled in Portland, Oregon, where the ingredients for fine whiskey—grain, water, wood—are plentiful and the laws are friendly to moonshiners who want to turn an honest buck. Right now, in garages and warehouses around the city, plans for another Whiskey Rebellion are being hatched. This time the barrels will be labeled "Oregon Whiskey," and if all goes well, what's inside them will rival the best that Kentucky and Tennessee have to offer.

Other than water, grain, wood, and friendly laws - what else contributes to this distilling revolution? A robust and innovative beer brewing community:

But [Lee Medoff and Christian Krogstad, founders of Portland's House Spirits] aren't at the distillery. Instead, I find them down the street at the Roots Organic Brewing Company, where Krogstad is bent over a 350-gallon stainless steel kettle, stirring a batch of "mash"—a steamy mixture of malted barley and hot water—with a wooden canoe paddle. It smells like a hippie soup kitchen in here, but Krogstad assures me it's the essential first step in the whiskey-making process. "Whiskey is essentially distilled beer," Krogstad says. "That's an oversimplification, but basically, it's true." And since Portland is home to dozens of microbreweries, current (and future) whiskey distillers will have plenty of the raw ingredients at hand. Like most Oregon distillers, Medoff and Krogstad started their careers making beer during the microbrew boom of the '80s and '90s. "We were around at the beginning of the craft-brewing revolution," Medoff says. "And now it's happening all over again with spirits."

There's one final only-in-Oregon ingredient in Oregon whiskey: The weather.

As soon as Medoff tasted his batch of proto-whiskey, he knew he'd created something special. "Kentucky and Tennessee only have two seasons: hot and cold. In Oregon we have four," he says. "I learned that the slower temperature change here in Oregon results in less extraction of the barrel flavors, so you get less of that smoky sweetness that bourbon has. I realized that with all-local ingredients, we could make something truly unique, truly Oregonian."

Read the rest of this fascinating look at what's next in Oregon.

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