Stranahan’s Whiskey Distillery Tour

‘We have hybrid stills,’ says Max Rutherford, our tour guide at Stranahan’s whiskey distillery in Denver, Colorado. ‘Pot stills are inefficient, so we have pot stills with a column still on top. They’re made by Vendome and we had to persuade them to make them for us. It was like going to Ferrari and saying: Can you make us a go-kart?‘

Distillery tours can sometimes be dull, depending on your guide, but Max is a real star. He’s friendly and knowledgeable, but most of all he’s funny. He makes the group laugh constantly, so much so that he should consider a career in stand-up. However, as well as being a tour guide for Stranahan’s he also plays in a band called Hi-Fi Gentry.

‘Denver has more music venues than any other city in the USA, and that includes Nashville and Austin,’ he tells us proudly.

The Mile High City isn’t short of distilleries either, including Leopold Brothers which I toured on a previous visit to Colorado’s capital. Stranahan’s is the oldest in the city, though. In fact it’s the oldest of over 50 distilleries in the state, Max explains.

Stranahan’s Whiskey Distillery Tour

‘This was the first distillery to open in Colorado after prohibition. It was founded by Jess Graber, who came from Woody Creek. He was friends with Hunter S. Thompson. Jess was also a firefighter, which is weirdly where our story starts. Stranahan was the name of a guy whose barn Jess couldn’t save from burning down. Stranahan was into home brewing and Jess had plans to open a distillery, so he asked Stranahan for advice.

‘Stranahan said: My barn just burned down and you want to talk about distilling?? Jess decided that if he made a whiskey he would call it Stranahan’s, both after this guy and because he thought it was a good name for a whiskey.’

Unlike other distilleries which have a diverse range of spirits, Stranahan’s focuses on American single-malt whiskey. They only use malted barley, 90% of which is grown in Colorado, and have their own proprietary strain of yeast.

‘Yeast produces two things,’ says Max, ‘one of which is CO2. We don’t need CO2 as we’re not making fizzy whiskey. That sounds kind-of weird. But we do want the other thing that yeast makes – alcohol!’

Max explains the distilling process, telling us the difference between the heads, the tails and the hearts of the distilled spirit. Stranahan’s only uses the hearts.

‘You guys have probably heard all those old moonshine stories, about how people go blind and die and all that fun stuff. That’s because you don’t drink the heads, and these guys weren’t very smart. Some distillers take the tails, distill them a few more times and sell it as cheap liquor. That’s why when you buy the cheap liquor off the bottom shelf you get a worse hangover more quickly. I speak from experience.

‘I’m not saying you won’t get a hangover from Stranahan’s if you drink enough of it, but we’ve taken out all the nasty stuff so you won’t go blind and die, which is not good for publicity.’

Max then passes round a sample of pure alcohol for us to smell.

‘People from the south say this reminds them of home. People not from the south say it reminds them of hospitals, of rubbing alcohol, but it’s also sweet. Some people have said it resembles rosewater, or old red wine.’

Stranahan’s uses carbon-filtered water from nearby Boulder. Called Eldorado, it’s natural spring water which has been ranked the second-best spring water in the world.

The whiskey matures in American oak barrels, which they get from the Independent Stave Company. They’re charred for 35 seconds on an open flame. They only use their barrels once, then they sell them to Scottish and Irish whisky makers, though some brewers also buy them.

Having reassured us that we won’t die or go blind, Max asks that rhetorical question: ‘Wanna try some whiskey?’

We start by tasting some of Stranahan’s original yellow label whiskey, which is a blend of 2- 3- and 5-year-old whiskies. Max asks us to smell the aroma of the whiskey by breathing through the nose and the mouth at the same time.

‘On the nose I’m getting vanilla, honey, caramel, butterscotch. Then clean your palate by taking a sip of the whiskey, not of water. Then we do what they call the Chattanooga chew. Gently rock the spirit back and forth in your mouth, coat your mouth with it. Do not treat it like mouthwash. It will burn and I will laugh at you.

‘The taste? Cinnamon. I get coffee, though people don’t usually agree. Apricot? But it’s hot. It’s 94 proof which is 47% ABV. We like to give you the option to dilute your whiskey with an ice cube or sometimes water.’

Max then asks us to do just that, and see if we notice any change in the taste of the whiskey.

‘Now I get brown sugar, molasses,’ Max tells us. ‘It’s smoother, less hot, more syrupy. It’s surprising what difference a drop or two of water can make.’

While we try a sample of Stranahan’s Diamon Peak whiskey, which is also 47% ABV, Max tells us about their special Snowflake range of whiskies.

‘Snowflake is our baby and we release it on one day a year, each year. We call it Snowflake because every batch is different. Last year on the morning of our release the line was about four times round our building. They sell for $100 each. We opened at 8am and sold out by 12.30pm. We release about 1200 bottles.

‘The tin cup on top of our bottles is made of stainless steel and is a tribute to cowboy culture, as they would drink their whiskey out of tin cups. Our founder, Jess, was a cowboy. You fill the cup up and you’ve got a 3oz pour, which we call a cowboy shot. Drink that and you deserve to say Yee-haw!

‘The label is a sash. At first we had conventional square labels but our bottlers had difficulty putting them on straight. It’s much easier with a sash. They can be a bit crooked and no-one notices.

Each bottle has a saying written on it, like ‘I learned it in prison’ or ‘Safe Drively.’ We used to let the bottler hand-write a personal little message on the label but we started getting people asking why we had anatomical drawings on the labels so we had to put a stop to that.’

Finally Max tells us all how we can get a free bottle of Stranahan’s.

‘We bottle using volunteers. You can sign up on the website to help with bottling. You work for four hours, we feed you and give you a free bottle.’

Then comes the punchline: ‘The last time I looked, the waiting list was about 35,000 people long.’

More Information

To book your own tour, which I highly recommend, visit the website:
www.stranahans.comYou can buy Stranahan’s Whiskey from Caskers and from Master of Malt.For more information on Denver, see:
www.visitdenver.comFor information on Colorado, see:
www.colorado.com