The Waitsburg Spirit

SEATTLE - Kirby Kallas-Lewis wanted to operate his boutique distillery in Waitsburg. He and his wife KT Niehoff bought the Lounda- gin Building on Main Street four years ago to redevelop as a hotel just at the time Kallas-Lewis began to take an interest in making spirits. For a while he explored the idea of setting up his operation in the basement.

Regulations for a distillery on the premises of a lodging establishment, however, proved tough. So, he abandoned his vision for the distillery, "Oola," in the midst of the grain country, while keeping the dream of handcrafting gin, vodka and whiskey very much alive.

When his distillery finally went into full production on Capitol Hill in Seattle one year ago, he didn't forget his ties to the Touchet Valley.

To the contrary: Oola's most recent product, the first bourbon to roll out of the new facility on the corner of Union and 14th, is named after the little city whose brownstones echo the Seattle neighborhood where Kallas-Lewis has lived for two decades and where his whiskey will soon be available at the grocery store, the Anchor and the jimger- manbar.

"I love that town," Kallas-Lewis said.

He is a former artist and tribal arts dealer who still hopes to use Waitsburg as a barrel- aging location and thinks of the product as a celebration of old and new. The label of Waitsburg Bourbon, a two- six of the amber-colored Kentucky-style, four-grain mash bill, waxes poetically about toasting to small towns and big dreams.

Hidden among the rolling hills of wheat and wine coun- try in southeastern Wash- ington is the small town of Waitsburg, settled in 1865. Old-timers, newcomers and everyone in between popu- late this tiny gem. They've woven together the character and traditions of the town with new ideas and new neighbors to create a truly special place.

Barely a month after its release, the sixth spirit to emerge from Oola is already getting rave reviews.

An Examiner.com writer who was present at the North- west Distillery & Cocktail Festival in Seattle where bartenders from across the country had a chance to sample the spirit, said the tasters quickly came to a consensus.

" Several bartenders voiced the opinion that it was the best whiskey to come out of Washington State yet," she wrote for the arts and enter- tainment site.

And that kind of praise could bode well for Waits- burg's name and description on the label as the bottled bourbon spreads far and wide. Kallas-Lewis is already lining up distributors for the whis- key in China and Canada.

If the success of his other spirits is any indication, award recognition may soon follow for Waitsburg Bour- bon. Oola's gin won Triple Gold in the Micro Distillery International Competition and Bronze at the New York World Wine & Spirits Com- petition last year, while its vodka won Gold in the for- mer and another Bronze in the latter the same year.

Having such a high-qual- ity craft product as Oola's Waitsburg Bourbon on the market is something the town can be proud of, said Jim German, a longtime mix- ologist, owner of the jimger- manbar and a close friend of Kallas-Lewis.

"It's the best distilled spir- it in the state and it has our town's name on it," German said.

The Genesis

It all began when Kallas- Lewis tried to think of a way to fit into the Northwest's bourgeoning foodie culture he and Niehoff had come so much to enjoy. After the bottom dropped out of the market for the kind of ethno- graphic art, artifacts and fur- niture his Lewis/Wara Gal- lery imported from around the world, he set out to rein- vent himself, but wanted to find an unfilled niche.

"It was time to do some- thing else," he said. "This was exciting to me because it was new."

There are amazing wines and great food, but that's al- ready well established. This (craft spirits) was exciting to me because it was new. Here you could still be somebody."

He liked food, but its pro- duction wasn't his forte and wine, well, let's just say the world hardly needed another wine label. But spirits, he decided, were another matter. In 2008, Washington State relaxed its liquor laws to en- courage the creation of craft distilleries and Kallas-Lewis saw his opportunity.

With only one small dis- tillery in the state at the time, the hard liquor equivalent of the microbrew renaissance two decades ago was a whole new frontier.

"Here you could be somebody," Kallas-Lewis said.

Without any formal back- ground in the art or business of making fine booze, he taught himself the chemistry and aging of grain-based liquors. In an admittedly obsessive fashion, he cracked books on the subject and toured the few craft dis- tilleries then in existence in California, Arizona and Eastern Washington, where Spokane-based Dry Fly Distillery had already made a name for itself.

It helped to be very close friends with German and to have a wife with years of ex- perience as a bartender. His palate and interest in spirits were already well developed, which helps him select the best of a batch book-ended by the beginning and end of the distilling process.

Meanwhile, the entire philosophy behind cocktails was turned on its head after Audrey Saunders of the Pegu Club and other New York mixologists introduced "culinary" cocktails using fresh ingredients and refining the selective use of spirits that made their drinks more art than hooch.

That approach appealed to Kallas-Lewis, who believes his micro-spirits should be savored instead of knocked back. In fact, he recommends drinkers of his whiskey serve the beverage in a glass with a big cube of ice so the increasing volume of water can bring out the complex layers of flavor in the barrel-aged bourbon.

The Garden

The New York cocktail revolution inspired Kallas- Lewis to complement straight versions of gin and vodka with botanical variations and to create his own line of rose- mary vodka, citrus vodka and hot pepper vodka.

The taste notes on Oola's website describe its Chili Pepper Vodka as "vibrant fiery orange in color" with a "savory nose of red pep- per surrounded by a subtle earthiness." Rosemary vodka is couched as "emerald green in color displaying a nose of herbs and citrus," while citrus vodka boasts "notes of lemon with hints of lime" and "undertones" of verbena.

German said he uses the flavored spirits in many of his cocktails now and his customers are more likely to savor straight shots from them than from regular vod- kas or gins.

"They mix extremely well and are interesting to peo- ple," German said. "They're a nice change of pace."

They way bourbon ingre- dients interact with nature is through the longstanding use of oak barrels for the aging process. The liquid goes in crystal clear at the start and comes out honey amber after about two years thanks to its interaction with the wood. In the small barrels Kallas- Lewis sourced in the Ozarks, two years in those little trea- sure chests makes gives the spirit a four to six-year flavor profile, he said.

The breathing oak takes in the alcohol and issues its tanning, an exchange aided by the rise in temperature during the day and a drop at night. The more intense tem- perature swings in an eastof the-mountains town like Waitsburg mimic those in Kentucky, one of the cradles of American whisky, Kallas- Lewis said.

This is one of the reasons why he might eventually use a portion of the Loundagin property, possibly the lot across from the alley, to age his whiskey.

Kallas-Lewis is com- mitted to drawing on local resources in other ways, though perhaps not as close as his Main Street property.

For spirits, he has dubbed "grain-to-glass" on the bottle labels, the Seattle artisan entrepreneur likes to use wheat, rye and corn from the Wil- liams Brothers organic farm east of Walla Walla. The bar- ley comes from Vancouver, Wash., while some of the fla- vor ingredients, like the mild and spicy peppers for the vodka, come from Yakima. Everything but the barley is organic "for the planet," as he put it.

Kallas-Lewis commit- ment to organic and to the personal care he puts into every bottle that goes out Oola's doors typifies his ap- proach to life, German said.

"Everything he does has a standard of very high qual- ity," Kallas-Lewis' Waitsburg friend said. "Whatever he does, he raises the bar on it."

To Kallas-Lewis, the art of making spirits is first and foremost "a creative act," German said. "It isn't just something in a bottle or something behind a label."

Danny Cole, owner of the Waitsburg Grocery Store who now carries Oola's bourbon, vodka and gin, was equally impressed by Kallas- Lewis attention to detail.

"Every bottle has a batch number and a case number scratched into the glass on the bottle," Cole said. "That's impressive."

And Dave Kearns, distill- ery specialist for Jim Beam in Seattle who has tasted hundreds of whiskeys in his life, said what's actually in the bottle is even more im- pressive.

"For a micro distillery just emerging, this is the best (whiskey) in the state," he said. "It doesn't taste young. It tastes like it's aged well."

The Market

Being only the second craft distillery to open in Seattle this decade, and still one of only a dozen in the state, Oola has a head start on the 60 small distilleries still wait- ing to be licensed.

His production facility, which is co-located with Lingo Dance, Niehoff's dance studio, and Restaurant Zoe amidst Capitol Hill's college- like apartment buildings and hip retail stores, generates 3,000 bottles of spirits a month, a number Kallas- Lewis hopes will grow to 5,000 next year.

At the same time, he doesn't want to grow beyond his ability to give every one of those bottles his personal touch. And of all six products Oola puts out, Waitsburg Bourbon "is the most fun," he said. "It's magic in a bottle."

Cole, who received the first Oola products for his new liquor section recently, said last week he had already sold one bottle of bourbon and one bottle of the gin.

In price and presentation, Oola's bottles hold their own. The young company has two local competitors on the shelf: Dry Fly, which sells its Washington Wheat Whiskey for $55.85 (750 ml), including all taxes, compared to Oola's $40.70. Hood River Distillers sells its Pendleton Blended Canadian Whisky for $37.52. But it should be noted Oola's Waitsburg label is the only bourbon among the three.

Dry Fly's Washington Wheat vodka sells for $34.94, compared to Oola's Grain-to- Glass vodka at $33.82. Only Kallas-Lewis' gin is a bit pricier at $37.27, compared to Dry Fly's at $34.94.

"The price (of Oola spirits) is competitive," Cole said.

But Waitsburg's grocery store owner isn't just pleased with the price. Like German, he likes the idea of the Waits- burg name and connection.

"It's a pretty bold maneu- ver," he said. "I think it's cool."

German likens the promise of a Waitsburg brand and what it could mean for the town's visibility to the name the little Touchet Valley town had in the 1900s when it was known from San Francisco to Chicago for its flour mill.

"Waitsburg Bourbon cel- ebrates the ambiance of the town, which is known for its Americana," he said.

To Kallas-Lewis, who developed his concept for a distillery while in Waitsburg, the label honors something personal.

"I'm a newcomer to the whiskey-making tradition," he said. "I feel I'm bringing in new blood while re- specting an old tradition and what's already there. It's the same that's happening in Waitsburg."