Cocktails Distilled
Cocktails Distilled
Understanding Heritage Grains With Laws Whiskey House
With Laws recently winning the title of 'World's Best Small batch Bourbon', we thought it was a good time to talk with founder, Al Laws, to talk about the very niche yet thriving world of heritage grain whiskey.
While heritage grain may sound high brow, for distillers like Laws, who started Laws Whiskey House in Colorado more than a decade ago, heritage is all about unique flavour profiles.
As Laws prepares to start the year with a series of new releases, we talk to him about grains, small-scale distilling and the faith required in every step of the whiskey-making process.
So whether you're a whiskey aficionado or a curious novice, you'll be enticed by the Colorado terroir at the heart of Laws Whisky House.
Tiff Christie (00:02.138)
Welcome back to Cocktails Distilled. Today we are looking at the very niche yet thriving world of heritage grain whisky.
While heritage grain may sound high brow, yet for distillers like Al Laws, who started Laws Whiskey House in Colorado more than a decade ago, heritage is all about flavour and giving the liquid the respect to be done right.
As Laws prepare to start the year with a series of new releases, we talk to him about grains, small-scale distilling, and the faith required in every step of the whiskey-making process.
Thank you for joining us, Al.
Alan Laws (00:43.31)
Thanks for having me.
Tiff Christie (00:46.362)
Now there's quite a movement towards heritage grains. What impact do you think this is having on the whiskey industry?
Alan Laws (00:55.626)
Well, I think it's like anything else is like as you look at your industry and as you look at your products and you're like, well, how do you make them better? How do you make them richer? What were they originally? There's a lot of kind of nostalgia in whiskey for sure. And it's kind of like, well, what was it back when they started all this 100 years ago for us? Because we're new, it was like, well, this is how we differentiate ourselves. And we're looking for differentiated flavours.
We're not looking for the cheapest commodity input. We're looking for something that brings extra stuff to the table, which then we believe or we know provides a much richer and different whiskey experience.
Tiff Christie (01:43.766)
Now for you, which came first, your interest in whiskey or your interest in heritage grains?
Alan Laws (02:07.754)
Definitely my interest in whiskey. That's been going on for me since I was like 16. I grew up in Canada, so it's not so, a little more liberal than the United States and liquor laws, but like, yes. I enjoyed American whiskey when I was a lot younger, and whiskey is really where I fall. In fact, I would say to where we are today, making it, if you don't love what you make, you shouldn't be making it.
Whether that's vodka or anything else. Whiskey, I think it's the most evolved spirit. So to me, it became something of a, well, I want to do it. So there's a lot of things to start out with when you are looking at making the whiskey and there's ways to do that right and to stay true to your techniques, and to use traditional styles. And then following that, it was like, well, we wanted to be more local to start because I believe the whiskey space in general is very in the United States is going to develop a lot like it is in Scotland where you have space side islands, highlands, lowlands where there's distinctive styles that come from there. So, I think the United States is moving toward that, mostly driven by the by the craft industry.
When it came down to us looking for differentiated flavours, and then also we wanted to be local, and we were looking at things like, well, hey, let's make let's make it from grains and all the inputs that come from, you know, a radius around us. And we tried the beginning and no one would sell us grain. This is before the whiskey movement had kind of blown up here and started to, you know, be everywhere and anywhere. And like, literally, there were small craft industries that supply industries like us yet. So we had to fight our way through that and our first step was to find, almost by chance, on a weekend when we ran out of wheat malt that we had used a small amount in our four-grain recipe and I didn't need to go get that because this is a weekend and I can work on the weekend, I got a job the rest of the week. So we went to a homebrew store, if you can believe that, and found wheat malt.
Wow, this is really interesting. It's like, why, what is this? And the guy's, oh, this is a locally produced groan and then malted wheat. And it's in a malt form here and, you know, it's a nondescript bag with a stamp on it. Okay, I'm gonna try that. It lit the whole distillery up in far, there's aromas and smells, and that was just like 25 pounds in a, like a 900 pound recipe. And we're like, this is where we have to go immediately.
Quick call to that producer and do you have rye? Do you have barley? Do you have corn? And they didn't have corn, but they had all the rest of those things in both raw and in malted varieties. So when they malted it all on the farm, and so they were doing it in very small batches, they were doing it almost to order. So that meant it was super, super fresh. And you're gonna find, I think in the future, you're gonna hear more and more about fresh malts and fresh grains in the process of making whiskey and what that does. It brings up huge amounts of aromatics that will die off sitting in a silo for eight, 10, or 24 months sometimes. So to us, it was like, hey, this was the revolution. This is what we wanted to do from the beginning. And we were able to do that with all the small grains, all the flavour grains. And it only took about like two years after that to where you know, corn was available in that way. So the whiskey sister supply, or two sisters that I met at an event, and they're like, well, why don't you buy our corn? I'm like, well, I don't know who, no one would sell me corn. So I'm buying it from this place in the Midwest. And they're like, oh no, we have corn. We can do this for you and this for you. And we're in Burlington, we're three hours away. We're like, Mike sold, bring it. We made, I don't know, 20 barrels worth of it, let it go for like a year and a half before we totally committed to it and it was better. Again, better because it was cleaner, better because it was fresher. And again, corn doesn't bring a ton of flavour; I would say; that's my opinion. Some people would disagree with me. I think just starch, so it brings starch to the table and then the freshness of that makes a difference. So then we were rolling with 100% Colorado-grown grain, all the water that we use, we use heirloom, I'm sorry.
We're using heirloom varietals of grains. And we're using El Dorado mineral water out of the ground from another part of Colorado to cut it to barrel string. But all these things matter. Started with varietal, and then after varietal, there's more to it. And this is not like, cause I knew this, this is because I learned this. And having great partners from the farms allowed us to grow with them and in their knowledge they brought to the table and they continued to try to raise the bar on themselves. And so we end up with, well, it isn't just the varietal, it's the soil that it's grown in, it's the location, it's true terroir. And there's nothing else that tastes like our rye. This is the rye that's, SLV, San Luis Valley rye is only grown in that valley. And for, you know, developed in that valley 100 years, 7,500 years ago.
And it brings to bear a lot of flavours that come out of the ground. So you think, oh, that's dirt. No, no, no. This is like this earthy kind of notes, though. And instead of like cracked pepper, you know, pepperiness in most rye, it's got this cool vegetative Serrano like Midwest kind of peppery notes. So all these things matter to us and they've mattered more and more as we've grown up here over the last 12 years continue to address these things and look at the year-to-year variances and take wet tests on the grain and see what's high in protein this year what that is going to mean to flavour. All these things are very interesting to us and we have great partners that work with us on this.
Tiff Christie (08:33.678)
Now, it seems as if you came across your growers almost accidentally, but are you working with them now to explore different grains, or are you just working with the grains that they were already, the heritage grains that were already planting?
Alan Laws (08:53.766)
No, we definitely use different grades. We experimented most on the barley side. So I think the right garlic start. And then we used some Scottish green. It was more, it was like it was, I think it was more six-row. And, you know, they plant a part of the field now. We took all that, made whiskey with it. Different malting techniques on the rye side for the rye malt, because we make 100% rye. So anything that can vary there. And again, year to year, there are differences, but we definitely work with them on this on malts that we want to have modified. So what that means to the average person, probably nothing, but what it means is that you can buy all kinds of different barley malt, right, like chocolate malt, Abbey, like all these things that they're slightly modified in their roasting, and you can get different flavours out of it. It's very important for beer because those flavours will be there in the beer in the end, whereas when you're distilling it, some of the stuff doesn't carry through the distillation, others do. And often they change. So to work with them, we may use a Caramel 60 malt sometimes in barley, and their Caramel 60 is probably more like Caramel 120 if you looked at a competitive set one, but they customized and made it for us. So like, well, we want more of this, we want more of this, and they can tweak that, and they will. And again, we're not talking about, you know, 20 tons of something every time they make something, right? So they're small enough to be adaptable to small breweries who care about this and to small breweries like ourselves that definitely care about this stuff. Working with them on both, you know, varietal selection and, then again, modification of malts or combinations is really fun. And then they're very smart at it, and they, you know, they look at everything very closely, and they're doing a study on fresh malt with Colorado State University right now, which should come up this summer.
Tiff Christie (10:57.438)
Now for somebody who is maybe just getting into their whiskeys and has never experienced a heritage grain whisky before, how will they find the flavour different from a typical whisky that they might be used to drinking?
Alan Laws (11:16.586)
Well, I think if you're starting out making it, you should make both and then see the difference. It'll show up immediately in the clear spirit before it goes into the barrel. And then just run five or six barrels, test barrels of each and see how it develops. Our wheat varietal we use is a centennial white wheat. So it's a spring wheat. It's grown, it was developed for Colorado, centennial state, and it provides some of the most interesting parts of all of our whiskeys. So...
And our wheat whiskey is 100%. So it has these huge orange notes that are unmistakable. A lot of cool flour, honey flower, like honeysuckle, kind of, you know, aerobatics to it. This is crazy. And it's there at the beginning, and the wood, the barrels definitely accentuate it. To a point after six, or seven years, it tastes like a cocktail already. So like those are, see, but in order to do that, you gotta kind of wade into it. And we keep, you know, we've been a 60, 20, 10, four-grain recipe with, you know, 60% corn, 20% wheat, 10 barley, 10 malts for quite a while. But we still make other things that tweak that and try to see what would take over. At the beginning we had the rye is so strong, it takes over even at 10%.
So we had to make production adjustments to denature it a little bit. So we didn't have it take over the wheat and the, you know, the nice oranges and doughiness, cinnamon bun, if you will, things that come from the wheat. And then the nuttiness that comes from the barley, we didn't want that to take it over.
So we made some adjustments there, but we keep trying to like, well, what's the right combination? We like what we make, but we always wanna tweak something, and but again, not everything, just one thing and see what we can end up with, we'll see what it ends up being. And again, year to year, we have differences in those major grains, which are very different every year. Rye, in particular, can just be wildly different, depending if it was too wet in the spring, it could be super large in size and have too much protein, which means we have to change some processes in order to take down some of that, but the flavours are there and the flavours,
So we talked about terroir and varietal, but there's also something that the TTB isn't recognized really yet is like vintage. So what year was it made and that? They don't allow you to put that on the label, but it's there. So we don't cross-marry grain years in our single-grain whiskeys. So then we have that, we have that little bit of extra provenance that we can talk to. It means something to us.
Tiff Christie (14:03.518)
Do you distill it in a different way, a heritage grain from a non-heritage grain? Is there a lot of balancing and...
Alan Laws (14:16.247)
We have not. We still stick to, especially on mash, we stick to a very specific grist of the grain. So that, you know, there's a certain amount of flour in it, there's a certain amount of like this, x size and y size and, excuse me, to get the most out of the actual out of the actual kernel. And then we have and we continue to
It's not as important as it was in the beginning for us. We found that we can do this without being so specific, but we used to use an inverted step infusion mash, which is the inverse for beer, where you would start cold and then add certain grains and bring it up. So here, we will want it to basically add the grains to the cook at the point where they would like to liquefy properly, gelatinize properly, and basically maximize their flavour.
So the main thing I've already described is that the rye was taking over. So we had to move that up and cook it with the corn at a higher temp. And then the rest we still added those 153 and then 148. We add these things at the temperatures to maximize those flavours. We don't wanna get rid of them. We wanna accentuate them and bring them forward and temperatures matter the most.
Tiff Christie (15:44.91)
Now, the other thing that we should mention is that you bottle in bond. For anyone who doesn't understand that term, do you want to describe what it means?
Alan Laws (15:50.562)
So we, from the beginning, I'm a whiskey geek, so bottle and bond has meant a lot to me because it means something in the process and it means you've taken a certain amount of care and it also means that you actually made the whiskey, which in the world we're in with so much of its source, we wanted to plant that flag and say, we made this, we're following all the strictest standards for whiskey making in the world. And those standards stem from the Bottle and Bond Act of 1897 here in the United States.
And the funny part of this is that was the very first consumer production law in American history. They went after the whiskey first.
Tiff Christie (16:37.222)
didn't know it was the first. That's interesting.
Alan Laws (16:40.33)
Yeah, so and it was because during that time, federal government tax revenues were half based on whiskey. So that was where they're getting the revenue. So then there was, you know, unsavoury types making or taking clear, I don't even know, in bad spirit and then putting prune juice and, you know, tobacco spit and everything in it to colour it and then sell it. So the consumer was getting, they didn't know what they were getting. So the Bottle and Bond Act brought in a standard that said, hey, if it's bottle and bond, it means it was in a federally regulated rick house, and it followed a whole bunch of standards so that all these unsavoury things wouldn't happen to it. So the whiskey today, like the Bottle and Bond Act, doesn't really exist as something they enforce today, but it still exists on the books, and it's used by enough companies, and it's increasingly being brought back. Again, I think some of this nostalgia, but it's also because I think that the craft movement has looked at this and said, well, this is a way to say and show that we're following these standards. And these standards are basically, you have to make the whiskey within a six month period. And those two periods are January to June or July to December. All the whiskey that goes into that batch, and I think this is a batch thing, more than a single barrel, some people do single barrel, bottle and bond should be a batch. So all the whiskey has to come from those six months.
When you're small like us, that's tough cause you may not have made it because you're not making it every day. You're making a month and a half of bourbon, then you're making rye. And so what you have to pick from is different. So you have to be pretty dialled in on what you make to make sure you have a uniform consistency. And the weight that goes in the barrel matters. In Kentucky, they used to talk about seasons or how many years its age essentially is in how many summer seasons it's all.
So the stuff in the June, to the June ending six months goes into a period of much warmer temperatures and they get different things out of the barrel at the beginning than something that went in and then December ending quarter or half. So what matters the most. It has to be made by a single distillery during that period. It has to follow all the straight whiskey standards and go into a new chart oak and come off the still below 160 and be in the barrel below 120. All those things still apply.
And then it has to sit in a bonded federal warehouse, which if you're making this, you have one of those. Back then they had a revenue guy with a gun and keys to the place and you couldn't get anything out of there because it was protected. Today, you're definitely, well, you can be audited, so you better follow all the rules. And then it has to sit in that warehouse for four years minimum.
Our stuff we started for now, we like the seven to eight the best. Some people like our six stuff, but we make most of the stuff in that seven to eight range. And then has to be put into glass or bottled at a hundred proof. So those are the rules that go around. And I think the hardest part is, you know, has to be made by single to silvery. And then, you know, even in Kentucky, when you have many, many different federally bonded Rick houses, it becomes difficult because all your Rick houses have different DSPs. So it's even harder for a company, I think, unless they know exactly where it's coming from, because the warehouses matter as well and the DSP on them. So it's not easy, especially when you're small, you don't have a lot of barrels to pick from and you're trying to create this. So we're big behind it, again, because we got to plant the flag. And we believe it says something about what we do and how we make something.
Tiff Christie (20:35.11)
I'm curious as to how easy is it to get your warehouses bonded?
Alan Laws (20:45.954)
Well, we have areas within the warehouse. If we move the barrels across a, you know, doesn't even have to be painted a line, we technically need to pay tax on it again. So it needs to stay separate.
Tiff Christie (21:11.791)
So it can be within your warehouse, it doesn't need to be the whole warehouse.
Alan Laws (21:16.342)
Well, you have to identify the bonded area in your warehouse to get your DSP distilling permit. And to the extent you expanded a few years ago, we have another warehouse about 15 miles away, and we had to spend quite a bit of time for them to approve it under the same DSP. So typically, they want it within eight miles or something like that, but we showed that this is all the same thing. It's just the way the roads were, but it's not like they just go sign that and let you do it. You gotta, you know, we wrote 10 pages of describing, you know, traffic patterns and, you know, weather patterns and things that change, like, yeah. It seems like it, but they're trying to keep to a standard. And that's why American whiskey and Scottish whiskeys are, I think, better because there are standards. You don't know what you got when there aren't standards and it doesn't protect the consumer.
Tiff Christie (22:18.258)
Tell us a little bit about your new releases.
Alan Laws (22:26.91)
Sure, so we have a few things coming out, our seasonal releases. So we have a bonded seven-year-old wheat whiskey, a bonded San Luis Valley seven-year-old rye whiskey, and our bourbon, which will be the first one, our four-grain bourbon. This year, we like the seven-year-old barrels better than the eight. So we're gonna try something different and we're gonna lighten it up a little bit.
When we look at stuff, we try to look at what we have, how many we're gonna harvest, and then what do we want the flavour profile to be this year. Last year on the bourbon, we wanted it kind of bigger and heavier, and because we're in a mile-high area and we're right against the Rocky Mountains, we have a lot of barometric pressure scenes. We get a lot out of the wood right from the beginning.
So our whiskies, once they get above eight years old and stuff, start to be pretty heavy. So this year we wanted to go a little lighter and something that finishes with a little brighter, I'd call it like sour mash corn finish. So that's what we went with. It will be out in about six weeks, I think. It's in the tank now. And you know, it takes us three or four.
And then the rye whiskey this year, again, is from a different season, right? Sorry, it was from a different vintage, not something that the TDB recognizes, but so it's from a particular year and the grains were a little different that year.
It's a, I don't know, again, pretty light body. I think it has a little more mint to it than normal. So it's got like, that one where we like seven. I don't think we'll move it from seven. We have some 10 years that we've put out and it's big too. And I think we found something, kind of a sweet spot for how our ride develops. And then the weed comes a little bit later. It's usually.
We want to release it near the summer. We find that the wheat whiskey is a great summer whiskey because it tastes the best on ice. And I don't typically use ice in my whiskey. I will splash everything with some water, but the cold and then the melting of the ice with the wheat whiskey tames it. It's got a little cool like fire to it, like summer fire, like hot winds. And the orange comes out.
out, and you drop a little splash of cherry juice in it or just the cherry, and you get yourself a cocktail. And then the floral notes in it, it's an amazing summer whiskey. So that's what we, you know, that's the seasonal rollout for us. So the rye, it's great for every day, and it's mostly, you know, rye is mostly drunk in a cocktail. So we think it does have some great accompaniment to whatever you want to do in your cocktail, whether it's a Black Manhattan or whether you want to make something a little bit more like a boulevardier or something, we think that it has its components for that. Whereas bourbon, I would probably want to drink shake, but if I had a meerkat out of it, it would definitely be a whiskey sour. So that would be what I would make with it, with the egg and everything else.
Tiff Christie (26:07.246)
I imagine there is a fair amount of education that you need to give people, not just about botulin bond, which we've talked about, but also these heritage grains and the sort of flavours that they can impart. Do you find that that's a lot of what you're doing?
Alan Laws (26:29.866)
Yeah, we have a little like bottle shop tasting room right now. And that will be replaced in the next few months with a very. Architecturally designed very cool brand experience, if you will, with some education center and a little bit more broader on the tour side. And in that, in our tours, that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to describe. Well, how the company came about and what our steps were, but also to explain that what you're going through here is a flavour experience, that comes from something. It comes from a particular place in Colorado that grows grains, that then transmits those grains, and it comes in the form of brain, and then through the process in, again, at a mile high, ageing at a mile high, all these things contribute to the ultimate flavours you're gonna taste. And so we take them through that. We typically wanna start them with four grain, which is all cooked together, and that, and yet, in designing that whiskey, it was like, well,
When you have a sip of it, you want all four American mother grains in every sip. So bam, you want to taste the sweetness of the corn. Then you want to have like this penny metallic kind of bite, which is the rye. And then this, you know, doughy, uh, baking spice, fruity, apple, orange kind of notes. And then this nutty hazelnut, walnut kind of finish and all those you get in every sip of the four grain. So once you've done that, then we want to try single grain whiskeys.
so that you can go back and forth and say, wow, there it is, what you just said is there. I'm like, yeah, there is the rye bite. Wow, there's the orange from the wheat. And so watching people through that experience is fun to watch and see how people understand that these are real flavours. We're not just telling you, here's what the tasting notes are. We're not even telling you what those notes might translate into some connection in your cortex. We're just saying these flavours exist; they come from the grain.
Tiff Christie (28:28.57)
And I believe that your tasting room is going to somewhat resemble a church.
Alan Laws (28:38.474)
It has a huge Gothic arched window in it. Yeah, it has pews, which my dad, my stepfather and I are building. So it's, yeah, it's have this cool experience of going through Whiskey Church. And you go through a tour, come back into a nice like tasting area, we'll go through two or three samples and then a full cocktail bar on the second floor allowing for our mix all just to take you through different experiences with it essentially. Plus, we made a selection of vintage whiskey, allowing you to go, well, what did you make back in 2016? I'm like, oh, well, here, some of that. We've held some back so that we have stuff that allows people to go, you know, what has changed? We did a really interesting thing about a year ago for some folks where we said, okay, well, why don't you test a vertical of our four grain from batch one all the way through to batch like 27? And we go one, seven, 13, 27, like here it is. We were a little nervous at first, oh my God, what if we didn't make it really nice at the beginning? But it all turned out well. Like it was like, hey, they're all the key elements of what makes a Laws bourbon or even a Laws whiskey. We have very distinctive signature notes, like black tea, maybe orange, orange pico black tea, and these fruity notes are all in every one of ourevery one of our whiskies, which we believe that's, you know, might be somewhat attributed to yeast, but it's mostly attributed to where the grains come from and the ground they're growing.
Tiff Christie (30:16.73)
How do you want somebody to approach your liquids?
Alan Laws (30:26.094)
Um, well, I think that on the bourbon side, I have, my view of this is that most people who like American whiskey know what bourbon tastes like, and they immediately assume everything should taste exactly like what it comes from, uh, what comes from Kentucky, which is awesome. I drink that all the time as well, but bourbon can be made anywhere in America.
And I really, like I said, getting believe in this regional contribution and different techniques and using what's local. And so I think that the number one thing we try to get through people on bourbon is that this may not taste like Kentucky bourbon whiskey to you. And we like our flagship in that kind of four year range because we wanna keep the green and th
e fruity notes and we don't want it to be overpowered by the barrel. Some folks who like bourbon like big wood taste. I personally am less excited about that. I want to taste the grains. We're about the grains. So we want to educate people on like, this is what you're going to taste. It is definitely tastes like bourbon, but it's going to have like a drier finish. It's not going to be as sweet right up. That's because it's only got 60% corn, but it's also light enough bodied where if you're not an expert or you deem yourself a neophyte you're gonna like it enough because it's very approachable.
It's like Maker's Mark, Maker's Mark's the most approachable bourbon there is. It's awesome. And people are like, oh well, but hold on. That's what it's supposed to be. It's a weeded bourbon, it's well made. That's what ours is too.
So it's easy to drink or really approachable at the front end. And then at the back end, if you let it sit on your paddle longer by the third sip, you start to get some of the complexity which our goalposts for developing it was Four Roses and Maker's Mark.
And so those things kind of like play together and you go, now you can sort of see these sort of things. And as you get into our bonded whiskies, you're gonna get more, like way more barrel influence. So they become closer to what deck's base expectations of Kentucky might be. But like we make it different. Everything we make is on a pot still, double pots distilled. We're not making it on a column still. And column stills are great whiskey. We're we like the pot still because it concentrates, you know, we're about flavour concentrates those flavours dumber that's Yeah, well, yeah, that's some of its words comes from pot steel the Irish whiskey is way better than a coffee still Columns still like way better. Absolutely red breast way better
Tiff Christie (32:49.438)
If people want more information about Laws, they can, of course, go to the website, which is laws or connect with the brand via your socials.
Alan Laws (33:20.714)
Yes, that's, yeah, I'm not a social media person, but we do a very good job with social, I've been told. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of information you can get a vibe for what our culture is, and then come visit us.
Tiff Christie (34:33.902)
Anyway, Al,thank you so much for your time.
Alan Laws (34:36.65)
Thank you, Tiff. This has been great. I appreciate the questions and the interest and especially the interest in the heirloom variety grains and flavours and differentiation of flavours,