Whisky Wisdom continues the exploration of interesting people in the whisky world by going out and talking with them, preferably over a dram of whiskey. Copperworks Distilling, located on the waterfront in downtown Seattle, was founded in 2008 by Jason Parker and Micah Nutt. The following interview was transcribed from video by Rebecca R. and lightly edited.
Interview with Jason Parker
Seattle, WA. September 17, 2018
Tell us about the genesis of Copperworks.
Jason: Micah was a really great home brewer and I really respected his abilities in brewing. We talked about opening a brewery together over the years and decided we didn’t want to get into brewing. The space was already really crowded. It became legal in 2008 to have a distillery in Washington State, which prompted us to pull the trigger on getting things started. At that time, we decided we wanted to apply brewing to distilling. We basically wanted to be brewers who were using really high-quality brewing techniques and turn that into distilling. And so that was kind of our genesis. This is what we have to offer: we are brewers, not traditional distillers, but we’re going use a lot of the traditional distilling elements, like our Scottish stills.
What makes Copperworks stand out in Seattle? Or the marketplace in general?
Jason: One of the things I really enjoyed in the brewing community was that it was very supportive. We had the opportunity eight years ago to form the Washington Distillers Guild. So I joined. I volunteered my time and became one of the original board members and have been on the board ever since. That’s allowed us to help shape the conversation in Washington to be more collaborative than competition. We call it “co-op-ertition”.
There are a lot of things Copperworks wants to accomplish. One is being a green company. As much as possible, we want to have an environmental bottom line, not just a financial bottom line, and beyond even that, a social bottom line. We’re trying to work towards that triple bottom line.
We are now making whiskies from single farms and single grain varieties and single vintage malts. What’s particularly interesting is that we are working directly with farmers to keep them growing malt instead of other cover crops in the wintertime. We’re helping the small farmers survive by contracting with them in advance. We’re actually giving them a real living wage. We may pay three time more than the commodity market, but we’re getting really great and unusual products from them.
Co-Founders Jason Parker and Micah Nutt
Are you working with Washington farmers?
Jason: Yes, all throughout Washington State, both in the Palouse and the Skagit Valley. We work with the other distilleries too. We invite distillers to spend two or three days on the deck with us to learn our process of fermentation, distillation, and barrel aging. There’s no story that we don’t want to share because we feel that if the community becomes better distillers, then the entire ocean will rise and we’ll all be better off. If a few distillers are being secretive and somebody else can’t learn and they put bad product out, then it’s going to hurt us all. So we’re trying to be very open and transparent. We have a lot of people who have taken us up on our offer and spent several days with us. We don’t charge for that. We’ve had a lot of people come in and we help them fill out their tax forms and we help them do distillations and show them the bottling equipment. We’re trying to do that on a national front as well, via the American Craft Spirits Association and American Distilling Institute.
How does working with your white spirits (like vodka and gin) influence how you approach your whiskey?
Jason: It’s not just that we’re interested in the financial opportunity for clear spirits, although, obviously we are interested. I tell everyone this: we don’t make vodka to make vodka, we make vodka to make gin. But we’re very proud of the vodka! It’s iconoclastic, a lot of flavor, a lot of aroma. That is what leads to the gin, a very high quality and award-winning gin. We focused on gin, not only because we love gin, but because gin is like cooking, where you can come up with a great recipe and then you just have to be able to reproduce that recipe, even though that’s not always easy.
Once we had great gin, our next question was how can we use the gin to learn about our whiskies? Well, the obvious thing we had to learn about was about barrels because no one comes from a brewing background with a deep knowledge of how barrels affect spirits. We started putting gin in a variety of barrels to learn about what happens. That lead us to investing in barrels for the whiskey, decisions we wouldn’t have been able to make before we knew what the barrels were capable of doing. We got some really great experience from putting gin in barrels.
Forgive us for moving on, as we’re more curious about the whiskey. It’s kind of a thing for us.
Jason: [Laughs] Oh, that’s fine.
Copperworks’ Scottish Stills
Share with us the story of your whiskey. We were able to taste your first batch a few years ago, which was a completely different animal than what’s in front of us now [batch 7].
Jason: As you can imagine, the first release of a whiskey is going to have two major issues. The first is the company has never distilled, fermented, brewed, or barrel-aged their product. Their first whiskey is going to be a learning curve. Secondly, the company has never blended barrels. So the two things that you need to make a really high quality spirit are things you don’t have at the first release. We were there too. Release number one and all of our subsequent whiskies have always been the best whiskey we can make from the inventory on hand. What we’re not trying to do is be consistent. We’re not trying to produce a whiskey that always tastes the same. Instead, we’re trying to produce the best whiskey we can make.
When we did our first distillations and blends, we made some tweaks pretty early on and had no idea what we were doing. We were just as surprised as anybody would be by the results. What we’ve been able to get now out of subsequent batches is a lot more experience and a lot more flavors to work with. We have at least two recipes now. The first time we only had the one, and now we have the five-malt and the pale malt. We only had one type of cask, which is a wonderful cask from Kelvin Cooperage. We’ve since upped the age of the stays from 18 to 24 months and lowered the char, though we’re still doing a long toast. Everything has a forty-minute toast. I guess the other thing is experimenting a little bit with proof. The first release was 106 proof, which is the highest we’ve done. We really like high proofs, but that might have been a little too high, though we’re generally in the triple digits.
Where do you dream of going from here into the future with this whiskey?
Jason: We’re going places with informed decisions. We do two-hour taste panels every Wednesday that allows us to really dive deep into the flavors and what each barrel contributes. We’re getting a lot of education internally that way so we know what is possible. It allows us to be better at picking the barrels to put together into the next release.
We are exploring different woods, different toasts, and different chars. We’re actually centering a little more on the flavors that we want. I think that for the next six years, we’ll be releasing whiskies that are incrementally better with each release without doing a consistent flagship whiskey.
The thing that I’m very excited about are the first-fill barrels we’re using now, brand-new charred American oak, never had anything in them before. We don’t believe that ex-bourbon barrels are very high quality. The fresh barrels we’re buying are, and when they’re empty we’re filling them with whiskey again. I’m super excited about those flavors, though I have no idea how long they will take to mature. Certainly a little bit longer than our ex-bourbon barrels and, maybe quite a bit longer, so they can actually get more oxidation, esterification, and development of mature flavors. My guess is Copperworks will get its peak when it has a combination of new barrels and first-fills – the Scots might call them second-fill – and is able to blend those two together into a release that will be really, really fun. So wait another five or six years before that starts coming out. Then we’ll really have a better answer.
All the images used in this interview were taken from the Copperworks social media pages and website. Be sure to check out Part 2 of this interview, coming soon!
