There’s more to local booze than just wine and beer. Micro-distilleries are costly and highly regulated, but where there’s a will and a still, or a really big rice steamer, there’s a way.
Forty Creek Whisky
John Hall walked past the Hiram Walker distillery on his way to school, dreaming they would hire him to make whisky. Never happened. So he became a winemaker, eventually establishing Kittling Ridge in Niagara, which is also home to his Forty Creek Distillery.
In 1992, while the rest of the Canadian whisky business was pursuing the bigger-is-better approach, Hall was thinking small. Forty Creek’s output is a fraction of the average mega-distillery’s, and its approach to whisky-making anticipated current artisanal and local concerns regarding food and drink.
Forty Creek uses a pot still like those used to make Scotland’s revered single malts. The rye, corn and barley are all grown in Ontario. All single-grain whiskies are aged separately in barrel and then blended and further aged in Forty Creek’s own sherry casks.
His craft-whisky-making has won Hall worldwide recognition from the whisky fraternity and resulted in remarkable, uncompromising tipples like the Forty Creek Barrel Select.
Forty Creek Barrel Select Whisky, 750 ml/$25.75, LCBO #550715
Still Waters Distillery
Regardless of how much Still Waters vodka I “sampled,” I had to remind myself that I was neither thinking nor seeing double as I conversed with proprietors Barry Stein and Barry Bernstein. Working in an extremely mundane suburban industrial mall, the two Barries do it all: fermenting, distilling, blending, bottling, marketing and sticking the corks in the bottles. Bernstein and Stein don’t put the DIY back in distillery, because then it would be spelled ddistiilleryy, but you get the idea.
Still Waters is on its way to making Canadian whisky, but since that takes three years from start to finish at the very minimum, they’re paying the bills by making vodka while the brown spirits Rip Van Winkle it up in barrel.
It’s their fascination with whisky that distinguishes their vodka from much of the competition. Still Waters is a single malt vodka using 100 per cent malted Canadian barley. That, combined with some innovative approaches to distilling, yields a distinctive, long-finishing, grain-infused vodka. It will be out at the LCBO in May or June of this year but is available now at the distillery.
Still Waters Vodka, 750 ml/$34.95, 150 Bradwick, unit 26, Concord
Ontario Spring Water Sake
Almost all sake we drink comes from the other side of the world, and to withstand lengthy, unrefrigerated shipping and warehousing, it must be double-pasteurized.
When successful sushi marketer Ken Valvur established his sake brewery in Toronto, he knew that proximity to his southern Ontario clientele would allow him to sell totally or partially unpasteurized sake. Another local advantage was proximity to Haliburton spring water, whose chemistry is very similar to some of Japan’s most sought-after sake water.
Ontario Spring’s sake is a revelation for Japanese tourists. Happening upon a sake brewery in the midst of the Distillery District’s Victorian industrial never-never land is like finding a Norwegian herring pickling plant in the middle of Cancún. What’s more, only 7 per cent of sake made in Japan is unpasteurized, so it’s doubly confounding.
But once they sidle up to the small tasting bar and try Ontario Spring’s extremely fresh, highly drinkable, fruit-forward sakes, the reviews are enthusiastic. Make up your own mind by visiting the brewery, or try its Nama Cho sake, available at most LCBO Vintages outlets.
Izumi Nama Cho Junmai Sake, 300 ml/$12.95, LCBO 260174
