Serious spirits

It's been in the works so long, it almost doesn't seem real.

But you can smell it in the air of this La Vista warehouse: a bakery-meets-dairy perfume of yeast, hops and fermenting grain.

You can feel it in the hand-hammered copper stills: cool and invisibly rippled beneath your fingers.

And you can taste it, at least the part of it that's been mashed, fermented, heated, vaporized, cooled, captured, refined, filtered, cut and coaxed into bottles: a clear 80-proof alcohol that hits the tongue with a crystalline sweetness, yields to a gently crescendoing burn, finishes with peppery tingles and a silken whisper of citrus and quinine.

Now sold across Nebraska as Joss super premium vodka, it's the first tangible fruit of Sòlas Distillery, one of Nebraska's first microdistilleries since Prohibition.

Part of an artisanal spirits boom in America, it's the result of efforts led by Zac Triemert, a microbiologist who fell in love with beer-making nearly a decade ago, got a rare master's degree in distilling and wrote the 2007 Nebraska law that paved the way for the state's microdistilleries.

Today, the 35-year-old is bottling Nebraska spirits — and working to shatter vodka's reputation as an anonymous, flavorless beverage.

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“The first part of distilling is brewing,” Triemert says, stepping over the thin, legally-required line separating his beer company — Lucky Bucket Brewing — from Sòlas Distillery, where the malted barley for his first single-malt whiskey is fermenting in a giant steel vat.

And the first part of brewing is microbiology.

That's how a Minnesota-raised University of Wisconsin pre-med student ended up in the alcohol biz. Triemert worked as a fermentation microbiologist for Cargill in Blair after getting his microbiology and chemistry degrees, met the folks at Upstream Brewing Co. in Omaha and began brewing its beers in 2002.

Soon after, he started hatching plans for his own venture. At first, it was just going to be a separate beer label. But while reading a book about Scotch one morning, he had an epiphany: “Scotch whiskey is essentially beer that's aged.” Both start with a mashing together of grain and water and a fermentation involving added yeast.

He took a year-long sabbatical from Upstream in 2005 and 2006, studying with about a dozen others at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, the only place in the world he's aware of that offers master's degrees in distilling.

While there, he wrote a master's thesis on a unique distillation column — a tall copper tube — he believed would allow the production of ultra-pure or “super premium” spirits in small batches and began planning a distillery he could build on the backside of the Upstream brewpub near 170th and West Center Road.

When he got home, he began working on the Nebraska microdistillery legislation that the Legislature would adopt in 2007.

He ordered copper stills from Scotland and hoped to have the new distillery running sometime in 2008. But the stills took more than a year from order to delivery. And Triemert soon realized that the Legacy site lacked the necessary room and electrical capacity.

He and fellow Upstream brewer Jason Payne left Upstream in the fall of 2008 to get the Lucky Bucket beer label going and look for a new spot with room for a brewery and distillery. With Upstream president Brian Magee on board as a co-president, they began brewing Lucky Bucket beer at borrowed facilities at SchillingBridge Winery & Microbrewery in Pawnee City, Neb.

They released their first brew, a pre-Prohibition style lager, in January 2009. And they spent many hours last year driving to and from Pawnee City to keep pace with demand. They moved beer production to a 12,000-square-foot warehouse in LaVista in September and installed the distilling equipment in the fall.

Though Triemert had hoped Sòlas would be the first microdistillery in the state since Prohibition, Cooper's Chase Distillery near West Point, Neb., claims that title. It was the first to get federal and state licenses. And it was distributing vodka as early as November. Sòlas' first bottles of Joss vodka hit local stores and bars in December.

Triemert said he doesn't mind. He's just glad there are small distillers in Nebraska. And he's relieved to know the distilling column he designed for his master's thesis actually works. The tall copper tube contains 21 cooling plates and siphons at strategic spots.

“Vapor rises, goes through each plate and recondenses,” Triemert explains. “So you get lighter and lighter molecules that vaporize and recondense. At the top you get the lightest. Ethanol (the ethyl alcohol in vodka) is a very light molecule, but not the lightest. Things like methanol are lighter, so that's going to go all the way to top of the column. I'm pulling from the stream where the purest ethanol resides, avoiding things that are lighter and heavier than ethanol. That's a super-premium vodka. And nobody's done it on a small scale before.”

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The American Distilling Institute estimates the country has about 200 small or “craft” distilleries, a number that is growing by the dozens each year. The institute's 2009 directory lists at least one each in 41 states, including Iowa, which is home to the storied Templeton Rye.

(Templeton Rye Spirits began making its Prohibition-style rye whiskey at a new distillery in Templeton, Iowa, about two hours northeast of Council Bluffs, in 2005. The company says it is doing legally what Iowa farmers had been doing under the radar since the 1920s: producing small-batch rye whiskey of exceptional quality. The area's whiskey reportedly was favored by Al Capone and sold in speakeasies during Prohibition. )

The boom in small distilleries and craft spirits appears to be tied to growing interest in local economies and local foods.Perhaps not surprisingly, given the brewing-distilling connection, many of America's microdistilleries are clustered in states where small brewing companies have had success: Colorado, California, Oregon and New York.

“Craft distilling is where craft brewing was in 1980,” says Triemert. “We're very much at the beginning of the curve. I think in 10 years from now there are going to be a lot more craft distilleries in the state. The interest and love people have for making high-quality and interesting and flavorful things, it's from the same gene that caused people to brew craft beer. It's very easy to be passionate about. And (spirits) are a natural extension of microbrewing. If you brew beer, you have a lot of the equipment to get started.”

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Getting started is one thing. Finishing is another.

Though vodka can be filtered, blended with water and bottled right after distillation, the single-malt whiskey Sòlas distilled in January likely won't be ready for another two to four years. It needs to rest and age and breathe in oak barrels to acquire its ideal flavor. Triemert will have to keep checking to know when it's ready: “There's certainly science to it,” he says, “And there's art to it — and a little magic.”

And he'll have to keep hoping that there will be a market for it when it's time to bottle.

In the meantime, Sòlas is working to develop a rum (due out this fall) and a gin, dabbling in brandies made from local wines, and trying to get the word out about the vodka it hopes will establish its quality standard and pay the bills.

Triemert said he and his partners have invested about $2 million to get it going. And though they've begun the transition from volunteer help to paid staff, they're not yet profitable. They're as busy now trying to sell the vodka as make it.

They pitch Joss as a spirit that tastes of Nebraska because it starts with organically grown Nebraska wheat and ends with naturally filtered water they ship from the Sandhills. (Magee and Triemert say the water has unparalleled purity and mouthfeel.)

They call it a “craft spirit” and a “super premium vodka” because it's made in small batches (yielding about 200 cases or about 475 gallons at a time, far short of the 10,000-gallon-a-year maximum allowed under state law) with the distillation column Triemert designed to extract the purest ethanol.

Triemert is seemingly everywhere: monitoring the filtration of the latest vodka batch, serving up samples near the cheese case at Whole Foods on weekends, planning a vodka-paired dinner at a French restaurant later this month, leading tours of the distillery, and making sure he has enough bottles to supply retailers like HyVee and Patrick's Market, bars like the Crescent Moon and the Homy Inn, and restaurants like Jams and Le Voltaire.

He's forever fielding questions about the name, a good reminder on the busiest days of why they started down this path.

“Joss means luck in Japanese,” Triemert said. “Sòlas is Scottish for happiness or joy. That's what we're really after.”

Contact the writer:

444-1069, nichole.aksamit@owh.com

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Animated graphic: Click through to see how whiskey is made

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Video: Watch as Zac Triemert makes the first batch of whiskey at Sòlas Distillery

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