In 2013, everything changed for distilling in British Columbia, Canada. New legislation was passed that waived provincial tax on alcohol for producers who made less than 50,000 liters per year, a size bracket designated “craft.” The new bill stipulated that taxation would then increase proportionally with production volume up to 100,000 liters, the point at which a producer is designated “commercial.” The result was an explosion of new microdistilleries. Only four distilleries were in operation before the legislation change. Twenty-six craft distilleries began operations in March 2013 alone. Today, there are 78 distilleries across the province.
To receive the tax benefits of the craft category, however, there is another important requirement — one that ended up shaping the British Columbian whisky landscape in new and unforeseen ways. Unlike other Canadian provinces and many other places worldwide, British Columbia’s craft laws require 100% of the grain used in spirit production to be grown and processed in the province and fermented and distilled onsite at the distillery. No outside alcohol can be used in any quantity.
The original motivation of the legislation changes was to support British Columbia farmers, but the inflexibility of the rules has proved challenging for distillers. An allowance for a smaller percentage of neutral spirit could help cut gin costs while supporting craft whisky production, especially needed at a time when the cost of British Columbia malt has gone from CA$1,100/ton to CA$1,800/ton post-pandemic, a staggering 60 percent increase. Furthermore, with only a few farms that can supply grain for the whole province, the entire industry is vulnerable to fire or other catastrophes. However, arguably the most significant consequence of this law is its indirect limitation on the kind of whisky a British Columbian craft distillery can make.
British Columbia is a coastal province and is not known for its grain output. While British Columbia does grow rye, barley, and wheat, its prairie neighbors produce most of the grain in Canada. They grow corn, but almost no #2 yellow dent corn, the variety used most frequently for distilling. The malted barley selection is very thin. At Gambrinus, the big malting company in Armstrong, British Columbia, you have one local choice: BC Pale Malt. Until the recent addition of Field Five Farm and Canadian Malting Group, Gambrinus was the only malting company, but the province remains mostly a landscape of BC Pale Malt, with no access to specialty malts that comply with the craft regulations.
For one craft distillery in East Vancouver, that lack of options led them to a breakthrough in production design and to a new line of complex, unique whiskies. Odd Society Spirits was one of the new crop of distilleries that opened in 2013, known for their experimental approach and quality. Master Distiller Joel McNichol and Owner-Operator Gordon Glanz (this author’s father) wanted to make a peated whisky, but could not figure out how to do it without breaking the law. There was no peated malt available to them, and smoking a barrel with peat did not produce a peaty whisky to their satisfaction.
“Other than changing the yeast, there’s not a lot of ways to get entirely different whisky out of the malt that we’re exclusively required to use,” explains McNichol.
McNichol and Glanz thought about peated whisky as they continued to make their Wallflower Gin. To make Wallflower, they use a custom-made Holstein still which has an external gin basket. Some botanicals are macerated, while the more delicate botanicals are vapor extracted, since some botanicals do well in the boil and others do not. There is a mechanical valve which can stop the vapor from moving through the gin basket. The distillers have total control of how long the botanicals are vaporized, since they use an external gin basket with a valve rather than an internal gin basket. It just so happens that Odd Society’s gin still is also its whisky still. After several runs of gin, the workers do a big cleaning in between and then make whisky for a number of runs. One day Glanz and McNichol were making gin, and a light bulb went on.
Glanz describes the pivotal moment: “We thought, we can’t get peated malt in BC so we can’t make peated whisky. But we were standing in front of the stills, and Joel said, ‘What if we put the peated malt in the external gin basket, and use that malt the same way we do lemons?’ Lemons don’t grow in BC and they’re allowed.”
McNichol’s idea was visionary. The distillers ordered a bag of peated malt from Scotland, placed the peated malt in the external gin basket, and ran the hearts of the BC Pale Malt new-make whisky through the peated malt. The new-make whisky was intensely peaty, and after aging the whisky in oak casks they found the flavor to be indistinguishable from a peated whisky made the traditional way. At a later point, whisky expert, friend, and Master Blender Dhavall Gandhi paid a visit to Odd Society. He passed his expert nose over one of the experimental peat variations, unaware of the alternate process used to make it, and failed to note any peculiarities.
Glanz noted additional benefits to this technique, such as how cost-effective and efficient it was. Only one 25kg bag of peated malt was needed for the still run. If they were mashing peated malt, depending on the size of the mash, around 10 bags of malt would be needed. With this new method a similar amount of flavor could be extracted from a single bag. After a peat mash, it would be necessary to undertake an extensive cleaning for every piece of machinery to remove the residual peat flavors before distilling another product. In this system, only the gin basket needed to be cleaned, a much easier task. Glanz confirmed that because of these benefits, even if they were finally able to get British Columbia peated malt, they would continue this system, since even on a commercial scale it saves money.
Now, it begs the question, is there a sacrifice in terms of flavor? Glanz and McNichol don’t think so. “There are some purists who say, that’s not real peated whisky, but we see it differently. We’re taking peated malt and we’re introducing it at the end of the distillation process. Traditional Scottish distillers add their malt in at the very beginning. We add our malt to the basket at the very end. We’re introducing the same grain at a different stage of the process, but we’re still introducing the peated flavor compounds to the spirit during distillation before it is barreled,” says Glanz.
Odd Society Spirits has applied this technique to produce a line of experimental limited-run whiskies called Peat & Smoke. They use peated malt from different regions, including a heavily peated malt from Baird’s Malt in Scotland, a peated malt from Skagit Valley in Washington State, and a local peat from Burns Bog in Delta. Burns Bog is particularly nostalgic since every kid who has grown up in the Vancouver region would have taken a field trip at least once to Burns Bog, the largest peat bog and undeveloped urban landmass on the West Coast of the Americas. Unfortunately, Odd Society’s partner in this project, Skagit Valley Malting in Washington State, has since gone out of business. Glanz was getting ready to send Skagit Valley Malting some Alberta peat to use in another small batch of peated malt when he received news that they had closed down permanently. “We could ask them anything and they would do it,” he reminisces.
After playing with peat, Odd Society has applied this technique to other malts. McNichol and Glanz took inspiration from the famous smoky German style of beer called rauchbier, which is made from malt smoked with beech wood. Excited by the possibilities of wood as an alternative to peat, Odd Society launched a new whisky series called Smoke & Oak which uses the same process of vapor extraction, but instead of peat the malt is smoked with different woods. Beech wood smoked malt flavored the first whisky of the series. Odd Society has since released three small-batch whiskies using malt smoked with endemic West Coast wood: garryana oak, bigleaf maple and arbutus. No smoke is equal; the essence of each wood is captured in the bottling. The distinctly different profiles range from the salinity, stone fruit, and subtle smoke of beech wood to the more acrid, campfire and spice notes of the garryana, to the soft and sweet bigleaf maple. The series is an illustration of the infinite possibilities that arise when combining the traditional techniques of old world whisky with new world innovations.
The era of whisky making we’re in today is one of creativity and change. Every whisky tells a story of place and the people who make it. When drinking craft, the liquor in your glass is the result of happy coincidences of history and terroir, limitation and innovation.
