Juniper harvest with forager Rob Miller in Eastern Oregon. From left to right: Christian Krogstad,
Rob Miller, Anna Mantheakis. Photograph by Summer Luu.

The first words out of our mouths were, “What happened?”

The recipe was fresh, real, and award-winning. The still was a drop-dead beauty of artisanal design that pumps out gin to great reviews. But something was off during that first run of Four Corners on the new still. As distillers, we smelled it and we just sensed it. We thought it might sort itself out after resting a couple days. When we tasted it again, we looked at each other and said, “What are we going to do now?”

The Four Corners Gin was not developed on the bodacious Freeland Kothe still where we now make it. It was crafted, berry by leaf, on a simmering glass lab still, then refined on an old keg still with a hissing condenser, and finally scaled up for production on an all-stainless 400-gallon pot still. That’s right: About the simplest still imaginable is what delivered the firstborn of a gin that just won Best New Spirit at ADI 2024.

But bigger wheels are always turning around us. The stainless pot was needed for other uses, and we had to change facilities after our R&D phase. That’s how we came before the copper throne of the still known as Hellbitch. Named for the untameable mare of the Lonesome Dove series, Hellbitch hits home runs with Freeland’s variety of terroir-driven gins and their spicy, layered rye whiskey. We trusted her to deliver. But every distiller knows: It’s not the same when the recipe is run through a different still.

Thin. Hollow. Something major and definitive had been torn from the heart of our gin. That sweet citrus and floral melody that weaves through a wild botanical landscape? It was gone. Square one has a welcome mat saying, “You thought it would be easy, didn’t you?” And that’s where we found ourselves. Square one.

The Origins of Four Corners Gin

Distilling Four Corners in its infancy was like collecting leaves and flowers on a 3,000-mile road trip across the continental United States. I started with about three dozen wild plants from all over North America, selected for consideration by Elizabeth McElligott, an herbalist who used to shake up botanical drinks behind the bar. I distilled each one in the lab, tinkering with maceration proof and cut point. My three-ring binder grew heavy with sensory notes. I unearthed herbal and forest floor base notes in late distillation. I unveiled floral and citrus high notes in the elevated steeping proofs. I distilled and collected until our blending table was teeming with aromas that would make retired members of the Parks Service sigh with nostalgia.

I met with McElligott and Christian Krogstad, notable distiller of Aviation and project manager of this wild journey, to mingle flavors with little droppers until we had promising recipes. Krogstad is the man who brought me into this project, and when we blend together, we are like two characters in a buddy cop movie. I’m the one consulting my mental encyclopedia of technical information as I methodically measure out dropperfuls of distillate, and he’s the cowboy breaking the speed limit as he throws blends together. McElligott gave us an herbalist’s insight into the lives of plants and picked out new subtleties with her experienced nose. Together, we wandered American landscapes in search of those indescribable scents that carry the soul of the wild: the forest after the rain, the high desert on a dewy morning, the prairie in summertime. I wrote down our recipe ideas, scaled them, blended, and tinkered again. And again. Until we had our winner. It’s not easy to go back to the drawing board after putting in that much work.

But the more we know about our product, the closer we are to the solution when a problem like this pops up. We began by consulting the library of distillates I had amassed. Gathered around the blending table with little droppers, we added back the distilled essence of each botanical one at a time to visualize what exactly was missing. “The cascara sagrada,” mused Krogstad. “It gives us that sweetness.” “The yerba santa and American juniper,” I noted. “They give us floral and citrus.” We steeped the juniper longer. We added a little extra of this and that. But we could only get away with so much of that before we pushed the limits of the recipe. It came down to the physical features that distinguish Hellbitch from our former still.

Bells and Whistles

With a variety of accessories, Hellbitch is a dressage champion next to our old one-trick pony. But the cooling system has a limited capacity for heat absorption, requiring that we run the distillation slower. This, combined with all the extra reflux in the onion head, drew out a more rectified distillation and left our sweet notes behind in the tails. Furthermore, every square inch of the pot’s interior is copper. We developed the recipe on an all-stainless still. Copper doesn’t eliminate whole ingredients from the spirit. It reacts with specific aromatics. Adding more can help a little, but try too hard to restore missing flavors by throwing in more of an ingredient and the other aromatics hidden within the same ingredient — the ones unaffected by copper — will shoot up higher than they were before. Then everything gets thrown out of whack.

Hellbitch, located at Freeland Distillery in Portland, Oregon. Photograph by Anna Mantheakis.

We found ourselves in the funny position of needing to do precisely the opposite of what distillers normally do with copper stills. We needed to overwhelm that copper with more flavor than it could pull out. So we raised our distillation proof and filled the still to capacity. This reduced the reflux ratio and loaded the still with a high concentration of aromatics. It also compressed the distillation, which helped us in another way by bringing back those late-distillation sweet notes we were missing. As we monitored the distillation, we noticed familiar flavors jumping out at us, brighter and stronger than before. It was a giant leap toward salvation.

Still, the gin beguiled us when it was collected. Despite everything we had done, the fresh distillate was subdued. We tasted it after resting a few days to recover from still shock, only to find that our gin was soft-spoken and shy. I thought: Am I crazy or does our last batch, the one with less of the American juniper, taste more like… juniper?

The Mystery of the Missing Juniper

My winemaker senses started tingling. I have my MS in winemaking from UC Davis, where the professors of wine chemistry have spent their careers illuminating the secret lives of wine aromatics. I remembered the dynamics of aromatic transformation when wine is blended, clarified, or exposed to oxygen. Why do hosts open a distinguished bottle of red wine and decant it a couple hours before dinner? Why do winemakers splash-rack wine, exposing it to oxygen only to return it to the barrel for further maturation? Why do they allow blends a few weeks to marry in a tank before they decide if they are ready? Because with each exposure to something new, such as the influx of oxygen or the mingling of blend components, chemical equilibria start to shift, and flavors shift in synchronicity. Some of these transformations are fast, like the decanted bottle. Others are slow, like the married blend.

As it turns out, our wild-harvested American juniper takes several weeks to recover fully from distillation. If I were still a master’s student, I would make it my thesis to unravel the mystery behind the missing juniper. There is something in this juniper that hits my nose in exactly the same spot as sauvignon blanc. The grassy aroma of sauvignon blanc comes from thiols, which are exactly the sort of thing that gets bound up by copper. Furthermore, thiols are known to hook up with each other under the right circumstances. In wine, we see vegetal-smelling thiols pair up and form disulfides with exposure to oxygen. When this happens, the volatility drops, the disulfide becomes reclusive, and the funky cabbage aromas of reductive wine can virtually disappear until the pairs slowly break up and make a sensory comeback much later. I don’t suppose the exact same reaction is behind the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the American juniper. But I would be willing to bet that the shifting chemical equilibrium transforms the juniper’s aromatics into less volatile forms, concealing them in a state of obscurity until they emerge from behind the veil after the spirit has had time to settle.

The Value of Starting Over

When we revisited our new recipe after resting, we were overjoyed. It was our gin again, fresh and wild like we remembered, but with a little extra sweetness on the finish. If anything, we had made it better. What did we learn from this? Copper is a double-edged sword, and we can’t let it pull out the good flavors with the bad. And time is an essential factor. There is a wisdom to waiting and seeing what happens to the spirit after it’s had time to recover from being boiled and vaporized.

One of the hardest challenges I faced through all of this, aside from the technical hurdles, was the simple fear of changing the gin while trying to reclaim it. We already had an incredible gin before we switched stills. How could we adapt to the new facility without changing it into something else? I worried there was no way to do that without rebuilding the system we had before, still and all.

It reminds me of something my high school art teacher used to tell me, something I still think about when I am developing spirits. She told me about the final exam for her hardest course in art school. They spent the year creating the best and most challenging work of their lives, paintings that kept them up late at night and inspired awe when seen finished for the first time. And when the big day came, the instructor told them that the exam was simple. There was no paper test, nor any judging of the work. It was pass or fail. To pass, the student must light their work on fire and burn it.

It was not just a test, she said. It was their final lesson. The lesson was that an artist must never become so attached to their work that they believe their best is behind them. Artists must evolve and adapt. If an artist’s greatest work vanishes tomorrow, it can be recreated or even re-imagined as something greater. The work of creating and re-creating makes us more than just artists who were lucky enough to make one good thing. It makes us masters of our craft.

Four Corners Gin Bottle. Courtesy photograph.
Previous articleAll Aboard
Next articleTop 10 Guadalajara Bars
Anna Mantheakis, R&D Distiller of the Four Corners Gin, began her career in winemaking. She crushed grapes around the world and made Pinot Noir in Southern Oregon before she transitioned into distilling. She flexes her creativity by spearheading technical and creative spirits development projects. She holds an MS in Viticulture & Enology from UC Davis and the General Certificate in Distilling from IBD.