A great piece by David Furer about one of my favorite distillers SPLIT ROCK DISTILLING in Maine, featured in DISTILLER recently.
Conveniently located along the well-traveled coastal Route 1, Split Rock Distilling was co-founded by Topher Mallory and Matt Page. They regale me with how Newcastle, Maine, has grown in the 25 and 20 years they’ve respectively called it home. “We came here to make the best we could through the local, organic agriculture culled from our neighbors, to make all of our products from scratch as [much as] possible. It’s been a fun challenge setting out on uncharted territory,” says Mallory. “It’s good that we were young and crazy enough to see it through!” Page chimes in.
After working in Kentucky as a site evaluator, Page arrived in Maine to work for an established artist and to live in a place where he knew his neighbors. Mallory had previously worked in finance in Oregon before leaving to shape surfboards. He’d traveled with his wife between the two Portlands until deciding to reside in the eastern one.
Their friendship began when they were the only two men at a woman’s birthday party in 2005. They met hunkering next to a fridge, where they shared their loves of climbing and travel over drinks. While drinking bourbon with friends in 2012, they commiserated about the lack of Maine-made bourbons. Today, bourbon is the core of the Split Rock portfolio — although it has grown beyond just whiskey.
“It’d have been easier to have bought filled barrels to age and bottle here, but we were setting out to make bourbons that we could look at every step of the process knowing that we were there creating it,” says Mallory. “That it’s organic is part of the challenge: the methodology of production and sourcing the grains, filling out the requisite FDA forms, getting the best ingredients to make the best product with them,” adds Page. The dedication to locally sourced ingredients extends beyond the company’s spirits — which include a Maine requisite of a blueberry product, here one of its three vodkas — to its range of five bitters and 14 Royal Rose brand syrups.
“We knew to settle on a place along Route 1 because of the need for a definitively accessible location. We did all our government and business applications, construction learning, and applying together. For two years it felt as though we were perpetually filling out forms and asking permissions from people in many offices. It was a lot more than painting or putting up drywall [like] we expected,” says Mallory, shaking his head.
All of Split Rock’s water needs are supplied by an on-site well fixed into a recirculation system, which provides water for the products themselves as well as fermentation, mashing, cooling, and distilling (a glycol system was deemed too expensive and energy-inefficient). Friends and family joined in the bootstrapped, hands-on renovation and revitalization of the property.
Since its July 16, 2016 launch, Split Rock has used recycled bottles with post-consumer waste paper labels. Since April 2018, it’s offset some of its electrical usage with 36 solar panels producing over 11,000 kw hours annually. Surplus energy is contributed back to the grid, supporting midcoast Maine’s power grid. Its nearly 10,000 lbs. of carbon offset is buttressed with an on-site electric vehicle charger.
Following a diligent search for consistent sources of organic Maine grain (no co-packer or NGS ever), Page and Mallory are now seven years into a relationship with New York’s Champlain Valley Milling, using its food-grade cornmeal for vodkas and gins; whole wheat, barley, and rye bread flours for bourbons; and molasses and granulated cane sugar for its rums.
Since 1991 New York resident David Furer's work with spirits has included stints managing Chicago's Midwest Int'l. Spirits Exposition and BTI's World Spirits Championships; writing and editing for Sommelier Journal, Santé, Germany's Der Whiskey Botschafter, the UK's harpers; and judging for Concours Mondial du Bruxelles. He's also an Advanced Sommelier with the Court of Master Sommeliers, and has managed bars in London England.
Read the rest at: