Lequille Lightning: You’ll never guess what they’re putting in their moonshine

A fast and fun ride for still owners Ritchie and Cameron in first year of production

Andrew Cameron and Owen Ritchie beside their newest moonshine still they affectionately named Morgan. The owners of Still Fired Distilleries Inc of Lequille are making moonshine, vodka, and gin. It’s so popular it’s been difficult to keep up with demand.

keeping up to demand.

Still Fired

The two former commercial divers took the plunge into the distillery business after an almost unanimous plebiscite to go ‘wet’ in the small ‘dry’ community in 2014.

It’s been a non-stop ride ever since they produced their first commercial batch of vodka about a year ago. Demand was threatening to outstrip supply and Ritchie had a sleeping bag rolled out in one of the big racks that hold the corn mash vats so he could be there 24/7 to keep it all chugging along at maximum output.

They’ve been producing a premium vodka since the start, plus Granny’s Apple Pie Moonshine ( think mulled cider on steroids), a Thai Chili Vodka, Blueberry Vodka, and their Vanilla Vodka. The latest offering has been their Night Owl Coffee Moonshine and the gin is only days away.

Cameron is animated about the coffee ‘ shine. It’s made from un- aged corn whiskey, cut down with freshly roasted fair trade organic Sissiboo coffee from Bear River. They blend them together down to 20 per cent alcohol and sweeten it with Nova Scotia honey.

Andrew said the reception for the coffee moonshine has been enthusiastic.

Second Still

“We were at the point where we were having trouble keeping up with one still. I was literally sleeping here six nights a week. Sometimes seven. Just always constantly a fight to keep the shelves stocked,” said Ritchie. “So we decided to go in and build a bigger, better still.”

They made some improvements and it has some new features - like a bigger stack that allows them to produce alcohol faster.

But the moonshine is the same corn mash product and from that they make everything else. Ritchie said corn offers a very unique flavor profile. It’s smooth on the front of your tongue -- doesn’t have that initial burn that a lot of vodkas have -- and it maintains a slight sweetness in the aftertaste.

“That sweetness we find a lot of people are catching onto,” said Ritchie. “It’s kind of a love/ hate relationship. People either love it or hate it. With that same premium vodka we do our infusions.”

The infusions they do are the most natural way to flavor a vodka. Most on the market are being infused synthetically, said Ritchie. That’s why the vodkas are so clear.

“The way we chose to do it is using as-local products as we can get and infusing it naturally. So we basically blend our vodka down to the 40 per cent which it would normally be sold at, do the regular filtering, and bottle the vodka as if we were going to sell it as our premium, and at the last moment before we put the cap on, we either put in our 40 blueberries, our single Thai chili pepper, or our single vanilla bean.”

The Gin

“Basically for our gin we wanted to keep it quite simple,” Ritchie said. “We’re using seven different botanicals, and we’re throwing a pretty neat twist into one of our gins.”

They plan to release two gins with one – Fundy Gin -paying tribute to the Bay of Fundy.

And here’s the twist: “We’re actually going to be using dulse in the gin. It’s going to be a dulse-infused gin. So that’s going to be our seventh botanical in that particular gin.”

They’ve done their experimenting and testing – and the results are positive.

“The dulse brings over a really cool salty flavour and you can almost smell a fresh ocean breeze off it. It’s not that open- a- bag- of- dulse smell. It’s that salty air smell and that comes through with the gin. We’re just trying to make unique products to the area.”

Old Days

People come in and talk about making moonshine. Some tell stories of their grandfather’s moonshine made up on the mountain. And they made some crazy stuff – from pinesap ‘ shine to maple syrup lightning.

And it was a business then like Still Fired is now – it just wasn’t legal.

“It’s something that I never would have thought but it goes, I think, really deep into the culture in Annapolis and the surrounding areas,” said Ritchie. “There was some pretty interesting stuff guys were coming up with. It’s pretty neat to see what people have done over the years. I mean there’s been a long history of bootleggers in the Lequille area and a few of them have made all their own moonshine that they sold.”

He said that in Nova Scotia in general it’s always been happening but now the laws are changing in a way that is allowing people to actually show their creativity where for years and years you had to hide it.