If you build it, they will come and drink
Willibald Farm Distillery offers unique experience in a rustic setting in Ayr
Cocktails in the country, anyone?
Maybe you didn’t know that your ice bucket list should include enjoying a smart cocktail at a hipster-ish bar, made with gin distilled on site, essentially in the middle of a farmer’s field.
Now that Willibald Farm Distillery — a rustic facility set in a renovated barn with a surprisingly modern cocktail bar and patio in Ayr, 20 kilometres south of Kitchener — is open for business, it’s time to update that list.
Set back from the road, the first thing you see when turning into this craft spirits distillery is the name “Willibald” spelled out in bold, black, gothic lettering, next to the gate. Pull into the parking lot and it’s impossible to miss the huge shiny copper still through the giant window, inside the retrofitted barn.
This small family farm, the former van der Heyden homestead, is where three young partners — brothers 28-yearold Jordan and 26-year-old Nolan van der Heyden, and Cam Formica, 29 — make Willibald gin. While they have big expansion plans, at the moment it is the only product made here. The partners are serious about building their business slowly. They opened to the public last year, after four years of planning.
This year, with the cocktail bar up and running, they celebrated the distillery’s first batch of gin with what they called a Summer Sessions party — made possible through a special one-day liquor licence. The event included gin cocktails, wood-fired pizza and live music. The adult-only event was such a hit, they organized a number of them on Saturdays between noon and 5 p.m. throughout the summer. Two sessions are still to come on Aug. 11 and Sept. 8. Evidence that their plans for a field of dreams bar were timely.
As the saying goes, “If you build it, they will come.”
“On our first day open, we had 600 people here,” says Formica of the first Summer Session, “and the parking lot was full, with people parked all the way up the lane on both sides. After that, we started ticketing our Summer Sessions, so that we could limit it to a couple of hundred people. There’s only the three of us and we want to be able to provide that level of service that we think is really important.”
Formica wants to not only serve food and drink in a timely fashion, but also explain their philosophy to guests, something that’s easier now that the distillery has a “by the glass” licence — something the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) only started offering in March. Until then, distilleries could only offer small samples of straight spirits. The new licence allows distilleries to sell cocktails made with spirits distilled on the property. To Willibald and other craft upstarts this makes a huge difference in terms of attracting visitors, since most people want to know how the spirit tastes in a cocktail, especially with gin, which few people drink straight.
Then again, if you were going to drink straight gin, Willibald wouldn’t be a bad choice. It’s aged in oak barrels, which gives it a light straw colour and a touch of vanilla that mingles nicely with the spicy juniper and licorice-y caraway. It’s a unique gin, that veers ever-soslightly into aged aquavit territory. It would probably work fantastically well in a wet martini (two parts gin to one part high-end dry vermouth) with a healthy sprinkling of good quality bitters.
Unfortunately, we can never find this out at Willibald’s onsite cocktail bar, since the new licence doesn’t allow Formica to mix any vermouth into his gin. The signature cocktails on offer — the fresh-tasting, easydrinking strawberry-basil-lime Flower Power, for example — are made with Willibald gin and non-alcoholic products only.
But for its Summer Sessions, Formica gets a one-day permit that allows him to mix his gin with vermouth, or anything else available at the LCBO.
“Because we’re restricted with our by-the-glass licence to only serve cocktails with our own product, the Summer Sessions are one way to make sure we can keep doing new cool and creative things,” says Formica. “I can do a lot of stuff behind this bar but, if you’re a gin fan, sooner or later you’re going to want a Negroni.”
(A cocktail made with equal parts Campari, gin and vermouth.)
Obviously, the hope is that the AGCO will loosen up more and allow a little vermouth and Campari behind the bar.
While they wait, though, the owners have plenty to work on, such as getting the kitchen up and running so the barn and patio can function as a full-service restaurant — they are aiming for September — and preparing for the eventual launch of their whisky, which is currently in the barrel, aging for at least another year.
What’s more, they’re conditioning their 24 hectares of land to make it organic.
Right now they buy Ontario grain, but the long-term plan is to grow it on site and become a certified organic, grain-to-glass distillery.
That’s a pretty cool plan. But what about that name? It doesn’t perfectly convey the coolness of their project.
Turns out Willibald derives from a family name, dug up by the van der Heyden brothers, who grew up in Ayr.
“Their grandfather’s middle name was Willibald, which is a very traditional German name, that he wasn’t very fond of,” says Formica.
“So when he immigrated from Germany to Canada, he removed it from his passport, driver’s licence, the works,” Formica says. “We wanted a name that was unique. If you Google it, you don’t get many results that aren’t us. But the other reason was to give him a reason to be proud of his name after all these years.”
Richard Willibald Feicht, now 86, still lives up the road from the family farm-turned-distillery.
Formica says everyone finds it funny that he has to drive by a giant yellow sign with the name he was trying to leave behind him.
But it’s all in good fun. In fact, Jordan recently asked his grandfather what he thought about it and Feicht answered that he was honoured to have a distillery named after him.
Tickets to Willibald Farm Distillery’s two remaining Summer Sessions cost $15 and can be purchased online at drinkwillibald.com. The distillery is at 1271 Reidsville Rd., Ayr, Ont. and open Thursday to Saturday, noon to 7 p.m.