New whiskey debuts with local flavors
Prior to the pandemic, when the Taos News first heard murmurings of Rolling Still partnering with Taos Land Trust to develop a whiskey made from the organic rye grown at Río Fernando Park, staff reached out to both then-director of the land trust, Kristina Ortez, and Dan Irion of Rolling Still, a cocktail bar that opened across from the Taos Inn in 2019.
Tempo covered the story in February 2020, and a month later the world began going into lockdown. But Rolling Still made it through the first year of the pandemic to finally unveil the new whiskey born of the partnership this month.
The ongoing conservation work at Río Fernando Park, by the Taos Land Trust, continues to explore and apply the best practices for the conservation of soil, water and habitat, including sowing cereal grains, like rye, which was used to make the new Ponderosa brand whiskey: the Sidewinder 4.2.
Rolling Still
The launch party for the new whiskey happened Friday night (Oct. 29). Patrons arrived in cowboy/western costumes for a costume prize at the end of the night. The American roots band, Crooked and Cracked, played on the patio as a crowd gathered.
Dressed in cowboy garb, Irion, distiller at Rolling Still, explained that Sidewinder 4.2 is the only whiskey they make and took over four years of tasting and following government regulations to create.
‘It’s approachable. It doesn’t have the whiskey shutter that a lot of these really intense, bitter whiskies will have. But it’s not bland, it has a lot of flavor and that flavor is coming from the use of the unique aging with the Ponderosa bark.’
Irion said owners Liza Barrett and Nicole Brady made it their goal to create a whiskey (not usually their drink of choice) – one that they actually wanted to drink. Given their lofty goal and the extra time the pandemic created for experimentation, arriving at the final product took a long time.
“The 4.2 is more like a Richter scale ... It’s how many different iterations of this project we’ve gone through. So this one is the 420th iteration,” added Irion.
Irion said they used rye grown by Taos Land Trust at Río Fernando Park, water from the Phoenix Springs (above the Taos Ski Valley), pecan wood from Las Cruces for the aging process and Ponderosa tree bark from Garrapata Ridge, located between San Cristobal and Lama.
Rolling Still had to get a specific Food and Drug Administration certificate for the new whiskey, known as the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) in order to include the Ponderosa bark. The FDA had no record of Ponderosa bark used in a commercial application, Irion said.
The distiller, formerly of Taos Mesa Brewing, wanted to include the bark because of its uniqueness to the Taos area and the special flavor it added. In order to be granted the permit, Irion and others had to prove that ponderosa bark had been used historically in the Southwest.
“There’s all sorts of documented evidence of tribes, Southwest tribes – indigenous tribes using Ponderosa bark. And one of the cooler things is they were using Ponderosa bark” Irion said, adding that tribes would make use of the bark sap to create syrup, “the sap
DAN IRION
Distiller at Rolling Still
that’s just behind the bark making a kind of cinnamon, sweet vanillaish candy.”
He said the barrel to age the whiskey was also chosen in order to make the whiskey stand out in terms of taste from other liquors on the market.
“The reason we wanted pecan wood is all these distilleries for eons always use oak for their aging process. And so it’s like, ‘Well, why oak?’ The more we started looking into the research of it, it’s because it was a ubiquitous hardwood that was available,” said Irion.
Irion said the finished product is one of the smoothest whiskeys you’ll ever taste.
“It’s approachable. It doesn’t have the whiskey shutter that a lot of these really intense, bitter whiskies will have. But it’s not bland, it has a lot of flavor and that flavor is coming from the use of the unique aging with the Ponderosa bark. And from that, we’re pulling off cinnamon. Most importantly we’re pulling off vanilla. And some people even say butterscotch,” said Irion.
Rolling Still Manager Chris Mulligan said another key to making a great whiskey is water.
“In any bottle, you know, in any spirit, that’s 40 percent alcohol, 80 proof is 60 percent water. So having good quality water like ours coming from the ski valley makes a huge difference,” he said.
Barrett said all of the experimentation and trial and error was worth it to reach the final result they’re now selling by the bottle and serving up at Rolling Still.
“It’s really smooth. That’s kind of our romantic kind of tagline for it is, Sunset Smooth,” said Barrett.
She said they’re not stopping there. They’re going right back into the distillery to start on something new: pecan-infused whiskey.