Whisky stocks survive high water
HIGH RIVER — The temporary storage room is the size of a school gym; it is moist and lit by hanging fluorescent lights that cast a shadow under the eyes of Barry Wilde, president of Highwood Distillers, as he stands next to casks containing the lifeblood of his business.
“Usually, you can be in here for only 10 minutes before being overtaken by the whisky fumes,” Wilde says.
During this visit, however, huge fans ventilate the air. They’ve worked constantly for weeks to lower the warehouse’s humidity. Because, while Highwood Distillers sits more than a kilometre away from its namesake river, it was hit hard by flooding on June 20. River water poured down 1st Street in front of the distillery. Staff had six minutes to evacuate and many were stranded as they tried to head home.
When Wilde was allowed to return to his business 10 days later, the distillery and warehousesheldcontaminated flood water a metre deep. Restoration efforts began, and in the following month the staff logged 30,000 man-hours sandblasting, dry ice blasting, scraping and sanitizing. Three hundred trips to the dump were needed to dispose of the remains of 40,000 cases of finished product — rum, gin, vodka, liqueur and whisky — that had been stacked, ready for shipping. At some point over the course of the 10 days that the stacks sat in water, the bottom cardboard boxes dissolved. Everything above collapsed and eight weeks worth of stock was destroyed.
In the whisky rooms, however, the stacks of casks remained upright and watertight.
“This is gold,” Wilde says of the barrels. “Some of this is 30 years old. If we’d lost the whisky, we’d probably have been out of business. Whisky is our focus brand category. We make good whisky and a lot of whisky. It’s where we put all our emphasis and marketing dollars.”
Whisky sales represent 30 to 40 per cent of Highwood’s business and it’s growing as they focus on new brands and flavoured whiskies.
Highwood Distillers is one of Canada’s largest privately held spirits companies, employing 50 staff and producing over 300 products and 100 varieties of liquor. Comparatively, however, it is a small player in the Canadian spirits market. Wilde would not disclose annual revenues, but Jan Westwood of the Association of Canadian Distillers estimates Highwood could claim one to three per cent of the market.
Highwood’s wheat whisky is made completely in-house. Forty-five hundred pounds of locally sourced wheat is added to 1,500 gallons of water and boiled in a giant pressure cooker. The resulting mash is placed in a mash cooler, where naturally produced enzymes and yeast is added to kick-start fermentation. Once transferred to fermentation tanks, it sits for a minimum of 72 hours. As the sugar breaks down, the resulting alcohol — referred to as high wine — is stripped off and refined several more times through a beer still.
What’s left are two types of potable alcohol: off-centre (more flavourful) and supercentre (more pure and used primarily in vodka). Highwood blends the off-centre alcohol with well water (cleaned through a reverse osmosis system) to reduce the alcohol from 95 to 72 per cent.
It’s now ready to be aged in charred, American white oak barrels, for a minimum of three years. Each passing year the alcohol acquires the signature flavours of the wood barrel.
After the aging process, Highwood blends their whisky with additional flavour, adding spice, pure Canadian syrup or rye, depending on the brand.
They make a wide range of spirits in their distillery across from the warehouse. That is, when they are in operation. When the flood water entered this building, it did so with such force that it turned 40,000-litre tanks of liquor on their sides. Outside the distillery, it moved a 10,000-lb. container 50 metres; it destroyed their 10-tonne truck and four forklifts.
Two bottling lines were beyond repair. Staff continue to work methodically, sandblasting and drying their main bottling line which usually produces 1,500 cases per day. With production stalled and stock on retailers’ shelves getting low, ripples from the flood continue to lap at the bottom line.
“All our sales reps are still working and making calls on stores asking them to hold on. In Alberta, where retailers own their own stores, they’ve been really good,” says Wilde. “Our customers are telling us they will stick with us. We will try to get the product out September 1, we just need their support to hold true when we get going again.”
While the future of their stocks remains uncertain, Highwood’s insurance covered product and equipment losses, and the restoration companies have hired many of their staff to clean up. Grateful as Wilde is for those developments, the silver lining remains elusive.