Liquid luck: SLO County’s whiskey boom has distillers pushing boundaries

If you’ve looked for locally made whiskeys recently, you may have found yourself out of luck.

It’s not that there aren’t any — it’s that there aren’t enough. The spirits often sell out faster than Central Coast distillers can make them.

“We can’t keep up,” says Stephen Kroener, half of the duo behind Krobar Craft Distillery in Paso Robles.

Whiskey is enjoying a resurgence at the moment with booming sales, especially in the premium tiers. Millennials, particularly, are embracing brown spirits as part of a cocktail culture come roaring back.

Those seeking small-lot, craft whiskey are also the same people who support farm-to-table cuisine and locally made goods, says Alex Villicana, who owns and runs Re:Find Distillery and Villicana Winery in Paso Robles with his wife, Monica.

“It’s those consumers who want to know where their products came from, who made them and what’s in them,” he says.

The demand is leading Kroener and Krobar co-founder Joe Barton to expand beyond their two overworked stills behind Barton Family Wines in Paso.

They’re building a 5,000-square-foot distillery next to the new Central Coast Brewing Co. on Higuera Street in San Luis Obispo to house a 500-gallon still that will allow them to ramp up production of core products.

Krobar plans to offer a small tasting room at that location, but a more visitor-friendly spot will be further south on Higuera Street. That’s where the company is partnering with Yes Cocktail Co. to open a cocktail kitchen in the upcoming SLO Public Market.

Set to open in summer 2019, Mixed Company will offer seasonal craft cocktails, spirits sampling, specialty sandwiches and paired food menus — think savory pâtés and rillettes with classics like a Manhattan or Old-Fashioned — served inside and on a private patio.

“We’re aiming to have signature cocktails from all the top cocktail creators around to showcase the area as a whole,” Kroener says, “with a hyperfocus on local ingredients, mixers and spirits.”

The space will also house a micro-distillery where Kroener and Barton can play with experimental and one-off recipes.

And they aren’t the only ones looking to expand. Tiny Foggy Bottom Distillery in Los Osos, where Todd Adams churns out gin, rum and whiskey in just 100 square feet of space, plans to partner up on a 2,000-square-foot distillery and restaurant nearby.

And while earlier plans to remake Paso’s historic Fox Theatre into a whiskey distillery fell through, Villicana is keeping his eyes open for other opportunities.

This is heady progress for an industry still basically in its infancy in California. Distillers in the state couldn’t even sell grain-based spirits until late 2015 — barely a blink of an eye for a liquor that usually spends at least two years in a barrel.

That didn’t keep Krobar from testing the waters before Kroener and Barton even owned a still. In 2013, the pair went to the cradle of American whiskey, Kentucky, where they made their first rye whiskey, milling the grain and running it through the hopper themselves.

They still process the majority of their grain in house to use in their award-winning spirits — including a spicy rye whiskey, the sweeter and rounder high rye bourbon and bracing “cask-strength” versions of each — which go straight from barrel to bottle.

Working with a local grain grower, Kenny Enny in San Miguel, the pair are ramping up to use more heirloom-variety grains in their mash bills, giving the spirits even more of a distinctive local flavor.

“Grains are just like grapes,” Kroener says. “The flavor is affected by the terroir and the climate.”

They’re also pushing into the brave new world of new-world whiskey, with their first single-malt whiskey aging in barrel.

Single-malt whiskey, long the domain of high-end scotch whisky, is just starting to be explored in the United States — and Krobar wants to be at the forefront of that movement.

“It’s really going to be what defines the whiskey revolution in America,” Kroener says.

Other area distillers are pushing boundaries in other ways.

At the speakeasy-style Foggy Bottom, Adams is bucking the rye revival with a more traditional corn-based whiskey that’s found a fanbase through people headed to nearby Montaña de Oro State Park. With a tiny still he runs twice a week, he can afford to play around with aging them in different woods with different toast and char levels.

Adams has about 10 different whiskeys at any given time — offering barrel-influenced notes of cherry, apple, maple and more — as well as an unaged moonshine.

One of his newest creations, Uphill Fallout, is infused with fresh pomegranate, blueberries, oranges, lemons and cinnamon. An aged version called Black Sunshine is resting in barrel now.

Up the road in Morro Bay, Jim and Gloria Zion are using whole, raw pistachios in their Wicked Harvest Bourbon, a unique concoction that debuted in 2017 and recently got picked up at Total Wine & More locations across California.

A nut farmer and ag exporter, Jim Zion teamed up with fellow Cal Poly grad Steve Thompson, a master distiller in Kentucky, to procure six-year-old bourbon. (That’s whiskey made from at least 51 percent corn.)

The Zions then add in the pistachios and give the bourbon extra time in used wine barrels, which lends the liquor a smooth taste and long finish.

“We like to call it the bourbon for people who don’t like bourbon yet,” Gloria Zion says.

A hazelnut bourbon finished in pinot noir barrels is imminent, with plans to release a pecan version finished in rum barrels followed by rye versions of all three next.

At Re:Find, whiskeys are just a small part of offerings from the distillery, whose focus on grape-based spirits stemmed from a desire to find a new use for juice leftover from winemaking. In fact, one of Re:Find’s “brown spirits” is actually an oaky barrel-finished grape vodka that Wine Enthusiast magazine called “remarkably whiskey-like, with lots of caramel and spice.”

But a serendipitous request to make the real stuff using beer wort from San Luis Obispo brewery SLO Brew led Re:Find down a new path that now includes rye whiskey, a cask-strength rye and bourbon, soon to be joined by a wheat whiskey.

“And then we take those whiskey barrels and pass them back down to SLO Brew for aging their beers,” Villicana said. “So it really fits into that circle of finding new uses for things.”