I sat down with John Curtin, co-founder of the Albany Distilling Company (ABCo), at their barroom on Livingston Avenue. The building was previously home to a Nabisco factory. The rough floorboard ceiling and the bare brick wall speak to the age of the place and add to the smooth ambiance of the whiskey establishment.
While no Nabisco cookies were to be found, Curtin had plenty of insights into the heritage of spirits in Albany, the challenges of making and marketing spirits with history, and the continuity of economic activity along the Hudson River.
Albany Distilling Company opened in 2011 next to the Albany Pump House. They have since moved their production to a new space, but they use the original facility to store their barrels in bond. The space is subject to the whims of the Hudson Valley temperature. In below freezing temperatures, the sweet smell of whiskey and grain fill the space. I can’t imagine how it must smell during the humid summer months.
ABCo offers an eclectic array of spirits. Their main focus is rye whiskey, but they also craft rum, apple brandy, and vodka. Many of these choices are informed by the history of distillation in Albany.
The following interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Q: What was your motivation for moving into distillation?
A: Before I moved back to Albany, I was teaching in Scotland. I was in the middle of nowhere about a half hour from a distillery called Bladnoch. Tiny little place, but really neat.
I moved back to Albany not long after New York passed the Farm Distillery Act in 2007. That’s what really enabled small distilleries like us to exist. It reduced the annual fee from $15,000 to $128. It lowered all the thresholds. I thought, “Cool, that means Albany will have a distillery soon.” But after a couple of years no one was doing anything, so I thought maybe I could do this.
I had no money, no experience, just a wild idea. I visited a bunch of distilleries around here to learn something. There was a lot of open dialogue and collaboration.
Q: How has the landscape changed since opening?
A: Governor Cuomo was pushing craft beverages and they had grant money for tourism. The catch was that you had to have a trade organization to get any of this money. So I met with Nine Pin Cidery and the C.H. Evans Brewery at the Pump Station. If we could get together we could get all kinds of funding. We made the Albany Craft Beverage Trail. Then we added a winery. Then we expanded more. Then after two years, we finally said, “Okay, these eight counties that New York considers the Capital District are on the trail.” We have 55 members.
When I started off, I was like the 20th craft distillery in New York. There are now 209. So the community really has exploded in the past decade.
Q: Where you ever hands on distilling yourself?
A: At first, there were only two of us. We did everything. In some ways, I miss those days. We were doing 14-16 hour days. Everything from cleaning the floors and toilet, to running social media. At that time, it was tough to get New York State grain. None of it came pre-milled. The corn would show up and it was too noisy to mill during business hours next door at the Pump House brewery. I would wait until closing and I would mill from midnight to 5 or 6 AM. Then I would sleep for a few hours and start cooking. There are certain aspects that I miss and certain aspects that I don’t.
Q: In terms of collaborating with other craft beverage makers in the area and forming a community, how do feel that your spirits have contributed?
A: Originally it was nice to have a cidery, a brewery, and a distillery because we could cross pollinate. It gave us inroads into the different processes. Traditionally before there was sanitation–and there are still laws on the books about this–breweries were next to distilleries because if you screwed up a batch of beer you couldn’t drink it but you could still distill it out. You can pump beer tax free from a brewery into an adjacent distillery. Breweries and distilleries have been intertwined for a long time.
We try to take advantage of the community as much as we can. We do an apple brandy with local cideries. The craft beverage trail has breweries, wineries, cideries, meaderies, we have a kambucha maker, distilleries–so that broad perspective has been good.
Q: Your barrel-aged apple brandy, do you market that as applejack at all?
A: So applejack, that’s a funny term. Originally, jacking was freezing and now it’s become a catchall term for apple brandy. As a purist, I don’t call it jack but there are plenty of others who make apple brandy. We make it with Nine Pin Cidery, so it’s called Tenth Pin.
Q: You also do a rum, and your motivation for that is partly historical. Is that correct?
A: Where we were originally located by the Albany Pump Station, our distillery was about 30 yards from the site of the first distillery in Albany from the 1750s, the Douw-Quackenbush Stillhouse. I didn’t really know that until we moved in, so it seemed like as long as we were in the neighborhood, we might as well make rum.
We talked to the archaeologist who excavated the distillery. It was mothballed around 1815 which is around the time they were dredging out the Erie Canal. All of the sandy soil they dug out was used to reclaim land and fill in Albany. The distillery was filled in during that process with this sandy soil that was on the bottom of the prehistoric Lake Albany 10,000 years ago. The advantage of the sandy soil is that it doesn’t hold water well so it preserves things.
When they were digging the foundation for this parking garage, they found these wooden vats and they had no idea what they were, so they stopped construction. The archaeologist gave us the 450 page report of the dig, and he went on and found some contemporary rum recipes and even some correspondence from the Quackenbush family to customers out in Boston that talked about the process. We were able to make a reasonable facsimile of what they were doing.
Q: Within the spirits industry, heritage marketing is huge, especially in the southern whiskey producing states. How do you think distilleries should properly use heritage and history to market their products?
A: In the South, especially where there is more of an unbroken tradition of distillation, it works well. But, I’ve found it to be mixed up here. I’m a history buff, so I find it fascinating. From a marketing perspective, it isn’t always well received or there isn’t a ton of interest in it.
Marketing is tricky with spirits. There is the drive to be a historian, an entertainer, all sorts of facets. My focus is on making the best product we can and hoping that carries us. There is no one size fits all approach.
Q: As someone interested in the history, do you think that craft beverage drinkers, local Albanians, or tourists should know the heritage of these spirits and care about it?
A: I like to talk about it. It’s hard to say what they should be doing. Our Quackenbush rum is named after the Quackenbush family from the 18th century, Nine Pin is named after the Rip Van Winkle story (he fell asleep bowling nine pin,) the whiskey we call Ironweed is based on an Albany novel. I try to tie all of the products into the local history and culture.
There is the danger of pigeonholing yourself. Are people elsewhere going to care about the history of the Douw-Quackenbush Stillhouse? Probably not. So, I am hesitant to become too reliant on those narratives for fear of becoming hyper-local and not relevant elsewhere.
Q: Isn’t it a great coincidence that you established your distillery right next to the city’s original stillhouse?
A: It’s the river. It’s the raison d’être of the city. We built in a coal yard next to the pump station. The area there was settled and continually occupied because of the river. It is more interesting that the Pump Station was there and we piggybacked on their success–having that connection to the river and the water.
But the whole area was warehouses for lumber and goods. And Erie Boulevard used to be the canal itself. Albany was the 10th largest city in the country for a time, it was the connection between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. Now that the industry has left, all those buildings are vacant. We got lucky because we caught the first wave of those buildings being repurposed. Our bar location, for example, used to be a Nabisco factory. It was a house built in the 1840s but the factory wrapped their stable around the house. There was no zoning.
Albany is an old city. Everything has been used and reused.
Q: So, first the canal is built and buries Albany’s first distillery in sand, and then the canal is buried and 100 years later a new distillery emergences in a space that was built up for warehousing goods that traveled on the canal?
A: Yes, the circle of life!
Q: Scholarship on the historical distillery indicate that the Dutch Quackenbush family only opened the distillery to satisfy the taste of British soldiers who were quartered in the city during the Seven Years War. The Quackenbush’s house still stands and is now an English Pub. What kind of irony do you read in this Dutch-English relationship with spaces in Albany and alcohol?
A: The greatest demand for rum back then was the British soldiers garrisoned here during the French and Indian War. Part of the soldiers’ ration was rum. The interesting thing about molasses is that when you dilute it down to a fermentable strength and then distill it, the rum occupies about the same volume as the molasses did initially. It’s a lot safer to ship molasses somewhere and distill it there, rather than to have the cargo hold of your wooden ship filled with flammable liquid.
Most of the rum distilleries in the colonies were on the coast, New York and Boston being the main hubs. The only inland distillery was the Douw-Quackenbush stillhouse because the British came here. The city limits were just south of where the Quackenbush house was. It was the north gate. Rum was banned in the city limits because there were issues with soldiers being drunk. But the Quackenbushes, outside of the city limits, had no restrictions. They were industrious and had the demand for it.
One of the reasons for the 3rd Amendment to the Constitution–against the quartering of soldiers–was because of Albany.
Q: What kind of molasses do you use for your rum?
A: We did our homework. We have a Caribbean molasses which they would have used due to the slave trade. That’s the negative side of rum, it was directly tied to the slave trade.
But back then, sugar production was like filtering coffee. They would take the sugar cane, macerate it, get all the juice out, boil it down, then dump the syrup into paper cones and whatever was captured was the sugar and what came through was the molasses. Nowadays, there are ways to recapture the sugar in that molasses, but back then they would only do it once so the molasses had a higher sugar content.
This kind of molasses is now called a fancy grade molasses. We found a fancy grade molasses that we use. Overall, there is a much tighter control on the distillation process. They would have used wood or coal, I have a control panel and I can set a temperature and walk away.
Q: Changing directions a bit, Albany is the state capital of New York. It seems that throughout its history, alcohol interests and political interests have aligned or coincided. What’s your take on the politics-booze relationship? Do you think Albany is more accepting of it today than other cities and states are?
A: I’ll say this. Albany has a 4 AM bar closing time. Historically and still today, it’s a drinking town. We fit right in. Prohibition here was essentially ignored. The arrest records for public drunkenness show an increase in Albany during Prohibition. The breweries that were run by the Democratic party machine remained opened and untouched.
Back then, the brewers and distillers enjoyed a much higher position in society than we do now. So that part is gone. But alcohol was a huge part of Albany politics for a long time–more locally than at a state level.
Q: Is there anything uniquely Albany about your distillery?
A: I’ll say yes. I think the main thing is that we had the confluence of whiskey and rum. New York was mostly rum, but Albany was slowly overtaken by whiskey around 1820 because the surrounding area was all farmland, and we grow phenomenal rye in New York. So we have the overlap between the two and we make both today.
Q: I saw that a 19th century Albany distiller did copper distilled gin. Have you all ever considered doing a gin?
A: We have. I’ve had a gin recipe approved for a couple years now. But we don’t have the capacity. It’s in the long term plan, but it hasn’t materialized yet.
It would be based on a Brooklyn recipe rather than an Albany recipe. Although it’s sort of linked. Phillip Livingston–our bar is on Livingston Ave–had a distillery right on the East River. When he died it was bought by Pierpont who was the architect of Brooklyn. He became this gin magnate in the late 19th century.
A friend of mine dug up his gin recipe. He used a lot of hops and juniper and fennel. We know the recipe because he kept meticulous books about what he ordered, so we can reverse engineer his recipe from there. Every year, I think that this will be the year for gin.
Simple sugars from fruit juices can spontaneously ferment without the addition of anything thanks to natural yeasts in the air. Starchier foods that we produce in much larger quantities, however, will not ferment without some help. Before specific yeasts and bacteria were isolated and reproduced in fermentations that were able to break down starches into simple sugars, saliva was our only option.
On the streets of Oaxaca, two pre-Hispanic beverages sit side by side. Tejate, a complex drink based on corn and cacao, and agua de chilacayota, a refreshment made from a local gourd, are daily refreshments. While both of these drinks are emblematic of Oaxaca, tejate is laborious to make, involving hours of slow, hand mixing.
In both Colima and Jalisco, locals mix raw milk from goats and cows with liquor, often tequila. The drink is commonly called leche caliente, but also carries a variety of names inspired by birds. It is strictly served at breakfast, when ranchers are milking their cows for the day. It is not meant to get you drunk, but it can cure a hangover. Just don’t drink too much raw milk. You might get sick.
The Maya have long made a mead out of sacred cenote water, the honey of stingless bees, and the bark of the balché tree. The resulting drink, named balché, was used as a medicine, a social lubricant, and a religious intoxicant. When Spanish conquerors arrived, they attempted to eliminate the drink by killing the tree. In spite of them, the Maya continued and still continue to make balché today.
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