I.C. Light is a staple beer in Pittsburgh. It is a quintessentially Yinzer experience to drink the beer while the Steelers or Penguins duke it out against an opponent on prime time television. But the brewery that makes that beer, Pittsburgh Brewing Co., is now moving into the distillation space.
For over a decade, the company has been contracting out their brewing to the maker of Rolling Rock. After the brand was purchased by Cliff Forrest, owner of the Kittanning-based Rosebud Mining Co, it began to renovate the vast campus of Pittsburgh Glass Works on the bank of the Allegheny River in Creighton, Pennsylvania. Today, that brewery is operational. It is a gleaming, state-of-the-art facility, cranking out case after case of Western Pennsylvania’s favorite beers.
In the back, a small whiskey distillery has been built under the guidance of Matt Strickland. Strickland first consulted the company on their distillery, and has now come on as the distiller for the new project, Iron City Distilling. Strickland has a depth of international experience distilling, consulting with distilleries, and teaching on distillation. He is the author of Cask Management for Distillers.
I met with Strickland at the distillery, still partly under construction, the day after he had prepared the first mash for the new brand. The still would go into operation for the first time that coming weekend.
We spoke about whiskey through the lenses of professionalism, globalization, innovation, and Pennsylvanian heritage.
The following interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Q: The Scottish government recently said that, without marketing, all spirits within a given category are just variations of the same thing. To what degree is this true? How can you make a unique spirit?
A: I don’t agree with the sentiment that distilled spirits within categories are interchangeable. The substrates are wildly different from one another. It would be like saying beer and wine are interchangeable–and they’re not. And we take it further than the beer and wine people do.
One of the things that the industry is slowly coming to a reckoning with is that we have been traditional to a fault. You can understand that if you think about the production cycle of spirits. With the exception of vodka or gin, the turnaround time of developing a product is considerably longer than beer or wine. You could open a brewery, dial in a recipe, and have it released in a couple of weeks. For me, if I want to do a certain whiskey, it’s a four year minimum. You have a lot of money and labor tied up into something that will take a long time to develop–and you don’t even know if it will sell.
Consumer trends change faster than we can as an industry. When you look at the long term view it’s challenging. There’s all this money tied up in liquid stocks, so people are risk averse in the industry. To make something unique is not that challenging, there is a lot of room to explore because people have been really reluctant to go after it.
When I look at larger whiskey firms, they’re talking about the innovation they’re doing, but most of it is iterative. Every week I see the release schedule, and I just see another release with some red wine barrel or something, but it tastes very similar to the guy who did it last week.
Q: Do you think that the way people build careers and receive training as distillers teaches them to be risk-averse and less open to exploration?
A: It depends on how they get their training. I work in the education space and I see both sides of it. Some of the organizations that I train for are very old school in their mentality. They say, “This is the way to do it. This is the way it has always been done.”
But I teach in Kentucky, and I do a two day workshop called The Craft of Whiskey, which is an overview of the different whiskey styles around the world. People come in from all walks of life. We get guys from Jim Beam, Pernod Ricard, and Diageo, we get guys who want to open small distilleries, we get guys who have no intention of distilling, but they’re retired, have the money, and want to learn about how their favorite tipple is made.
I find in that class, once you get the discussion going, those are the people who tend to bend the rules a little more. Even in the larger firms, there is interest to see what smaller distilleries are doing and how they can innovate.
My mentor from Diageo told me that there is not a single thing that anyone in the craft sector has done that they hadn’t tried internally first. I’m not so sure about that. But, the truth is, a lot of those big guys are playing around with stuff, but they’re beholden to shareholders and stock prices. They can’t be as nimble about innovation. If they are going to do some serious innovation, they almost have to re-brand it. They have to innovate more slowly because there’s more at stake.
Q: So, perhaps there is a sort of U-shape in innovation in distillation. At one end you have the traditional producer, like the mezcalero who only knows how to distill the spirit one way in the traditional manner, then you have the craft producer who has some more flexibility and some curiosity but you’re less beholden to stakeholders, and then you have the big producers who need to consider stock prices.
A: There’s too much money at stake and you can’t run off your customers. At the same time, they do have the ability to innovate, but they don’t. They could start another brand but that’s expensive. You do have traditional guys in Oaxaca and surrounding regions. And the French are really bad about it with cognac. I had a mentor who was a French master distiller and he believes that there is only one way to do it. There is a bit of that too where it’s just sort of stubbornness. We were taught this way, we are successful, we don’t change it.
Q: Is there one image of professionalism in the whiskey world?
A: I think it can depend. Everyone’s a little different with how they approach things. But there is sort of an orthodoxy in place with the larger firms. Within a tight set of barricades, they stay in their lane.
Q: Is there a convergence of still styles globally, and is that affecting the diversity of spirits we are able to produce?
A: Yes and no. There are a couple of firms that are releasing stills to the craft segment. In effect there is a sort of convergence there. But I think it’s more categorical. In certain arenas, you’ll see certain kinds of stills. If I make whiskey, stills A, B, and C are good for me, but D, E, and F are for the cognac guys. I think that’s a mistake. I think there is a lot of technique that could be experimented with. You see a little bit of that in the agave space. One of the problems with mezcal ancestral is that it has to be made in clay pots, except you can’t really scale that. You could build more of them, but that’s labor intensive.
Some stills can’t be scaled up. Some of it is regulatory. In cognac, they have a certain still they are required to use. It can’t be above a certain size. It can’t be below a certain size. If they want to expand their production, it’s not an issue of buying a bigger still, it’s an issue of buying more stills.
There are some people who are starting to play with distillation equipment a little bit. Where you are seeing something interesting is in the gin space, the botanical space. They’re taking cues from the Japanese and shōchū production and the use of vacuum distillation. One of Bacardi’s distilleries out of the UK distills to 25 degrees Fahrenheit–that’s the hottest the distillation gets–because it’s under such a huge amount of vacuum on the still.
Q: Agave spirits are now leaving Mexico, Japan makes whiskey and gin, Australian whiskey is on the rise, do you think this is the most globalized distillation has been in history?
A: I think so, in that people have access to it. Distillation, as far as recreational beverages go, is new compared to beer and wine. Maybe 600 years old, most everything prior to 1500 was medicinal. Distillation is challenging, so a lot of times it didn’t travel far.
Today, with the sheer access to spirits, it’s the most globalized it’s been. It’s nice to see different ideas from the different distilling cultures creeping into new areas. That’s something I’ve tried to impress on a lot of my students. If you make whiskey, you should be learning how to make cognac, even if you never make it. You should understand home mezcal is made and you should understand how a retort still works in the Caribbean. It’s possible that you’ll never use those techniques, but it makes you better at problem solving. Learning something different can make you more valuable in the long run. If nothing else, as distilled spirits makers, we have to think in the long term.
Our sister company is a brewery–one with a 161 year heritage. They think about a month out, I’m thinking 5 to 10 years out.
Q: Working in different countries in whiskey, do you see a difference in the cultures within the community of whiskey makers?
A: I’m seeing a bit of that. But it depends on which category of whiskey you’re talking about. There are some taboo things that no one wants to touch. Bourbon, for example, no one outside of the United States wants to touch it. Firstly, they couldn’t legally call it bourbon. So how would you market it? Despite its popularity in a lot of western drinking countries, no other distillers make it. They say, “Leave the Americans to make it.”
But when it comes to single malt, virtually all of the major whiskey making countries and then dozens more have their own single malt producers now. For a long time they really wanted to be Scotch whiskey, but now we are starting to see the emergence of industries or scenes and they’re saying, “You know what, I’m from Taiwan. I’m going to make whiskey, seen through the lens of Taiwanese culture.” We are seeing more and more of that, although a lot of people are still content to produce whiskey the way the Scots do.
Q: To what degree can the regulatory framework change the palate of a spirit?
A: With single malt, it could be potentially huge. The American Single Malt Whiskey Commission spent years trying to define what American Single Malt should be and then present those ideas to the Tax and Trade Bureau. I went to see a panel of the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission when they were presenting their ideas. My gut reaction was that you could release a single malt whiskey into a 500 liter ex-sherry butt for 20 years, and another guy could put a single malt into a little 5 gallon new American oak, heavily charred barrel for 3 months and those would both be considered single malt. Nobody in their right minds would confuse those two things. It felt like they just didn’t want to leave anyone out. But maybe it can be good for innovation.
Regulations can be good for styles, because they define what the style is. For the consumer, that can be a good thing, because you know what you’re getting. On the other hand, regulations stifle innovation or they make it more challenging. How do you walk that fine line between codifying a style, but doing it in such a way that you leave enough room for interpretation and innovation to happen. (But not so much room that people go so far off the rails that consumers don’t recognize it, which can damage the category as a whole.)
Q: Your new distillery, Iron City Distilling, is adjacent to its sister company, Pittsburgh Brewing Co. Will you do bier schnaps?
A: We will do single malt. There was some talk about schnaps because there is a lot of German heritage with the beer. I have the equipment to do it, I understand the techniques to make it. It is a bit of a marketing thing. How do you present it? A lot of people don’t really understand what schnaps is.
As of right now it’s bourbon, rye, and single malt. The brewery has some old beer recipes that they’re digging up for me. I can turn them into single malt. The idea is that in a couple years, whenever we release that whiskey, they can brew a batch of it and you can taste it side by side–although the single malt wouldn’t have hops in it. So there is the potential to have some fun collaborations.
Q: In terms of making whiskey here in the Western Pennsylvania area and working with an old brand, to what degree do you want to make spirits that are inspired by regional heritage?
A: Our rye will be. This is the region where whiskey got started in the United States.
In the lead up to Prohibition, the Pennsylvania distillers were huge. Rye was the most popular spirit in the country through the 1800s. It wasn’t until the late 1800s, and after Prohibition, when bourbon became the preferred drink. The Pennsylvania distillers were the ones making a lot of money. But they made plenty of unforced errors. They didn’t consolidate like the bourbon guys did prior to Prohibition. They were too arrogant–they thought that Prohibition wouldn’t really happen. By the time that they realized that it was happening, it was too late.
Our rye brand will be 50% malted rye and 50% unmalted rye, which is a very classic Pennsylvania all rye recipe from 150 years ago. We do sweet mashes only, no sour mashes, which was really traditional back then. We go low proof into the barrel and we are going to be heating the rickhouse–all of these are traditional techniques.
We are working with different varieties of rye than they would have back then, although we are still doing single varietal rye. We have 250 acres of Rosen rye planted that will be harvested in August, and we will start working with that in the fall. That’s a very floral rye. Right now we are working with danko rye, which is a Czech rye that grows well over here and it’s very spicy. They’ll both be the same recipe, but the varieties change. Hopefully people will taste the difference between the two. 150 years ago, you would have been working with one or two farmers who were growing pretty much the same thing.
The brewery has a 161 year history and wants to be in the present. Whereas the distillery has no history, and we are trying to go back 161 years.
Q: Is Pittsburgh the main target market?
A: We will sell out of our tasting room for the first couple years. We probably won’t see a serious release off these premises for 4 or 5 years. Then we will move into stores.
Q: So are you conceptualizing your products for a consumer in 4 or 5 years?
A: You can kind of bet on these things, but you’ll be right half of the time and wrong half of the time. I don’t really chase those patterns. All you can really do is make as much as you possibly can, and you know that there will be good times and bad times.
None of the big guys set out to make 20 or 30 year old whiskeys. If The Macallan could sell three year barrels instead of the 20 year barrels they’re famous for, and make the same amount of money, they would. No one in their right mind would keep whiskey around that long. Traditionally, that’s just not the way it was done.
You had firms that weathered the bad times and they had barrels that weren’t selling, and they were getting older and older. When things start looking up again, they can dump those barrels and make more money. Nobody set out to make those whiskeys.
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