Photo by Paul Miller.Īnd since Colorado already has a superior craft-beer culture, Wood adds, it stands to reason that the spirits industry would aim for similar success. Eric Jett works at Distillery 291 in Colorado Springs. “Colorado laws are small-business-friendly, and because of that, the doors have opened wider and wider for craft distilleries to become viable,” Wood says. Colorado allows distilleries not only to make their own spirits, but also to sell what they produce, both in liquor stores and their own on- and off-site tasting rooms licensed distillers also may collect the retail revenue from those sales. The popularity of Colorado craft distilleries, according to Wood, results in part from the state’s progressive and lenient laws, which have made it much more feasible for spirit creators to self-distribute. Army soldiers to fashion photographers to abandon their careers to make everything from whiskey and gin to absinthe and moonshine. Then I found this building, and I knew it was time.”Īs the proprietor of his own distillery and the president- and mouthpiece-of the Colorado Distillers Guild, a nonprofit association of licensed Colorado distilleries and distilling industry suppliers and tradespeople, Wood has witnessed a boom in Colorado craft distillers, one that’s persuaded everyone from former U.S. “But I spent years chasing after the idea of opening a distillery, and once I tasted Stranahan’s whiskey, I charged off to Kentucky to buy an 1880 German pot still, started doing tons of research and going to the American Distilling Institute conferences. “I’d decided that I was going to start making whiskey, which wasn’t much more than a drunken proclamation at the time,” he says. It was actually on the river that he first hatched the idea of distilling: He and his fellow boaters liked to celebrate the end of a multi-day paddle with a swig (or three) of whiskey, and right around the time that Stranahan’s-Colorado’s first licensed, post-prohibition distiller-released its introductory batch of 2-year-old Rocky Mountain whiskey, a guy brought along a bottle on one of the rafting trips. Born in Boulder, he earned a degree in business management from Fort Lewis College in Durango, then moved to Salida in 1989 to become a river rafting guide. Like a lot of distillers in Colorado, Wood, whose first name is really Powell Thomas (or just “Passing Through,” as he jokes), took a circuitous route to the profession. Today it houses Wood’s High Mountain Distillery, a tasting room, social center and attached warehouse where they distill and bottle small-batch whiskey, gin and liqueur. The space, a former auto body garage in downtown Salida, was built in 1900, and in 2012, Wood, a 51-year-old hippie with a magnificent handlebar mustache, and his brother Lee bought it. Wood is perched at the end of the bar, his stool surrounded by exposed brick, paint-splattered plaster, scrap metal, curious sculptures and church pews upholstered in red fabric.
Golden Moon Distillery in Golden features a speakeasy-style tasting room.
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