The Woodinville Story

Each day at our distillery, we start with two-and-a-half tons of locally grown non-GMO corn and rye from the Omlin Family Farm in Quincy, Washington. We mill every kernel into fine flour. Then we mix the flour with purified water from the Cascades. We cook the mixture to turn the starches into sugar.

Once mashing is complete, we move the mixture into one of our eight 9,000-gallon fermenters. We add yeast and let the mash rest for four days before distillation. It’s a controlled fermentation—a key difference between Woodinville and mega-distilleries. Working in smaller batches allows us to maintain the mash’s temperature, and thus the activity in the fermentation, within two degrees.

Our mash runs 20% sugar, unusually high for the industry and an absolute feast for the
yeast. Once the yeast has finished converting all that sugar to alcohol during fermentation, it’s time to distill.

The mash is pumped into the still and the distillation begins. Alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, concentrates, and leaves the still as a vapor.

Our handmade, custom-designed 1,320-gallon German stills are made of copper hammered just outside the Black Forrest of Germany by third-generation copper smiths.

Eight “superaromator“ trays refine and purify the alcohol in the column.

The highly refined vapors are re-condensed into a liquid, and the whiskey is born. Only the “hearts” of the run meet our standards and are collected.

After the whiskey is distilled, it’s proofed to 55% alcohol by volume with purified Cascade Mountain water.

The barrel wood is seasoned for 18 months in open air, wind, rain, and snow before being coopered. We fill the barrels with new make whiskey at our processing and aging facility in Quincy, WA.

All our whiskey is aged for at least five years at our Central Washington private barrel houses. Hot summers and cold winters cause expansion and contraction in the barrels, forcing the whiskey deep into the wood, where it can steal coveted vanilla, butterscotch, and spice notes. This process repeats over five years so what emerges when it’s time to bottle is a whiskey of stunning complexity, character, and finesse.

It fluctuates through the year, but typically the Woodinville production crew bottles biweekly. After their five-year slumber, the barrels are decanted, filtered, chilled, proofed down (except for cask-strength runs), and filtered. Then the liquid is pumped to the bottling line, where the finished whiskey fills handsome rectangular bottles with cork tops and “Made in Washington” running down the sides.