Ray Baker is serious about his booze
R.J. Baker Distilling Co. is nondescript by design. With GPS and directions from the man himself, it still is difficult to find because it…
R.J. Baker Distilling Co. is nondescript by design. With GPS and directions from the man himself, it still is difficult to find because it is not clearly a distillery. What it clearly is, is one of the outbuildings on a small farm in rural Delaware. Beyond the padlocked door (all the doors are padlocked as the first theft deterrent, but there are plenty of others) there is a small office, not five feet deep. It accommodates a desk and television as well as room for visitors to sit. Beyond the office is the distillery, and the storage facility, and the bottling line and the distribution area all contained in barely a thousand square feet.
The separate areas are marked by painted lines on the floor, as if some kids were arguing about whose section belonged to whom. The analogy isn’t far off. The feds have very clear rules about storage, aimed, one suspects, at preventing bootlegging. Practically every grain that passes through the door must be accounted for. If it isn’t in the bags or the stills, it had better be fermenting, bottled or sold (taxably).
The distiller doesn’t give the impression of a man happy to comply with the rules. In fact, he started distilling ethanol to defray his wife’s gasoline costs. Baker wears his hair long and has a Libertarian bearing that appears to be more about personal independence than politics. That is, he prizes self-sufficiency in an almost aggressive way. When it turned out that ethanol was too expensive to produce on a small scale, Baker decided to but his distilling and homebrewing skills together and begin making whiskey.
Unlike homebrewing, which mostly is unregulated, the government gets really antsy when people want to make their own spirits, so Baker successfully lobbied for a distiller’s permit. Over the last two years, he has become an expert on federal and state distilled spirit laws, policies and regulations. Along the way, he has made some pretty damn good rum and some perfectly acceptable bourbon. And he is just getting started.
The thing about distilling is that you have to do it to do it. It may seem simple, but it is pure trial and error. It is one of the very, very few hobbies that you only can do professionally.
Baker’s homebrewing career helped. He had a sense of what yeast would do, and how to create an acceptable mash (the combination of grains that is distilled into whiskey) but it wasn’t until he drew his first batch, which was after he got his distiller’s license and other professional certifications, that he knew whether or not he could make a go of it. Distilling is more an art than you might expect. It requires being able to distinguish, by smell, the heads, hearts and tails of a batch. The heads are discarded and used for cleaning. If you’ve ever heard moonshine can make you go blind, they’re talking about this part. The hearts are the good stuff and the tails are the after-product. They can be mixed in part to influence the flavor, but the “cut” always is at the distiller’s discretion.
And the cut is affected by the flavors, which occur over the process that comes with selecting the grains (or in the case of rum, molasses), figuring out how much sugar can be extracted from them, making sure the fermenting temperatures are both appropriate and consistent. For something that seems so simple, it is pretty complex. If the spirit doesn’t taste the way you want, you have to review each step, over and over until you find a finished product you’re happy with.
Every craft batch of whiskey (or spirit of any kind) is essentially the endorsement of the person who distilled and aged it, their way of saying, “This is the best this batch can be.”
It took Baker 14 tries to find the right combination of mash and cut. The first 13 are aging in barrels, and will be earmarked for special releases. The 14th is Iron Forge Bourbon, only available very locally. All of his spirits (he makes several infused rums as well) are named for local landmarks, and are part of a growing trend of craft liquors.
This is a good time to be a craft distiller. Like beer, craft spirits are getting hot. Also like beer, it is driven as much by a kind of exclusivity and novelty as it is by a recognition that there is a value to small batch brands. For now, vodka is pretty hot and rum and gin are on its heels. There is a relative ease to white liquors. Moreover, there is a shorter turnaround. Whiskey aged in a small barrel still takes weeks or months to achieve the right flavors. The larger the barrel, the longer the time. Generally, a 50 gallon batch takes a year to be even close to ready. White liquors are ready pretty much after the cut. Baker is aging some rum, but most of what he distills he sends right out the door. Because it is local, liquor stores are enthusiastic about having it.
The difficulty, as craft beer finds out with more than a little regularity, is getting the distributor on the same page. It is easy (and often fun) to paint distributors as vanguards of the establishment. In reality, their difficulties stem from trying to balance the needs and demands of clients that include multi-billion dollar companies like Jim Beam and Ray Baker, who makes let’s say, fewer than a billion dollars a year. The craft beer boom wasn’t kind to the logistics that distributors already had in place and, from the looks of it, the craft liquor industry likely is going to learn the same lessons.
The difficulty for people like Baker, though, is to find a way to keep from going broke while the rest of the world adjusts to a return to the days before distribution, or even regulation, when we got our booze from the guy who made it. Personally.