Ampersand Distilling Company is located in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island.
It would develop a dedicated fan base in no time and take its place as one of the best-loved and award-winning pours in B.C.’s burgeoning craft spirits market.
This fall, the craft distillery located on the five-acre Schacht family farm in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island celebrates its 10th anniversary. As befits such an auspicious occasion, the company will release two new flavours into its product line.
The first is the all-organic grain Raconteur Whisky, named in honour of the late co-founder Stephen Schacht. The second is an offshoot of this spirit taking advantage of the first, a barrel-aged version of the signature gin.
Co-founder Jessica Schacht, who is also the author of the Five Bottle Bar: A Simple Guide to Stylish Cocktails, took a break from directing a play at the coming Chemianus Theatre Festival to talk about reaching the milestone of a decade of distilling.
“Jeremy’s background in chemical engineering and the fact that you could apply that to distilling tied in with a real interest in craft cocktails was a perfect marriage,” she said. “Gin was always going to be our flagship spirit, as the most classic cocktails are attributed to it. We wanted to put our unique, local spin on it with a locally made product that could be a workhorse staple in your bar.”
With 18 classic drinks listing gin as an ingredient, the choice to make it first was obvious.
The 1,000-litre pot still and 500-litre packed column, dubbed Dot and Dash, that Stephen and Jeremy designed proved exceptionally good at producing a 97 per cent alcohol. The water used in production is drawn from a freshwater spring the Schachts discovered on their property.
Combining B.C.-grown wheat and seven cultivated or wild botanicals harvested on the farm or in the local forests, the recipe proved a winner. Only two years after being launched, Ampersand Gin was voted B.C.’s best gin at the B.C. Distilled event. The product won Canada’s best classic gin at the 2021 World Gin Awards.
Per Se Vodka came next. This pristine liquor won the world’s best varietal vodka at the 2020 World Spirit Awards.
“Adding the vodka really showcased all that the stills that Jeremy and his late father built could do,” she said. “While it is also excellent for cocktails it is really a favourite to sip neat with many customers. The gin and the vodka were always going to be the focus, with some diversions along the way and, eventually, whisky.”
Those diversions include the Nocino!, another award-winner produced from green walnuts harvested in the summer.
The husks are steeped in pure organic wheat spirit and then spiced with cinnamon, lemon peel and allspice with a slight sweetening from Cowichan Valley honey. Whether mixed or enjoyed on its own, this traditional recipe dark brown liqueur is thought of as Italian but may very well have its roots in England. It’s a key ingredient in both sidecar and negroni classic cocktails.
As to why Ampersand has collected so many industry honours, Schacht has a simple answer.
“Flavour doesn’t lie, but it relies on getting samples in front of people and that is a continuing challenge,” she said. “We are not distributed in government stores and a lot of people who would probably love the product don’t know it because they don’t shop in the private stores. But the blessing has been the close relationships we have built with those stores, bars and restaurants and the farmers markets where we can walk people through our story, our products and make them eager to seek it out again.”
There is no question that dedicated lovers of craft spirits, wines and beers have learned to look at the Vancouver Farmer’s Market vendor list to know if they should bring an extra bag along for that week to stock up on something special for the liquor cabinet or fridge.
Schacht wrote the Five Bottle Bar after the experience of writing a weekly column in the local newspaper and realized that there were certain bottles she kept reaching for to craft delicious drinks. The arrival of Raconteur whisky means three of those five bottles now come straight from Ampersand.
Unlike clear spirits, there is no way to arrive at a whisky fast. Aging is pretty much mandatory to achieve the product and looking at palettes of barrels taking up storage space for years is both expensive and fraught with fear. Getting to release the product is exciting.
“It’s exciting and nerve-racking, especially as a distillery whose primary aim was to produce the purest, cleanest alcohol possible,” she said. “Because with whisky, it’s all about what you leave in and let come together. That’s a real shift in perspective for us, but also a whole other set of mixing that art and science to see what we get; wheat whisky is less common.”
Better yet, when the whisky is bottled those barrels are loaded with flavour that just begs to be used for something else.
Enter the award-winning gin to draw out the flavour in those barrels and produce the barrel-aged gin. Schacht says this can be applied to new equations such as barrel-aged Nocino or Nocino-aged whisky and more.
One thing that the distillery is no longer producing is hand-sanitizer. They made “thousands and thousands of litres” of it during COVID-19. Many local distillers did the same.
“One of the weirdest experiences ever was going from winning the world’s best award for our vodka one day and then turning a whole lot of it into hand-sanitizer the same week,” she said. “That certainly was some of the bougiest sanitizer ever produced. But it was a needed community service where we were working with doctors, midwives, health and wellness businesses in need and I’m proud we could serve them at that time.”
It would take a real Scrooge not to want to drink to that.