Water of Life
Speaking of his tipple, Winston Churchill once said: “The water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whisky. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.”
As a Brit, Churchill could have been speaking for almost any of the early settlers in eastern Ontario, for those mostly British colonists were all imbued with a culture of drink. From the late 18th century till early in the 20th century, hard alcohol — spirits — was a social need more than a want and distilleries were as familiar as schools and blacksmith shops.
In this 21st century, things have come full circle. Small distilleries are springing up again — but now they offer the kind of elite indulgence that late capitalism grants our moneyed and leisured selves. The current distillers are a bit late to the party, following on the heels of craft vintners and brewers, but the celebrations are open and the music grows louder.
No one has taken as detailed a look back at the history of distilling in the region as Larry D. Cotton, who has written 23 books in his Whiskey & Wickedness series. (You’ll note that Cotton spells the word ‘whiskey,’ with an ‘e,’ the usual spelling in Ireland and the United States and more true, he believes, to 19th-century spellings than the ‘whisky’ spelling current in Scotland, Japan and Canada.)
Cotton’s own town, Perth, was one of the distilling hotspots. The whiskey production, he has punned on his website, was “staggering.” According to Cotton, in the early 1830s, the town’s six licenced distilleries could produce 2,000 gallons of spirits a day in a town that had only 1,000 souls. Of course, a good deal must have been consumed beyond the town limits.
“It was a different time with a different culture of drink,” he says. “Whiskey was considered essential — a way to ease the difficult lives of settlers and soldiers and workmen. Distilleries were considered essential infrastructure. People drank alcohol because they didn’t trust the water. Children were given a wee drop in the evening as an eye closer and drop in the morning as an eye opener. There was an idea that whiskey was medicinal.”
Most of the early distillers had come from Ireland or Scotland, though a few were English. Cotton points out that the word ‘whiskey’ itself, in Gaelic, means “water of life.”
History doesn’t tell us where the first distillery was built in eastern Ontario, Cotton says. “But I would guess it was built in Kingston or Brockville or some other community along the St. Lawrence River, and probably around 1785, but there aren’t many records.”
In Perth, John Criswick and Hanna Murphy have caught the torch of the town’s early distillers. They founded Top Shelf Distillers in spring of 2014 and sold its first bottle in December 2015. “And we’re on the verge of shipping our 100,000th bottle,” Criswick says.
A serial entrepreneur whose other businesses include Ottawa’s Mercury Lounge, Criswick saw a great business case in locating in Perth to help bridge between the Ottawa region, Prince Edward County and the Greater Toronto Area. He expects the Upper St. Lawrence area, especially from Kingston through the Thousand Islands and on to Brockville, to bring in a lot of American tourists who are thirsty for craft beer and spirits.
Millennials are also in the Top Shelf constituency, Criswick says. “Or maybe I should say the Millennial mindset — which is more of a psychographic than a demographic, covering anyone who produces and consumes content on the internet. One of the main affinities you have to develop with them is a sense of purpose and I’d like to think we’re already there.”
The locavore thing that fetishizes locally grown or produced food is also helping, he says. “Especially here in Perth, but throughout eastern Ontario, locally produced product is in demand.” Buyer, meet seller.
Criswick is pleased that Top Shelf’s products are currently in about 140 LCBO stores. Better yet, the LCBO will give Top Shelf a “general listing” next spring, at which point product can be placed in as many as 350 stores.
Is the LCBO as helpful to craft distillers as it might be? There is some ground to be made up, Criswick says. British Columbia, a much smaller province, has more than 60 distilleries. Here in Ontario, there are fewer than a third as many. “And the numbers speak for themselves,” Criswick says.
At present, Top Shelf is offering not only vodka and gin, but six flavours of moonshine, including one with a nice Canadian touch — maple. The moonshine, by regulation, doesn’t have to be aged. The distillery is also watching many barrels of whiskey which, quite soon now, will reach the three years of aging required to label it Canadian whisky.
A Distilling Revival
Whisky once flowed through towns in Eastern Ontario like water until prohibition extinguished the operations of all licenced distilleries. It's taken decades to revive the industry, but here are the local craft distilleries that are leading this region's comeback.
King’s Lock Craft Distillery
With more than a decade of distilling experience, King’s Lock uses local, organic grains to make its vodka, gin, white rye, gold rum, moonshine, white rye and an oak-barrel aged rye. Located along the banks of the St. Lawrence River in historical Johnstown, rich with Canadian grain shipping history, it’s the ideal location for the distillery. klcraftdistillery.ca
Kinsip House of Fine Spirits
Located in Prince Edward County, Kinsip is one of Ontario’s few farm-based distilleries. With plans to grow their own grain for their spirits, Kinsip has a wide range of handcrafted products from gin, vodka, whisky and bitters to more unique spirits, such as brandy, cassis and shochu. kinsip.ca
North of 7 Distillery
Known as Ottawa’s first craft distillery, North of 7 started selling its gin, vodka, rum, and most recently, a bourbonstyle whisky with more varieties aging in barrels. Sourcing local ingredients such as heritage purple corn from Against the Grain Farm in Winchester, juniper berries from Ferme et Forêt and corn from Moulin St. Georges Mills in Québec. northof7distillery.ca
Top Shelf Distillers
Carrying on Perth's legacy of distilling, Top Shelf produces vodka, gin, bitters and a line of flavoured moonshine — maple, citrus mint, cherry, apple pie, wild blueberry and 100 proof. Top Shelf is currently aging whisky to be released in 2019. topshelfdistillers.com
Twelve Barrels
Based on a pre-prohibition recipe from1853, Napanee native, Cole Miller started distilling at a young age and launched Twelve Barrels while he was still a student at Carleton University. Miller’s Twelve Barrels Canadian whisky is available at the LCBO. twelvebarrels.com
Whisky, and most other alcoholic libations, have not always been welcome in Canada. Like our American cousins, we too had a bout with prohibition, though ours was earlier, less widespread and, at least in terms of production, far more porous.
Most prohibition measures were taken by the provinces in the early 20th century, though the federal government did ban alcohol as a wartime measure from 1918 to 1920.
The temperance movement, which saw alcohol as a straightline route to individual and family misery, was very powerful on both sides of the border. The main groups in Canada were the Dominion Alliance for the Total Suppression of the Liquor Traffic and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, though many religious congregations, especially the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, were equally committed to the crusade.
In 1876, the Dominion Alliance, in a seven-part statement of principles, put the prevailing attitude succinctly: “[T]he traffic in intoxicating liquors as common beverages is inimical to the true interests of individuals, and destructive of the order and welfare of society, and ought therefore to be prohibited.”
Most legislation was passed by the provinces. Prince Edward Island was by far the most abstemious, prohibiting alcohol as early as 1901 and leaving the measure in place until 1948, when the province seemed to grow tired of its pinched and parched mouth. Most other provinces introduced prohibition during World War I and ended it during the 1920s.
Ontario was a special case. Though prohibition was in force in the province from 1916 to 1927, the legislation allowed many exceptions. Wineries were never closed, the sale of light beer was eventually permitted and many breweries and distilleries were allowed to continue producing product for export — infamously, to the United States. When the government ended prohibition in 1927, it set up the LCBO to manage sales.
If any prohibition caused fireworks in Canada, it was the American variety, from 1920 to 1933, which saw the rise of organized crime south of the border to bring in huge quantities of completely illegal Canadian booze.
Most of the illegal importation came from Ontario, especially along a 4.5-kilometre stretch of the Detroit River separating Windsor from Detroit, Mich. — a corridor which by some estimates saw 80 per cent of all the smuggling from Canada.
Many American mafia figures made huge fortunes in this game, but they were of course discreet. When a Canadian reporter asked mobster Al Capone about his activities with Canadian smugglers, he answered, “I don’t even know what street Canada is on.”
In Detroit and other American cities, vicious gangs were involved in the smuggling. The savagery of their Canadian counterparts was comparatively muted. In Windsor, a pool hall owner named Harry Low became a major supplier to gangs in Windsor. Daniel Francis, in his book, Closing Time: Prohibition, Rum-Runners, and Border Wars, described a man so unashamed of his trade that he “lived an ostentatious lifestyle, which included the luxury mansion he built for himself … [with] parquet floors, leaded windows, a stunning spiral oak staircase … and an undulating roof of shingles imported from England and meant to resemble the thatched roof of a Cotswold cottage.” This eventually became the house that former prime minister Paul Martin grew up in.
Most of the alcohol leaving Canada was officially going to such legal destinations as Cuba or Mexico though it was quickly diverted to the American market. The export taxes of the time provided as much as 20 per cent of federal revenue, Francis notes — and, in 1929, brought in twice as much as the income tax.
The people who were moving alcohol illegally across the border came to be known as rum-runners. One of the more infamous was Claude “King” Cole, who owned Main Duck Island at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. As Francis notes, fisherman Cole not only allowed other smugglers to seek shelter on the island on their way to New York ports of entry, but did his own smuggling, bringing booze to the island and later transshipping it himself to New York, often hidden under piles of fish. When police later raided his island home and found suspicious quantities of bourbon and rye, Cole managed to convince the judge that it was for his personal consumption. The judge dismissed the case and even ordered the police to return the alcohol to the island, where, no doubt, it probably sat for only a few days before continuing its way south.
The only craft distillery in Ottawa is North of 7, the brainchild of Greg Lipin and Jody Miall, who opened it in the fall of 2014. Its offerings include vodka, gin, rum and several whiskys — including a four-grain whisky that offers a good simulation of fine American bourbon. (All true bourbon must be American, by law.)
North of 7 whiskys are aged in 53-gallon oak barrels made by the Independent Stave Company, renowned for its taste enhancing effects on many Kentucky bourbons, including Jim Bean and Heaven Hill.
If it weren’t for bourbon, Lipin and Miall might never have created North of 7. Both are highly experienced rock climbers who have often sought climbing adventure in Kentucky. That was where their palates first learned all the niceties of choice American bourbon. They took time touring a lot of distilleries in the Bluegrass State and soon resolved to replicate bourbon’s savour in their own city.
“And we’ve had a good time,” Lipin says. Mind you, there have been problems, especially of the bureaucratic sort. “We thought provincial laws would change more quickly than they have,” he notes.
In British Columbia, for example, craft distilleries selling in their own shops are exempt from the more than 160 per cent markup the province applies to other spirit makers, as long as they produce less than 50,000 litres of alcohol per year and distil the spirit from local grain or fruit.
“But it’s not like that in Ontario,” Lipin says. “Here, I pay as much to the government as I would if I were selling it in the LCBO. Compared to B.C., the playing field is not flat at all.”
On the positive side, his products have been well received by customers. “They like to know where the product comes from — something you never know when you buy from the giant internationals.”
Virtually everything is sourced in the province except for a few spices that aren’t produced in Canada.
While he agrees with Top Shelf’s Criswick that millennials like craft spirits, he insists that all ages have responded well to North of 7’s products. “Why, we had a tasting the other day at a retiree home — and they loved it,” he says.
North of 7 Distillery
1733 St. Laurent Blvd., Ottawa, Ont.
northof7distillery.ca, 613.627.4257
Top Shelf Distillers
14 Warren Cresc., Perth, Ont.
topshelfdistillers.com, 613.201.3333
Whiskey & Wickedness
57 Foster St., Perth, Ont.
whiskeyandwickedness.ca, 613.818.1386
