PEDAL TO THE MEDAL

Boulder Spirits debuts Special Release Series with a San Francisco Double Gold

BY COLIN WRENN

Every spring, the preeminent palates, authors, influencers and experts from across the alcohol world hold a massive blind tasting out West. The San Francisco World Spirits competition sees four days of rigorous, highly controlled tastings, and since 2000 it’s been setting the bar and calling the shots for who is crowned the best of the best.

At this year’s event, which took place April 13 to 15, Boulder Spirits took home a double gold for its 2022 limited release, The Trailhead.

While the imprint Boulder Spirits has only been around since 2018, the business has roots dating back to 2007, when Ted Palmer launched the ginfocused Roundhouse Spirits in a small facility in Longmont. In 2012, current owner Alastair Brogan moved to Colorado from Motherwell, Scotland. By 2014, he came on as a partner and the distillery became Vapor. It was with the launch of the first American Single Malt in 2018 that the spirits were rebranded, though the production facility maintained its original name and continues to produce white label hooch under that designation.

Medals from all the big ones — including the World Whiskey Awards and the International Wine and Spirits Competition — line the walls of Vapor’s East Boulder tasting room. The team has been winning awards, many of them double gold or platinum, every year since the launch of the first bourbon in 2017.

“Awards like this really do provide a sense of accomplishment,” says Brogan. “The time and effort we’ve put into distilling and aging whiskey for the past eight years is really paying off recently.”

While the Vapor team had been planning to institute a Special Release series, the development of The Trailhead happened somewhat by acci- dent. A barrel of the already four yearaged American Single Malt and a barrel of the peated variation were both aging in some sherry barrels. The team had no plans to cut them loose. So why release it?

“Because it tastes so fucking good,” says Negley. And while the majority of the 850 bottles were sent to Alberta and British Columbia, Negley says there’s still roughly 50 bottles still for sale at the tasting room for $95 a pop.

“We don’t believe there’s a $100 bottle of whiskey that’s under eight to nine years old,” says Negley. “We put that price on it because we knew it was good. With the special releases it’s got to be a limited amount, but also flavor.”

The whiskey is an incredible sipper and more than justifies the price tag. That it serendipitously launched the series and acted as Negley’s first foray into blending also helps solidify its lore.

“This was our first chance to really flex in that blending capacity,” says Negley, noting that the follow up, an expression by the name of The Ten Essentials, will launch in late July or early August. It will combine single malt from four different oaks — port, sherry, armagnac and American.

Negley says the series will continue with names that allude to all things outdoors, with an annual release he hopes will grow into the kind of debauchery found at a Stranahan’s Snowflake launch party. “Alastair didn’t move here because he likes the rain,” says Negley with a laugh. “It’s not a theme, it’s a lifestyle.”

It should come as no surprise that Boulder Spirits have become such critical darlings. Water comes from Eldorado Springs with grains arriving from the U.K.-based Muntons, the same company used by many of the isle’s heavyweights, including Macallan. “If you start with quality, in theory, you end with quality,” Negley says.

The Trailhead wasn’t the only release to catch the kingmakers’ attention within the last year. The Colorado Straight Bourbon Five Year popped up at number 10 on author and critic Fred Minnick’s Top 100 American Whiskeys for 2022 alongside the likes of George T. Stagg and the Old Fitzgerald 19 Year. And while that batch is sold out, the 2023 edition is set to be released on June 1.

In addition, Vapor will be helping Root Shoot Malting — a fifth generation family farm in Loveland that supplies barley, wheat, rye and non-GMO corn to craft brewers and distillers — launch its own whiskey. “We’ve got the biggest pot still in the state. So they wanted to see how their malt performs at a worldclass level,” says Negley. The brand is set to launch this summer.