8 minute read
Eat & Drink
Bees in the trap ... er, booze » Indulge your sugar and liquor-loving soul with the help of Honey House Distillery [ drink]
What pairs great with booze? If you’ve got a sweet tooth, might we suggest honey?
That’s the philosophy up at Honey House Distillery in Hermosa. The legally-distinctbut-part-of-the-family spirit-makers are part of the bee-spit-based enterprise up at Honeyville.
While everyone else was celebrating the end of World War I or fighting off the Spanish Flu back in 1918, Vern Culhane was building beehives, transferring bees he found on his land into them and then selling the resulting honey to locals on the Florida Mesa. His son and daughter-in-law, Danny and Sheree Culhane, carried on the family’s tradition — or beekeeping — and established Honeyville up north of Durango.
Just less than a century after the beekeeping began, Danny’s son, Kevin, teamed up with friend Adam Bergal to do what comes naturally for sweet things: fermentation.
Honey House Distillery was incorporated in 2012 with just two little tanks after the founders attended a bunch of distillery conferences, Kevin Culhane said.
The first product they took a shot at — and the one that remains their flagship spirit — was Colorado Honey Whiskey, which infused bourbon from the heart of bourbon country in Kentucky with Honeyville honey. The product blends a six year old bourbon, a four year old bourbon, and wildflower honey to create a sweet and smoky concoction.
In addition to the honey bourbon, the distillery has five other products on its shelves at the moment: Cinnamon Honey Whiskey, Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur, Hex Vodka, Red Cliffs Spiced Rum, and Forgotten Barrel Honey Flavored Rum.
The cinnamon whiskey is pretty simple in concept — it’s the Colorado Honey Whiskey, but with cinnamon. (This writer may have used it in place of Fireball to enliven a cupcake recipe he shared in a recent article.) The coffee liqueur, on the other hand, combines cold brew coffee from Durango Joe’s Coffee Co.’s dark roast espresso beans with Honey House spirits, honey, and vanilla.
Continued on Page 6 » » All of the spirits Honey House distills on site pass through the custom hiveshaped still the company commis sioned. Can you tell they like honey bees? Nick Gonzales/ DGO
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Nick Gonzales/DGO » The basic meal at the On the Line food truck includes three pieces of hand-dipped cod, beer-battered fries, tartar sauce, and sriracha mayo.
Is On the Hook’s fish and chips food truck worth the wait? » Business has a fleet of food trucks spanning several western states
Back in early December, I saw on Facebook that an On the Hook fish and chips food truck was parking itself on the south end of Durango. My interest was piqued.
Sure, Durango has a wide variety of places to eat, but any time someone wants to add something new to the mix, I’m on board. Unfortunately, I got distracted — fish and chips isn’t such a draw that I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to get it — and missed the truck entirely. When it returned for the day on Jan. 29, though, I made time to try it.
On the Hook is actually a fleet of food trucks based in Laramie, Wyoming, but is covering a large chunk of the western U.S., including Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. If the last couple of months is the norm, they return to a city our size about once a month. In Durango and Pagosa Springs, they set up shop in the parking lots of each town’s Tractor Supply Co.
The menu is simple. A meal includes three pieces of hand-dipped cod, beer-battered fries, Heinz ketchup, tartar sauce, and Sriracha mayo. You can mess around with the quantities of each thing that they give you, but that’s all they’ve got.
According to the company’s website, the cod is wild and line-caught in Alaska before being headed, gutted, and flash frozen. The founders apparently came up with the idea for the business while studying at the University of Wyoming in 2016.
How was the food, you ask? The fries, *ahem* ... chips were pretty decent. No complaints here. They were definitely better than an average fast-food fry, but they weren’t, like,
mind-blowing.
The fish, on the other hand, was surprisingly good. Keeping in mind that we’re talking about fish and chips, which is inherently a street food, it was quite satisfying. The batter was crispy, all-encompassing, and flavorful. Biting into it revealed flaky, juicy, white fish. For what it is — fried fish and potatoes — the meal wasn’t as greasy as it could have been.
The house-made tartar sauce was a pretty basic tartar sauce. I only took about two bites of fish with it, mostly because the Sriracha mayo was much more appealing. While it was more mayo than Sriracha, it was a little bit spicy, and easily the best of the three dipping sauces provided. (I’m including the Heinz ketchup in that equation — after all, John Lennon smothered his in it.) I dipped my fries in the Sriracha mayo as well.
As an American from a landlocked state, I can’t say that fish and chips as a meal holds a special place in my heart, but I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out for On the Hook’s return to the area. — Nick Gonzales
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The spiced rum is a dryer spirit, with just a teeny bit of honey in it, Culhane says. It’s barrel aged for a short period — only about seven months — and then spiced with cinnamon. Around the holiday season, it makes an excellent hot buttered rum. “It mixes really well,” he said. The Forgotten Barrel rum is the only spirit the distillery makes in which the honey is added in the barrel. The spirit, which is aged for three years in an old bourbon barrel, is also a limited release, hitting shelves once every three years. It was available this past holiday season, so if it’s not there right now ... try again in 2022? The vodka is the only product currently available that doesn’t have honey added after distillation, but it’s there in the beginning in the form of a honey mead or wine, which is then triple distilled into a non-sweet product with notes of wildflowers.
“Everything’s got honey in it in some form or another,” Culhane said. Honey House hopes to have a couple more products available by this summer. Head Distiller Jaime Benage is working on a gin, and the distillery is getting ready to break open a straight bourbon in the very near future. At last count, the distillery was aging 71 barrels of bourbon, and the oldest was four years old. The bourbon uses the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s Bow & Arrow Corn from Towaoc.
Everything distilled on the Honey House premises goes through a custom-made 250-gallon honeycomb-adorned still that the company commissioned from Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Kentucky. The distillery’s products are currently distributed throughout Colorado and into Wyoming, but it’s looking to expand, especially into New Mexico and Arizona.
For more information about Honey House Distillery, visit honeyhousedistillery.com or call (970) 247-1474.
For more information about Honey House Distillery, visit honeyhousedistillery.com or call (970) 247-1474. — Nick Gonzales
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