Laws Whiskey

MIND BODY Season 5 Durango Diaries SOUL

Wednesday, March 18 • 6 p.m. Local voices. Local stories. Welcome to Durango Diaries.

A popular buzzword, self care is more than getting a massage. It’s taking care of your mind, body and soul. Three local self-care professionals will share their stories about how they discovered their paths. Durango Public Library 1900 East Third Ave.

Laws Whiskey House: A Colorado distillery making really good rye from Colorado grains » Malt suppliers Colorado Malting Co. also has its own brewery [ drink]

Storytellers include:

Janet Curry is a licensed professional counselor and a certified mindfulnessbased stress reduction teacher in Durango.

Colleen Rafferty eventually found inner peace by enrolling with the Nutritional Therapy Association and pursuing her dream of becoming a licensed nutritionist.

Bif Hilliard danced professionally for many years in Seattle, a passion that naturally led her into the world of yoga. She now teaches dance at Durango Dance and yoga at The Sweaty Buddha.

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FREE. Kid-friendly. Info at durangoherald.com/durangodiaries

Nick Gonzales/DGO » » The distillery at Laws Whiskey House in Denver is closed to the public temporarily for renovation, and the barrel house (pic tured) is only viewable by appointment. But eventually, the entire operation will open back up with a taproom.

If you went back in time to the Revolutionary War and sat down for a stiff drink with General George Washington, you’d probably be sipping a rye whiskey with the future president. Not only did Washington grow rye at Mount Vernon, it was also the most popular grain for distilling in the United States until Prohibition.

During the 1920s, the palates of Americans softened on bootleg Canadian whiskeys, most of which were lighter and corn-based. For 100 years, rye whiskey languished at the back of the bar until craft distillers began popularizing it again while experimenting with different kinds of malt.

If you search for rye whiskey around Durango’s bars and liquor stores, you’re likely to run into Laws Whiskey House, one of the best rye whiskey distillers in the world, at least according to Whiskey Magazine, which gave it gold medals in three of the last four years.

The Denver-based distillery began whiskey production in 2011, first hitting shelves in 2014. Its founder and namesake, Al Laws, was an oil and gas

Courtesy of Laws Whiskey House » » Laws Whiskey House has won a number of awards, but both critics and the distillers at laws seem to have a soft spot for its rye whiskey.

analyst from Edmonton, Canada, who was obsessed with whiskey from an early age. Today, his distillery produces a variety of whiskeys – not just rye. But making rye seems to occupy a special place in Laws’ heart.

“It’s not like bourbon. All those rich peppery notes become something quite different. Ours radiates a vegetative heat like a Serrano pepper. It warms you up if you’re cold or you’re wet,” he said. “It gets right into your bloodstream like the symbiote in Spider-Man. It gets stuck to you and soon it’s in your every heartbeat. It’s an amazing whiskey.”

Laws’ analytical nature and passion for whiskey aren’t the only reasons his distillery keeps winning awards. He gets by with a little help from his friends.

Law considers his Yoda to be Bill Friel, the former master distiller at Barton 1792 Distillery and a 2006 inductee into the Whiskey Hall of Fame in Kentucky.

Laws met Friel while touring Kentucky, learning about the workings behind large-scale whiskey operations.

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