FERMENTI'S PARADOX
Accelerating Tradition SCOTT FEUILLE OF TAYLOR GARRETT SPIRITS BRINGS NEW TECHNIQUES AND LOCAL GRAINS TO ALBUQUERQUE'S GROWING CRAFT DISTILLERY COMMUNITY By Joshua Johnson · Photos by Stephanie Cameron
Left: Fried zucchini served with Taylor Garrett whiskey. Center: Copper stills at VARA Winery & Distillery. Right: First Class Old Fashioned, Mile High Molly, and Final Approach cocktails.
One of Albuquerque’s newest distillers, Scott Feuille of Taylor Garrett Spirits, has a bourbon mash-bill whiskey, and a unique method of making it, that has created a buzz among New Mexico’s whiskey lovers. Counting myself as one, I stopped by the tasting room at VARA Winery & Distillery, where Taylor Garrett Spirits has partnered and fired up its still. Sharply dressed and clean-cut, Feuille, a career pilot and retired naval aviator, greeted me at a dining table where he and his VARA colleagues had laid out an impressive sampling of their food and drink offerings. Three screen-printed whiskey bottles sat in flight formation atop a nearby table. He handed me a glass. With a rich mahogany color and a nose of toasted oak, vanilla, maple syrup, and corn, I was transported twentyfive years back in time to a scent memory of ripsawing oak boards in my grandfather’s basement. I was shocked to learn that this whiskey 28
edible New Mexico | SPRING 2020
was only six days in the making—less than one one-hundredth of the time required to age the youngest traditional Straight Bourbons. Accelerated spirits, as they are often called, are just starting to make an imprint on the craft distilled spirits industry. Craft distillers such as Brian Davis of Lost Spirits Distillery in Los Angeles are using alternative processes to develop their flavor profiles by subjecting spirits and wood to heat and light to achieve the same chemical transformations that would otherwise take years in a rickhouse. Terresentia Corporation in North Charleston, South Carolina, uses ultrasonic waves to enhance the profile of their spirits; and though their spirits do spend some of the time in traditional barrels, they aren’t doing any of their own distilling. Unlike Terresentia, Feuille finds the true art of his craft in that distilling process. “The skill isn’t letting it sit in a rickhouse for four or eight years,” he says; “if I put the wrong stuff in that ager, it isn’t going to fix it.” As he describes himself: “I’m a process guy. I’m a
