Sagamore Spirit Distillery in Baltimore

In this episode of the UnCapped podcast, host Chris Sands talks with Brian Treacy, president and cofounder of Sagamore Spirit Distillery in Baltimore, about the distillery’s devotion to Maryland, the farm they source their proofing water from and their ready-todrink canned cocktails. Here is an excerpt of their talk.

UnCapped: Today I’m in Baltimore at Sagamore Spirit with Brian Treacy. This place is absolutely beautiful, and another observation I had — and thank you for the tour: It’s awesome how happy everyone was to see you when you were walking through. It’s always nice when you see employees happy to see the guy in charge.

Brian Treacy: Well, I work with the greatest people I’ve ever met. I’m very fortunate. Everybody brings value, everybody matters, and we wouldn’t exist without them.

UnCapped: It was just something I noticed. Everyone was genuinely happy to say hi to you. Another thing I love about Sagamore is everything has a story. There is a succinct story for everything. I love that. I think the first story I’d like you to tell is the significance of the bottles and the labeling.

Treacy: We definitely want to have thought behind everything that we do. The bottle itself is obviously very uniquely shaped, and for good reason. You may have noticed, if you were in the Visitor Center, we have a display of glass from the 1800s, and you say to yourself, “Man, they made really beautiful glass in the 1800s. What happened?” We just got into this simplistic round bottle — not to knock it or anything, but there is something about the [antique] glass and the efforts they made.

UnCapped: It kind of went from an artistry to just functionality.

Treacy: Exactly. And I get that, from a cost perspective. There’s a great history of distilling in Maryland, and I think the unique shape of our bottle connects us to that history. A lot of the bottles back in the day were uniquely shaped, beautiful, different.

We happened to see a couple that were really inspiring. There’s a great museum here called the Walters Art Museum, and a lot of the artwork and money for that museum came from the history of distilling rye whiskey — and Walters rye whiskey. In the 1800s, they had this beautiful, six-sided bottle that said “Walters” on one side and “Baltimore” on the other, and I thought, if they could make that bottle in the 1800s, why can’t we do that today?

Our logo is the three diamonds, which we get from our farm, Sagamore Farm. We said, what if we shaped our bottle like the diamonds and embossed down the side, kind of like that Walters bottle, and tip our hat to the folks before us — to say thank you for the tradition you started and the legacy you left us — and give them some credit for that.

UnCapped: There are plenty of whiskey brands that, when you look [at the bottle], you know what it is, and this bottle falls into that. Even if you took off all the labels, people would know it’s a Sagamore bottle.

Treacy: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked on people’s websites and Instagram, and the bottle does pop, so I’m zooming in, like, can you see the bottle? Is that our bottle?

UnCapped: Where did the name Sagamore come from?

Treacy: It comes from our farm, about 22 miles north of our distillery in Baltimore County. It was founded in 1925 by the Vanderbilt family, it’s famous for its horse racing, had a great run with thoroughbreds, especially in the ’50s … really great history. That’s where our farm started, but it has evolved to meet more of what we’re trying to do today, and that is taking a modern approach to making whiskey.

Now it’s more of a place for retired horses. We’ve got 16 horses out there now that just kind of live and enjoy their lives. We used to have upwards of 80 thoroughbreds, four or five years ago, but when we got started, one of the

Sagamore Spirit Distillery

301 E. Cromwell St., Baltimore 410-624-7488 sagamorespirit.comcushwabrewing.com 301-223-3434 things we wanted to do was source local grain, which is a lot harder than you think. Rye is extremely difficult to grow.

UnCapped: Do you know what aspect of growing it is difficult?

Treacy: It’s finicky, and it’s actually uninsurable in Maryland, so you could lose everything. Farmers don’t want to grow something they can’t insure. But you ask farmers why you can’t insure it, and they’ll say, “Well, no one really grows it, so we have no data on it. We don’t know what to expect.” Like, what’s the average yield over 10 years, do we typically lose it, how sustainable is it? They just don’t have these data points. It’s actually considered an exotic crop [laughs].

UnCapped: And it’s synonymous with Maryland — Maryland rye.

Treacy: Yeah, that’s the reason we have Maryland rye: We grew a lot of rye grain at some point.

UnCapped: It was the No. 1 crop, right?

Treacy: Yeah, outside of tobacco. So we started reaching out to farmers and asking if they’d like to join us on this project. Obviously, there was some hesitation because of the risk. So we said, why don’t we buy the seed upfront and share that risk with you as a partnership, and we’ll hold you to a quality standard but not a yield. We got 50,000 pounds our first year, which was really exciting. Five years later — and four farms later, including our own farm, where we get 100% of our non-GMO corn and a lot of rye — last year, we harvested over a million pounds of Maryland-grown rye. This excerpt has been edited for space and clarity. Listen to the full podcast at fnppodcasts.com/uncapped. Got UnCapped news? Email csands@ newspost.com.