startup
Equal Opportunity Drinking Freeland Spirits sets out to do distilling differently written by Sheila G. Miller FREELAND SPIRITS STARTED with a Texas grandma, a whiskey night and a dream. That dream is now a reality, thanks to the hard work of founder Jill Kuehler, distiller Molly Troupe and farmer Cory Carman, who have combined to create a woman-owned and operated distillery that cheers “equal opportunity drinking.” Kuehler has a nonprofit background focused in food and agriculture. Up until a couple years ago, she was running Zenger Farm in Southeast Portland, a spot that educates thousands of kids each year about how food is grown. But she’d always had a soft spot for spirits, and was interested in their “terroir”—how grain from different places could influence flavor. When she became friends with Cory Carman, one of the sisters who owns Carman Ranch in Eastern Oregon, it all started to click into place. “Anytime she comes to town we drink whiskey,” Kuehler said. “On one of those fateful whiskey nights, I told her, ‘I think I want to make this.’ She said, ‘I want to grow the grain for it.’”
Jill Kuehler, Molly Troupe and Cory Carman have come together to create a woman-owned distillery.
48 1859 OREGON’S MAGAZINE
MARCH | APRIL 2019
With Carman on board, Kuehler had an idea—what if she could make this a woman-run distillery? The biggest challenge would be finding a female distiller. That’s where Molly Troupe, an Oregon native with a master’s degree in distilling from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland and experience at Hood River Distilling and Oregon Spirit Distillers in Bend came in. “I met this mythical woman through a friend, and I started wooing her to Portland,” Kuehler said. “We opened in the summer of 2017 and immediately started toying around with gin.” Though whiskey was the women’s first love, whiskey—like starting a distillery—takes time. “Gin is a close second love,” Kuehler said. So they started there. But it couldn’t be like everyone else’s gin. On a walk through Forest Park, Troupe brought up what would become Freeland Spirits’ not-so-secret weapon—the Rotovap, a vacuum distillation machine that could infuse into the gin fresh ingredients whose flavors don’t come through in a traditional heat distillation process.
