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Glass half full
Elevated Mountain Distilling in Maggie Valley.
Elevated Mountain turns beer into liquor BY BOYD ALLSBROOK CONTRIBUTING WRITER here were many things I expected to experience as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic — stress, isolation, illness, etc. Absent from that list was what I had the pleasure of tasting this weekend — quite simply, the finest liquor I’ve ever waxed poetic about. It’s a story only the wild circumstances of this year could have wrought. It begins with Asheville’s most well-known industry: beer. Often synonymous with craft-tourism, Asheville’s breweries fill an even larger economic role. “A lot of people might not realize that Asheville is a major supply hub for the whole East Coast,” said Dave Angel, owner of Elevated Mountain Distilling Co. in Maggie Valley. “They’re not just making local beer for local people.” When restaurants and bars along the Eastern Seaboard were shuttered in early spring, Asheville breweries kept kegging their product, waiting, hoping for the market to open back up. “Big breweries in Asheville had to make sure they were ready to launch as soon as Delaware or New Jersey or whatever state opened up. They had to have beer ready to go into that market,” said Angel. As 15 days turned to weeks turned to
“Making whiskey’s just like making a cake. The ingredients that go in it define what the final cake is. So it’s not like we can just use this to make our regular whiskey — it’s a unique whiskey that we’ll create.” — Dave Angel
months, and it became clear that things wouldn’t be the same for a long time, those waiting kegs began to pass their sell-by date of 45 days. “Cans and bottles were no problem, but restaurants and bars mainly serve draft beer,” Angel said. Breweries were stuck. They had the supply, but no demand and nowhere to ship it. Hundreds of kegfuls of Asheville’s topquality beer seemed destined for dumping, to become just another casualty in the growing
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litany of COVID losses. The overwhelming sentiment: what a waste. Enter Mr. Angel. “They actually approached me — one of the major breweries in Asheville,” he said. “They had literally thousands and thousands of gallons that had expired. The beer may not have been right but the whiskey, the alcohol in it is perfect. So they gave it to me instead of throwing it away, and that’s what I’m working with.” The way you make whiskey is essentially
to make beer — what distilleries call mash — and then to distill most of that away until you’re left with a high-concentration alcoholic beverage. This process creates a clear liquor called white dog whiskey — what people often refer to incorrectly as moonshine — which is then barrel-aged until it becomes the darker drink you’d recognize as whiskey proper. Understood in distillery terms, the Asheville brewery’s offer was basically for a massive supply of free, quality mash. “They have to write it off, they can’t sell it because it’s expired,” said Angel. “So they’d rather see it go to a good use than to just dump it. I’m very fortunate with that. I still have to pay to distill it and for the propane, the labor — it’s an expense we hadn’t planned on. But they’ve just made it so practical that we’re figuring out how to do that. Literally we get about 2,000 gallons every week. We started
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