Black Button Distilling

By Meghan Swanson

Jason Barrett is not afraid to fail. If you knocked him down seven times, he’d not only stand up eight–he’d research, learn, experiment, and invent a way to knock you down the ninth time. From earning his four-year degree in three years (just before he ran out of tuition money) to trading payroll work for distilling knowledge from experts, Jason is known to unswervingly meet problems head on, tackling them with creative solutions. This trait even extends to jumping out of planes for fun; once Jason sets his mind to something, he’s going to do it. “A whole bunch of friends and I wanted to go skydiving, they chickened out – I went anyway,” he tells us. Why would he undertake such a heart-stopping activity without the support of his group? “Because I wanted to go skydiving,” he answers simply, with a grin. He applied himself similarly to founding Black Button Distilling of Rochester, New York, in 2012. In a trajectory exactly the reverse of a skydiver’s freefall, Black Button has only come up, up, up from there, growing from just Jason to today’s 83 employees, and earning awards not only for their spirits but for their impact in the community. 

“It’s always interesting to me, the small things that can really impact the direction of your life.”

Jason did not grow up expecting to successfully launch his own craft distillery. In fact, he learned what it was to be unsuccessful - and what it was to overcome adversity - early on. By the time Jason made it to the third grade, he admits, he still couldn’t read. His parents found a kindly nun to tutor Jason one-on-one, and with her help he found the solution to his problem. Each word, sentence, paragraph, and eventually chapter he read for the nun would buy him time in which she would play games with him. With the path to his goal clearly in sight, Jason put his nose to the grindstone and caught up with his classmates. The experience was a fundamental one, teaching Jason that he could overcome even big obstacles with hard work and consistent practice - and it clearly stuck with him. To this day, he still has the book the nun taught him to read on.

It was assumed that Jason would grow up to become part of the family business. His great-grandfather started working on the factory floor of a high-end button factory in Rochester in 1922, and decades later  young Jason started to help out at the factory at an early age. He would sweep the shop floor, and soon was put to work sorting loose buttons.  He discovered he wasn’t very good at sorting the buttons, no matter how hard he tried–that was how young Jason and his family found out that he’s colorblind. “There was a joke when I was a kid that, if I took over the family business, we’d only be able to make black buttons,” he laughs. 

Recognizing that his trajectory was leading him away from the family button factory, he chose to major in Political Science at SUNY College at Cortland. Perhaps in an unconscious act of foreshadowing, he wrote his major’s thesis on the politics surrounding Prohibition in the United States. It was during this research on the history and laws surrounding spirits that he realized that although he was too young to buy beer, it was perfectly legal for him to buy everything he needed to make beer. “Being a fairly industrious young man, I went up to a homebrew shop, bought a starter kit, and started brewing beer in my dorm closet,” he recalls with a shrug. “It was pretty awful. I’m not good at it, I kinda only half-read the directions and was definitely going for potency over cleanliness. But I made two batches that semester and my friends and I drank it anyway,” he says, smiling at their youthful determination. 

Unlike some college students who pick up and then drop homebrewing, Jason stuck it through. By the time he’d graduated and moved to Washington D.C. to work in politics, he was an accomplished brewer, winning accolades and becoming a part of the very active local homebrew community. Now he knew what he wanted - to open a brewery. Diving even deeper into the craft, he resolved to speak with every brewer within a two hour radius that would have him.  At the time, Jason was working for an accounting services company. He offered payroll services (sometimes nearly for free) in exchange for the chance to hang out behind the scenes at the breweries in his homebrew club.

In time, one of the brewers he spoke to put him on the trail of a brewery that was ‘sort of’ for sale; as the brewer put it, connecting an old man getting tired of brewing with a young man who wanted to start his own brewery. Jason leapt at the chance, getting in touch with the brewery owner, and they began to make their way toward a sale. However, as a deal grew closer, Jason’s professional eye lingered on the brewery’s accounting records. They left much to be desired; it was clear the brewery was losing a lot of money, but not clear exactly how much. The business model simply wasn’t going to work out–this brewery wasn’t destined to become Jason’s.

“I did the perfectly reasonable thing: quit my job, sold my house, moved into my parents’ basement and bought a still.”

While the brewery sale did fall through, it brought Jason something else - an idea. In conversations about the brewery’s unfortunate financial situation, the owner revealed his original plan had been to open a combination brewery/distillery. That way, he thought he’d combat the seasonality of the market in the resort town the brewery was located in by spending part of the year making beer, part of it making spirits, and selling it all during the summer high season. Jason saw merit in the plan, and began to research the distilling business. It was then he realized some of his concerns about opening a brewery would be addressed by opening a distillery instead; though the barriers to entry were higher, there were fewer of them. Most importantly, starting a mid-sized distillery cost less than starting a mid-sized brewery. He mentally adjusted his course from brewing to distilling, and started to gather information. 

Back in the early 2010s, there were few craft distilleries. Certainly not enough to populate a club like the homebrew one Jason was in; however, brewers and distillers are sort of cousins, chummy enough that what few distillers were around tended to gravitate to hanging out with the brewers, who understood their work well enough. That’s how Jason got to know Scott and Becky Harris of Catoctin Creek (featured previously here). As with the local breweries, he traded payroll services with them as well, forming a friendship and ending up at one of their ‘So You Want to Be a Distiller’ courses.  “I remember walking out of that class really feeling like this was something I was likely to do,” Not too long afterward, he incorporated his new distillery; he called it Black Button Distilling, after the old family joke. He attended five different distilling school programs, spoke to 17 banks about a loan, and got two that said yes. He had mentally ‘downloaded’ all the data he could about distilling, made friends with two experts in the industry, and now he had the funding; it was time. He quit his day job, sold everything he had, and moved back home (quite literally into his parents’ basement). Eighteen months after incorporating Black Button Distilling, the doors opened on Jason’s distilling dream.

“It’s home. There’s no place like home.”

Rochester, New York, is not a sexy, sleek metropolis. Jason bluntly attributes his and his generation of fellow Rochesterians' love for the city to, as he puts it, “Stockholm syndrome”. Rochester has been in an economic decline since before Jason’s birth in the late 1980s. He and his peers never knew it during its salad days, growing up amidst a sagging economy hurt by deindustrialization. He jokes that the Great Recession of 2008 never even hit Rochester - it had already been in one for twenty years. Despite the decades of economic depression, Jason chose to open Black Button Distilling in the same city his family had been doing business in for nearly the last century. He didn’t need the city to be sexy; he knew it could be successful. 

“It’s those of us that have come back that start to realize the beauty of a fifteen minute commute to anywhere in the city; the beauty of having the largest public market in the United States five hundred feet out our front door…we’re right on top of the Finger Lakes. It’s got just a little bit of everything,” Jason explains. In perhaps the most surprising find of all, real estate is still affordable, in a way that it no longer is in large swathes of the country. One of Jason’s employees is searching for a four bedroom house for his family - his budget of 150,000 dollars is going to be enough to find what he’s looking for in Rochester. “It’s just a dramatically different quality and cost of life,” Jason points out.

Black Button Distilling thrived, growing faster than Jason’s wildest expectations. The button factory, besides providing a name for Jason’s distillery, also schooled him in small business ownership. “My folks would talk about business problems over dinner, and possible solutions, and 18 years of overhearing how they would approach these challenges taught me more about small business than any of my MBA classes,” he explains. He would need every trick in the book just to keep up: Black Button soared past his ten-year projections in year three. With the surge of success came struggles to accommodate. “The biggest pain for any company growing very quickly is that things that worked six months ago now don’t,” Jason says. Black Button’s very first office was an 11x14 foot room, where its five employees worked shoulder-to-shoulder. Today, they have employees spanning five states; needless to say, their communication methods have had to adapt. 

Growing pains aren’t the only challenge Black Button has had to face. In the fifth year, the distillery was threatened by a fire. In a twist of good luck, it occurred in the kitchen area, and not in the highly flammable distilling area. “I beat the firetrucks there,” Jason tells us, a fact his wife has not let him forget. He ran into the burning building, his mind on the employees still inside and in mortal danger if the fire should meet the distilling equipment. Fortunately, Jason and all his people made it out that day and the fire was doused. 

Even before the fire, safety has always been number one for Jason. “The thing that’s unique about producing ethanol for distilled spirits versus producing ethanol for wine, beer, or cider is that, if you screw up for wine, beer, or cider, you might give some people some gastrointestinal distress, you might make something that is undrinkable, you might make a mess. But it’s relatively safe. Distilling…is very dangerous. People die doing this, He stresses. “We spend an incredible amount of time, money, and energy on safety for our guys," he points out. This level of care has created a strong team bond at Black Button Distilling, evidenced by Jason’s attitude towards his employees. “Your employees are your partners. They’re not there to serve you, they’re there to work alongside you,” he explains. He smiles as he remembers having been there for the weddings, the birth of babies, and the mild shock of seeing a familiar schoolchild getting on the bus and realizing, ‘I was there the night your mom and dad met.’. There have, of course, been folks who didn’t work out for one reason or another along the way, and others who’ve passed through on their way to other things. All of them, at least those on the distillery floor, have been weighed by the same measure: putting Jason’s and his team’s lives in their hands. “It is an incredible leap of faith and amount of trust you have to have in another human being to work beside them on equipment that is deadly and know that you’re all going to come home at the end of the day,” Jason says.

“When we say grain to glass, we quite literally mean we’re involved in the process from when the seed goes in the ground to when the glass bottle goes on the liquor store shelf.”

Like many craft distilleries, Black Button Distilling operates on the hypothesis that what they put into their stills has a great impact on what comes out the other side. Jason likens it to his love of food; “I have often found that, [if] you put higher quality ingredients into a meal, you get higher quality stuff out,” he tells us. What better way to ensure the highest quality of grain for their mash than by becoming directly involved in growing it? When Jason started out, he canvassed local farmers looking for someone to grow grain just for Black Button. He had extremely specific varieties in mind, and only needed amounts that were a drop in the bucket for most farms. Finally, he found a family farm about 45 minutes away from the distillery that got onboard instead of simply laughing at him. “We’ve been with the same farm ever since. I point out to folks that you could cut our price in half, and we still wouldn’t move. It’s that relationship, it’s that quality of the grain, it’s being able to be involved in when it gets planted and how it gets planted…all of those steps all go into what makes our product what it is at the end of the day,” Jason says.

Years later, Jason asked why the farmer went ahead with the partnership, considering it was a lot of work for a small yield. The answer was simple but surprising; no one at parties much cared about the farmer growing two hundred thousand bushels of corn, but if he pulled out a bottle of Black Button bourbon and said ‘I grew the grain for this,’ it elicited far more interest. New York’s laws are friendly to farm distilleries, but even if they weren’t, this is how Jason would do things. “It certainly helps that [in] New York, the laws favor farm distilling…but quite honestly, even if those all went away…I want my grain, grown for my whiskey, my way. And I don’t have enough hours in the day to run a combine," he explains. “To me, you have to be involved at that level,”

Just because he’s too busy to farm his own grain doesn’t mean he isn’t exploring his options. In 2016 and 2017, Black Button was in danger of actually growing itself to death. Since he needed to back off from the distillery a bit to let it grow into itself, Jason started searching for a farm, thinking he’d go part time at Black Button and part time on the farm. After a long hunt, he finally tracked down the perfect property; a beautiful 19-acre mix of farm fields and woodlands, split by a little stream, complete with an old barn and a couple of wells. The day he got the keys to the old barn and it officially became his, he was kicking back in a meadow on the farm when his phone rang. It was Constellation Brands on the other side of the line. Constellation, a Fortune 500 company, local to Rochester and a major player in the beverage alcohol industry had expressed interest in Jason’s distillery and they wanted to take one last look at Black Button Distilling–this would be the moment they chose to invest or write the distillery off forever. Black Button ended up winning Constellation over, suddenly freeing up new capital to ease the distillery’s growing pains. “Here my plans to become a gentleman farmer have just gone right out the window,” Jason laughs as he recounts the tale. It was back to the distillery and all hands on deck. It wouldn’t be the end of the farm, however; not by a long shot.

In the past four years, Jason has had 5000 trees planted on the farm; mainly white oak to replace what they’ve taken, and water birch to guard the stream against erosion. He’s also planted thousands of juniper bushes. “You’re familiar with like, wet hop beer, where they pick the hops in the morning and make the beer with it that afternoon? No one is doing that for gin, because growing your own juniper is required, and it’s absolutely asinine,” he explains. The bushes take five years to mature, and can only be harvested every other year; they’re also vulnerable to pests like gypsy moths. “None of this is a good idea. It’s truly only the work of madmen,” he laughs. While whiskey is his “one true alcoholic passion”, Jason enjoys the flexibility, forgiveness, and relative speed of making gin. “Someday, I am going to harvest juniper off of my property, and pick the berries in the morning and make gin with them that afternoon, and I highly recommend getting on our email list and buying a bottle of that,” he urges. Most juniper used in gin is just 10-18 months old, and has been freeze-dried to boot. He wants to give his gin the same attention to the details of its origins that he does his whiskey. “Imagine what something picked that morning, fresh and ripe…oh, I’m so looking forward to it,” he declares with a smile.

“I believe that our spirits represent a sense of place. They bring with them who we are, and where we’re from…to others. I think this is an opportunity to highlight what is unique about Western New York.”

When Black Button Distilling opened its doors, it had a 500 gallon mash tun, two 750 gallon fermenters, and a 350 gallon pot still. Although Vendome Copper & Brass Works is held in high regard by so many craft distillers (including Jason himself), Black Button’s still was not a Vendome. “Obviously they make some of the best stuff here in the states, and boy do I wish I could afford it. Vendome is the Cadillac, and I’m a Chevy guy. I need it to get me from Point A to Point B, and I still just don’t have a lot of extra cash,” he says with a shrug. Black Button’s original ‘Chevy’ came from Artisan Spirit Design out of Vancouver, Canada–and it contributed to the process that Jason credits for Black Button bourbon’s signature taste. 

“We make whiskey unlike anyone else on earth. I’d like to claim it was years of study and brilliant fortitude that brought me to this, but it was a God-honest mistake,” Jason laughs. The still he ordered from Canada was built for single-pass distillation; in the course of his distilling education, Jason had come to prefer double-pass distillation, and that’s how he wanted to make his spirits. The still had to do double duty, handling both stripping and finishing runs. Black Button achieves this by turning the valves on the still mid-run, directing the steam exactly where they want it to go. This ends up giving them two runs of hearts; one that is heavy in corn oil and rich in character, and one that is light and sweet. These two distillates end up in the tank together, and then go into the barrel together. 

Blending is another point in the process that Black Button has experimented with over the years. At first, they were dumping their barrels all together–which sometimes yielded good results, and sometimes yielded a product that didn’t quite meet expectations. Jason is quick to point out that anything substandard never would have made it into the Black Button bottle. “We’ve never put anything out we weren’t happy with at the time,” he says. “Every barrel ages a little differently. Some are sweet, some are spicy, some are oaky, and if you just start dumping them into a tank and kind of seeing how it goes–especially at the smaller volumes–one barrel is two, three, five percent [of the blend], that’s a big swing,” he explains. 

To fine-tune the process, nowadays Black Button tastes every barrel each week, grading the spirits within and placing them into a ‘pre-tank’ that represents its strongest notes: sweet, spicy, oak, or the more neutral ‘base’. From here, the contents of the pre-tanks are blended, getting so precise that Black Button can control the mixture down to the quarter percent. “We’re taking one stream, breaking it into four, and then able to recombine it how we see fit to get exactly what we want,” Jason explains. Changing the blend doesn’t always go the way you’d think.  “Because interestingly, if we feel the whiskey needs a little more oak, sometimes the answer isn’t adding more from the oak tank. It’s actually taking a little bit out of base and adding a little bit more sweet so the oak can present in a more unique way,” Jason points out. This blending strategy preserves Black Button’s brand consistency, something Jason feels is extremely important.

It also opens up an opportunity to offer something special to customers. Black Button Distilling gets many requests for single barrels, but Jason is leery of pressure on distilleries to produce more single barrels for stores at the risk of degrading the quality of those barrels. “Single barrels used to be–and I believe should be–the ultimate expression from that distillery,” he opines. “If you make ten barrels on the same day or the same week, and you go back to them two years later, not all ten are ready,” he explains. “Each barrel is like a child in its own way. You can’t force it to grow up and be ready when you want,” This means that Black Button–any distillery, really–can’t guarantee that the X number of barrels they put down in year Y will be ready or good enough to represent the ultimate expression of their craft at a certain time later on. In fact, it’s normal for Black Button to get less than ten single barrels a year that Jason would consider a ‘10 out of 10’. 

Instead of compromising their strict quality standards to pad their inventory of single barrels, Black Button runs a custom blending program. Customers can come in and swirl together Black Button’s whiskey in whatever fashion they want, ending up with a custom bottling just the way they like it. “Maybe it is more spice than I would put in, and less sweet, and less oak. It doesn’t mean we’re right or wrong, it means you and I have different palates and like different things. It’s always going to be Black Button at its core, but now we can show the people that either go to your store or work with your group that this is what you think whiskey should taste like because you were the decision-maker at the final moment," Jason explains. It is easier to blend, he says, than to let people make their barrel from the grain up; but there are people who do that.

Jason obviously understands the desire to be a part of the process at every turn, no matter how long it takes. He’s currently on a quest to make his own entirely New York bourbon; not just grain grown there or water from there, but everything. The white oak harvested from their farm–via oxen, no less–has been quarter-sawn and is currently aging outdoors for an 18 month period. After that, it’ll go to Adirondack Barrel Cooperage, where it will be transformed into the staves that will become the barrels for Jason’s dream hyper-local bourbon. Perhaps five years after he distills it–using New York grain, New York water, and even a New York yeast strain specially developed by a local university–he will begin tasting it. All together, from the initial idea to tasting the actual product, will take 11 or 12 years. “That is a level of commitment…” here he pauses, huffing a laugh at his own perseverance. “...stubbornness, I don’t know," he finishes. The only piece of the puzzle left is the bottle it will come in; he’s hoping, of course, to find a glassblower in New York to make them. 

“Adversity breeds strength in character. It’s certainly something I don’t look forward to, but I can definitely say that the crystallizing moments in my life that have made me the man that I am today have come from overcoming that hardship–partly because you had no other option,"

Fire. Sharp growing pains. Gypsy moths. Jason and Black Button Distilling have faced them all; in March 2020, its biggest monster yet reared its spiky head. “Two years ago was when the world fell apart,” Jason says, with a level, somber look. Black Button always participates in the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, but due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19, it was abruptly canceled. “A few days later, the state is asking businesses to close. Distilleries, you can’t really just turn‘em off. It’s not a computer you can just pick up and take home," he explains. The fermenters, just like ones in distilleries all over the country, had billions of hungry little yeast cells inside them. “If we can’t get to them [the yeast cells], if there’s martial law, I mean they’ll go rogue and maybe even infect the building," Jason feared they’d never get the distillery properly clean again. They had to crash the fermenters and get them emptied before what everyone thought would be the two-week lockdown. 

As it became clear that the two weeks was becoming indefinite and our world would never be the same, Jason had to make a terrible choice. Completely shut down, with no ability to sell or make their spirits, he couldn’t afford to pay his employees anymore. He had to furlough the entire company. With a pained expression, he recalls the promotion he’d offered his employee of four years just that Friday; by Sunday, he had to call and tell the employee he couldn’t make good on it. He wept as he drafted the message to the Black Button team, explaining with a broken heart that they all simply had to go home - their jobs were gone. He and his CFO sat in the office together, heads in their hands, doing the agonizing triage of which bills they would pay from what money Black Button had on hand before the shutdown; and which bills would have to go unpaid, now that they didn’t know if or when they’d ever earn more.

Five days later, the FDA called Jason: the hospitals needed hand sanitizer, now. Black Button answered the call, bringing every employee back, using the vodka they’d planned to turn into their Lilac Gin that year. The ingredients for some of the first few bottles for the new hand sanitizer were literally scavenged from employees’ medicine cabinets. As with the ‘two-week’ lockdown, they initially underestimated how much they’d be making–Jason thought it would be five thousand bottles or so. The insatiable need for hand sanitizer in the face of an ongoing global pandemic demanded much more than that: three weeks later, Black Button was making 37,000 bottles of hand sanitizer per day. “It was watching that whole group of people–everyone…if everyone hadn’t stepped up, honestly in ways they did not want to…because that’s what needed to be done. Not even for the company, but for our community. We were literally the only hand sanitizer available in western New York for three weeks," Jason recalls. Once they fulfilled the hospitals’ orders and began selling to the public, they received 1400 emails in the first 24 hours alone. “Do you know how long it takes to answer 1400 emails?” Jason asks, his face incredulous at the memory. They had hired everyone back, and still needed more people. Unable to broadcast job openings for fear of being mobbed by job seekers, they quietly brought on the friends and family of current employees to keep churning out the coronavirus-killing liquid. Black Button pulled through the pandemic, and two years later they’re back at their craft with eyes firmly fixed on the future.

“No one should take away the idea that we knew it all day one. We’re still making improvements and finding little tweaks,"

Just like jumping out of that plane all by himself, Jason took a leap of faith in founding Black Button Distilling. Whether he ignored fears of failure or simply lacked them altogether, he has continued to meet challenges with a sort of jovial hard-headedness that simply leaves no room for giving up. He explores every step in Black Button’s work, trying new things here and there, always in pursuit of higher quality. “I’m not trying to claim we can control all of it, but we get very involved in as many parts of the process as we can because we feel like that’s what makes the difference and makes our products unique," he says of their distillery practices. At year ten, Black Button is so wildly beyond Jason’s original growth projections that it would seem the sky's the limit for their success. They keep striving for new heights and expanding into the passions of other local makers–Black Button will be doing a limited collaboration with Rochester’s oldest ice cream parlor in July 2022, marrying vanilla ice cream with their bourbon. (“It’s so delicious,” Jason assures us.) It’s clear his faith in himself, his people, Rochester, and Black Button was well-placed. We can’t wait to see what they’ll do next. 

TASTING NOTES

Four Grain Straight Bourbon (42% ABV)

Nose: Vanilla, Nutmeg, Blackberry, Peach

Palate: The mouthfeel is soft and silky with sweet notes of plum, vanilla and salted caramel up front. The mid palate retains some sweet with lingering plum and hints of crisp apple, while oak and smoke sweep in leading to a long sweet and savory BBQ burnt end brisket finish. 

This is a lovely bourbon. The soft yet strong body supports a variety of sweet flavors from start to finish, balanced nicely with spicy, earthy and savory notes that make it dynamic on the palate. 

Empire Rye (42% ABV)

Nose: Cinnamon, Raisin, Banana Bread

Palate: The mouthfeel is delicate with some heat on the backend. The front of the palate is very sweet with notes of white chocolate and golden raisins. Subtle spice kicks in towards the mid-palate as the sweetness gives way to dark chocolate, oak, tobacco and smoke on a long finish.

There is enough about this rye  that is similar to the Straight Bourbon that you can tell they are related, but this whiskey stands out on its own as well. Despite being the same proof, the rye spice gives this whiskey a bit more kick while maintaining a nice balance between sweet and earthy. 

Cask Strength Straight Bourbon (55% ABV)

Nose: Corn, Grass, Vanilla Saltwater Taffy

Palate: The mouthfeel is hot, sharp and drying. Baked plums and vanilla blend with spice up front. The spice takes over quickly leading to an oaky finish with notes of charred green and orange bell peppers, blue corn chips and some subtle vanilla on a long finish. 

This whiskey drinks a bit hot for 110 proof, but beneath the heat remains a lot of flavor. While spicy notes and earthy notes dominate on the palate more than the other two whiskeys, the complexity on the finish makes this one worth checking out.