Die the wolf/Patty Green Whiskey distillers

By Meghan Swanson & Devin Ershow

Stills have always been a part of American history, scattered throughout it like blackberries in a thicket. Steaming quietly away on hillsides and in hollers, most of them were operated namelessly. Transforming a farmer’s excess fruit or grain into valuable, shelf-stable currency or making illicit profits in the shadows where the lawmen couldn’t see, they weren’t something their operators needed—or in many cases, wanted—a brand for. Lynsee Sardell is a distiller in the traditional American spirit of distilling: someone who simply wanted to translate agricultural abundance into something new and special, adding a thread to the fabric of their community. Her work, born of curiosity and an audaciously creative mind, has been both branded and brandless over the years. Her unique perspective and distilling talent turned out to be a boon for Patricia Green Cellars, a Newberg, Oregon winery that suffered tremendous crop damage during 2020’s devastating wildfire season. Lynsee, who had already been experimenting with distillation on her own and with others for almost a decade, joined forces with Jim Anderson and Matty Russell at the winery and together they transformed the smoke- tainted harvest into Patty Green Whiskey Distillers.

“In Oregon, we have this wealth of botanicals, and this wealth of agricultural things that we can convert into anything.” - Lynsee Sardell

Lynsee grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, the home of Oregon State University located just an hour and a half south of Portland by car. It is nestled in the legendarily fertile Willamette Valley, widely regarded as a paradise of pinot noir. “It’s a big agricultural town,” Lynsee says, “So my weekends, my weekdays…when I wanted to get away from school would be [spent] stomping around in the woods with my dog.” She grew up in Corvallis in the 1980s and 1990s, when it had about 20,000 fewer people and the whole Willamette Valley was a hotbed of craft brewing and winemaking. “We’re all very …interested in brewing or fermenting. It’s like, in the air. I grew up…here when the wine industry was really experimenting, and there was a lot of collaboration.” Lynsee recalls. She remembers kids coming to school with hands stained purple from crushing and sorting grapes. “It was just something that was around me as a kid, so knowing it was even a possibility…was not a far stretch for me to imagine.” she says.

Lynsee’s story, however, doesn’t lead directly into beverage alcohol, as might be imagined for a Corvallis kid raised during the renaissance of winemaking and brewing in Oregon. After finding her first crack at college a disappointment, she moved abroad and lived in South America for a couple of years. When she told her family her next plan was to take a course in master gardening at London’s Kew Gardens, they objected strenuously. “That was a hard ‘no’ from my family, and growing up in a kind of Italian Jewish family, your filial piety is right there on the surface.” she explains. She decided to finish her degree in anthropology at the University of Oregon in nearby Eugene, Oregon, and moved on to a kaleidoscope of careers–as a fine artist, she has installations around the city of Portland and in the Portland International Airport.

Lynsee’s childhood in the Willamette Valley and her time spent living in South America on the border of Colombia and Ecuador showed her something very important: the place that brewing, winemaking, and distilling occupies within a community. At the end of the day in South America, she recalls, “everyone would sit down with a crate of beer–cerveza pilsner, which means ‘pilsner beer’--and pass around one glass.” There were two glasses, she amends: one to pour the beer into, and one to drink out of. “It’s not sanitary in any way,” she laughs. “And you…just sit and you have a fire, you have music, people bring their instruments, people…show up with ratty old cars that they work on.” she remembers. While the community gathered, a still would be bubbling away in the background somewhere. “Whiskey-making, aguardiente [a traditional Colombian spirit], winemaking, really was a community enterprise.” she explains. “It wasn’t like, ‘let’s make something hardcore’. It was ‘let’s get together and be together over something that makes us feel a little bit looser.’” she tells us. “That’s in the DNA of the things that I make. It has to be good, but it also has to be something you want to share with your friends and your family.” she finishes.

“You can find a still fairly easily now, but back then it was really hard; and not to play any card of being a woman, [but] that is not easy either. It was hard to find a place, but people started to trust me.” - Lynsee Sardell

Lynsee’s first still, purchased in 2008, was a stainless steel converted keg. “I mean, not nice.” she describes it. “But what that taught me is that…you just have to work with the materials that you’ve got.” she says. “We have so many skills as humans to make,” she points out. “If you can figure out how to make something delicious on that piece of work, then maybe you can make something good on something that’s really fancy,” she explains. In time, her amateur work turned professional–much to her surprise. In 2019, she met a friend of a friend hoping he could weld her a 20-gallon still.

“But then he said, ‘Why don’t you distill here?’ He turned around and …and it was a 350-gallon homemade, home-welded, open-fire still.” she recalls. “I said, ‘I can’t do that’.” But another friend connected her with a brewer who could make her a whiskey wash. To Lynsee, it felt like fate. “Working in the arts, it’s really hard. You’re constantly re-applying for your own job, you’re proving yourself over and over again.” she explains. “To have things fall in my lap was just weird.” she confesses. She took it as a sign to run with it, and run with it she did, through the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The distillery Lynsee had begun working at was Dogwood Distilling out of Forest Grove, Oregon. At the time, they were making gin, vodka, and absinthe, but Lynsee had ideas beyond that. “I really only wanted to make whiskeys,” she reveals, “so I saw an opportunity there.” As a child of an abundantly fertile landscape that also housed the state’s land-grant university, she saw so many crops that could be turned into spirits. “[Dogwood] just wasn’t willing to take that step into…’Oh, this guy has tons of peaches or this guy has tons of blueberries’,” she explains. This anthropologist’s mindset and distiller’s eye, unbeknownst to Lynsee, would serve her well in the tumultuous times to come.

“It wasn’t like some grand plan to be in the spirits business. It was the really tortuous and ruinous fires of 2020 that accidentally…worked out.” - Jim Anderson

Jim Anderson met the late Patricia Green of the eponymous Patricia Green Cellars winery in the mid 1990s. “She was a home winemaker–probably unbeknownst to her parents–when she was like 16 years old,” Jim tells us. She would harvest elderberries and other indigenous fruits. She was a partner in a reforestation business that operated up and down the west coast, but standing at four foot eleven, she realized that the arduous work of digging holes and planting trees likely wouldn’t be a long term career. She sold off her portion of that business and wound up harvesting grapes at a winery in Roseberg, Oregon called Hillcrest Vineyard in the mid 1980’s. “She was poking around, like ‘Hey, what goes on in that building there?’ and by 1987 they made her the winemaker, because she was the smartest person around despite not having any formal training. It was clear that she was the person for the job.” Jim explains. She spent the following years learning on the job, taking on additional work as a consultant which is where she met Jim, at the Torii Mor Winery she helped get started. In 1999, Patty and Jim moved on from Torii Mor and bought the 50-acre property that would become Patricia Green Cellars. Patty passed away tragically in 2017, but Jim and the winery keep on as the number of wineries in the area continues to grow. 

“2020 happens, we have these fires and nobody really knows what to do, so we just keep making wine, but at some point it becomes clear, like in the middle of harvest, we’ve got a problem that we can’t solve.” Jim laments. They did their best to adjust. They tried to learn on the fly and adapt their winemaking, but as Jim puts it, “The answer is that there really isn’t any answer. You’re sort of screwed.” The insidious nature of smoke taint is that the smoke seeps into pinot noir grapes and on a molecular level binds to the sugar. The grapes themselves look normal, but post fermentation the issue presents itself. As Jim artfully describes, “You know when you’re at a frat party when you were younger, and you went to pick up your beer, but you were talking to somebody and you picked up the wrong cup and it was the cup that everybody had been ashing into for the last two hours, and you took a swig out of it? That’s what the wine tasted like. Just irredeemably bitter and acrid.” They had thousands and thousands of gallons of this undrinkable wine. They couldn’t dump it for both emotional and legal waste management reasons.  Jim’s partner, owner of Kelley Fox Wines, had approached the same problem by hiring Lynnsee to make their ruined harvest into vermouth. She introduced Lynsee to Jim, hoping she could help him too. Patty Green had already tried distilling their wine with an unnamed Oregon distillery. “It was worse than the wine.” Jim says with a laugh. When Jim met Lynsee he told her about the disastrous brandy. Ever confident, Lynsee told him, “‘You should let me try.” Jim responded, “Come on over. We have thousands of gallons. You’re welcome to as much of it as you like.”

Lynsee started off with a small amount that she could tinker with in her home still. The next week she returned with mason jars filled with heads, hearts and tails. “The hearts stuff was phenomenal. Pure, no smoke taint to it at all. Neutral but had this perception of sweetness and this incredible buttery texture to it.” Jim says with excitement. When asked what she did that was different than the other distillery to produce such a wonderful product, Lynsee’s answer was a simple, “I don’t know.”

She continued, “I run the still pretty slowly and cleanly. I make sure my cuts are really clean and on point, so you’re just constantly monitoring.” A proper solution had presented itself, but along with it, a new problem. 12,000 gallons of tainted wine would produce roughly 1,500 gallons of brandy, but what were they going to do with 1,500 gallons of brandy? Lynsee had a suggestion that she had been thinking about for a while. “We could buy grain and do the grain distillation and start combining the grain [distillate] with a small

amount of brandy and you would have whiskey.” Jim explains. Jim liked this idea, showing off the “Bourbon” t-shirt he was wearing during our interview. Patricia Green worked with Lynsee and contracted with Dogwood, paying by the gallon.

They had the wine distilled first. To ensure the smoke wasn’t coming through, Lynsee stayed up for 36 hours straight. Lynsee details, “There would be these little cuts of time where the smoke would come out, so you knock back the temperature and the pressure just a little bit and then up your reflux on your column just to make sure that’s not coming out.” They started purchasing grain in 2021, but one year into the project the owner of Dogwood decided that he was going to sell the distillery. Having barely begun, there was concern that their contract would be in jeopardy. To ensure the safety of the project, Jim, his associate winemaker, Matty Russell, Lynsee and another person with a small stake in Patricia Green Cellars purchased the distillery. Patricia Green Cellars is its own entity, and owns the Patty Green Whiskey Distillers name and the whiskey brands that come with it. The distillery is now called Die The Wolf, which produces the distilled spirits under Lynsee’s supervision. 

“When a grain comes my way—it sounds disgusting—but: I eat it, and then I brew it into a tea, and then I ferment a little bit of it just on the counter and then try it to get an idea not just of what it tastes like, but what it feels like.” - Lynsee Sardell

Lynsee was introduced to Charlene Murdock, founder of Tuality Plains Great Grains, working with bakers to revive the barley in bread. She turned Lynsee onto the Culinary Breeding Network, which was founded by Lane Sellman, a professor at Oregon State University. The connection to O.S.U. led Lynsee to their barley breeding program aptly called, Barley World. “Not only do they revive heritage barleys like Purple Karma, but they also are experimenting with making naked barleys.

That means they don’t come with a hull. They developed Full Pint. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Full Pint barley, but if you’ve had craft beer then you’ve more than likely had that.” Barley World likes to test out their new strains by sending them out to farmers to see how the grains do outside of their own test fields. Lynsee connected with a few of the farmers O.S.U. was working with when sourcing grains for Die the Wolf. “I ask the growers that grow for me, not to grow what I’m asking them to grow but what they feel can really celebrate the land and be profitable for them, because this is an economy and we’re trying to spread all of that in a very conscientious way.” Lynsee explains. She adds, “The golden idea would be to have my own farm, but then there’s also this idea of ‘I’m not good at farming. I’m really good at distilling’ ,so I’m going to let the farmers grow the kind of grains that they want to grow.”

In Oregon, you have to have a separate brewing license in order to brew onsite. Rather than set up a full brewery to mash and ferment their spirits at the Die the Wolf, they have opted to outsource that to Culmination Brewing in Portland. Die the Wolf provides the grains and Culmination executes it to Lynsee’s precise specifications. They have to ferment off the grain, but Lynsee explains, “Because of the way I’m able to work with these brewers, I’m able to get enough proteins off of the mash that we still retain this lovely viscosity in the whiskey. There’s a lot of the character that is retained.”

Lynsee refers to their still affectionately as a “Mary Shelley.” “I would say it’s a Frankenstill, but I like to celebrate women.” It has a standard stock kettle with a custom made brandy helmet. On top of that is a custom made, copper lined, stainless steel column with two copper bubbler plates with a dephlegmator on top of that. Once through the dephlegmator the vapor flows through a worm and tube condenser to be collected as a distillate. This still gives Lynsee the flexibility to pay respect to whatever ingredients she is working with to get the most out of it. It’s not a set it and forget it system. It’s not run by a control panel and there aren’t any hard and fast rules Lynsee works with when distilling. Her method is based on constantly tasting the spirit coming off the still, listening to how the still is working, and doing her best to play with pressure and temperature to coax the best flavor out. She doesn’t work with a chiller, so the temperature of the water in the dephlegmator and condenser is based on what temperature the city water is during whatever season she’s working in.  It’s meticulous and requires intense focus, long hours and determination, but it’s also an artistry lost on most modern distilleries, and the unique perspective that made Lynsee successful when working with Jim and Matty than those who had come before her. 

“The important thing to us is can we get stuff that is cool, unique and interesting and can we make stuff that tastes great that represents where it comes from.” - Jim Anderson

Patty Green Whiskey Distillers has started with three products. Multifarious Whiskey, Purple Karma, Pinnacle Whiskey and Brandy of Pinot Noir. Patty Green likes words that end in -ious. They have their Perspicacious, Mysterious and Notorious Pinot Noir. The Multifarious name is a tie in to this trend they started with their wines. As Matty puts it, “We chose Multifarious because we also felt like we could use that down the road with multifaceted things we end up with, and it’s not necessarily going to be the same thing every time.” Multifarious means “many, and of various types.” The first batch of Multifarious came by happenstance. A small experimental malt house called Tiller Malt was in the process of moving and was willing to sell off some malt at a good price, but the malt was made up of three different varietals of barley that had already been combined. The malts were Lightning Malt, Purple Karma and Full Pint. The first batch was a combination of five barrels, two of which were virgin oak barrels crafted by Oregon Barrel Works, one with a #2 char and the other a #3 char. The other three barrels were repurposed pinot noir barrels that were sanded down to remove any trace of the wine, re-toasted and torched to a #3 char. The final blend included 80% whiskey with 20% Brandy of Pinot Noir. At this point, we think it’s important to bring up how uncommon this is in whiskey production. While technically legal within certain whiskey definitions with the Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the government agency in charge of regulating spirits in the United States, many would, we believe unrightfully so, clutch their pearls at the suggestion of blending a whiskey with any other kind of spirit. However, it is precisely this kind of innovation, often in the face of adversity, that has propelled craft distillation to new heights in this country over the last several decades. Just because something is uncommon, doesn’t mean that it is wrong. Lynsee explains, “I can make Lightning barley whiskey. Single malt whiskey, and that’s great. And there’s a little bit of brandy in there, because we don’t grow corn here. We grow some corn in Oregon, but the brandy is a stand in for the sweetening agent. I think of it as a ‘Vineyard’s Bourbon’ but we can’t call it a bourbon so let’s just not call it that, but it provides a tannin texture that’s really nice. It’s a very small amount but it helps to balance out the barley malt flavor.”

Similarly, their Purple Karma, Pinnacle Whiskey also has this 80/20 split between whiskey and brandy. This time, the whiskey was made from a select section of the hearts run, using the revived heritage grain, Purple Karma. They refer to this as a “statement bottling,” claiming that the grain provides an intense level of flavor and that the combination of that flavor, along with the narrow hearts cut and textural component of the brandy, make this a whiskey of “remarkable character.”

Completely separate from the products produced for Patty Green, Die the Wolf hopes to lean into the agricultural abundance that Oregon has to offer, creating experimental small batch spirits with an overarching theme of sustainability. Making products out of something that may have otherwise been wasted. They are working on a Blueberry Eau de Vie, a Creme de Violette made from a patch of violets that was growing on a farm that the farmer was going to tear out, and pear brandy made from odd shaped Hood River pears that can’t be sold at the market. They made Sorghum whiskey because a farmer found themselves with a bunch of Sorghum they had no use for. Not only did it produce the whiskey, but the spent grains went on to feed pigs at a neighboring farm. 

On the side, Lynsee has her own brand called Big Wild Spirits made from foraged ingredients that she finds in the forest. The name dates back to the earliest distilled products she made and passed along to her friends and includes products like Witch’s Gin and Fortune’s Fruit and Flower Apple Brandy. Big Wild Spirits will remain off to the side for now, something where if you know about it you know about it, and if not that’s ok with Lynsee, while Die the Wolf and Patty Green take center stage. For now, access to these bottles is limited, due to limited inventory and mountains worth of red tape Jim has had to sift through to be sure they are compliant with both federal and state laws when selling their products. That said, there are hopes to soon be available statewide in Oregon before potentially expanding into neighboring Washington and California. Matty says, “We would like to expand all three entities, but we’d like to do that with the same kind of approach that we take to it now, or the reason that it started, which is that it has to be sustainable. We don’t want to just be able to have spirits across the country at the loss of the craft-ness of it. We want to keep it this kind of cool craft kind of thing.”

Their union was not planned, and the subsequent spirits that have been produced are not necessarily traditional. Intentionally or not, Lynsee Sardell along with Jim Anderson and Matty Russell are paving a new path in whiskey with Patty Green Whiskey Distillers and Die the Wolf. While logical in terms of balancing flavors and textures to create a great spirit, the highly regulated world of beverage alcohol is not accustomed to nor often friendly to the idea of blending a non-grain spirit with whiskey. Towards the end of conversation, Lynsee encouraged us to close our eyes while she “takes us on a journey,” a playful smile on her face, leaning gleefully into her humorously dramatic prelude before giving us some final thoughts. She asked us to contemplate the characteristics that are in a beverage. “When you really get down to it, the molecules that are in a grape that make brandy are not much different than those sugar molecules that are in corn.” She continued, “In the end, if we’re just talking about drinking and drinking something that tastes good, this is the best match I can think of to make all those beautiful characteristics of butterscotch, tannin, and velvet that come from a good brandy, and then pair that with the silkiness and the oiliness of a good whiskey? Yes, please! Please give me that.” As a company, ourselves, fascinated by the ever evolving idea that is American whiskey and what it can be both now and in the future, we say “give me that” as well.

TASTING NOTES

Brandy of Pinot Noir (50% ABV)

Nose: Raspberry, Banana, Yogurt, Vanilla

Palate: The mouthfeel is slick and oily with earthy flavors up front of sauteed mushrooms in butter. That flavor persists throughout but is accompanied by a subtle vanilla sweetness and black pepper on the midpalate, settling into the earthy notes with faint highlights of grapes and oak on a medium finish.

This one spun our heads around a little bit. The nose is incredibly bright and sweet and the palate is very savory and earthy. The buttery texture almost makes you feel like you are eating mushrooms as the brandy crosses the palate. It is unlike other brandies we have had, in an extremely intriguing way.

Multifarious (49% ABV)

Nose: Raspberry, Dark Chocolate, Toasted Almonds, Leather

Palate: The mouthfeel has the same slick and velvety texture, this time with sweeter flavors of vanilla and burnt sugar caramel up front. Subtle notes of oak and spice fill the mid palate leading to a long and complex finish of chocolate, caramel, cashews and roasted almonds.

Unlike the brandy, the nose and palate are much more in sync with this whiskey. We have to say, we love it. The flavors are incredibly rich and dynamic. The texture is outstanding and the finish goes on forever. Not that Patty Green was looking for a proof that their concept of blending whiskey and brandy together works, but if they were, this is it. One of the best whiskies we've tasted this year.

Purple Karma Pinnacle (56% ABV)

Nose: Raspberry, Barbecue Chips, Mushrooms, Leather

Palate: Unsurprisingly, the mouthfeel has the same wonderful texture as the previous two installments. There is this sharp salty sweetness up front, like a salted caramel. The saltiness almost stuns the palate completely for a moment, wiping anything else away. For that reason, the midpalate is difficult to pinpoint. Once the the saltiness subsides there is an earthy and vegetal flavor mixed with spice and oak on a medium finish.

Wow, what a ride. If you like salted caramels, you are going to absolutely love this whiskey. The abscense of a midpalate has us scratching our heads a little bit. Because of the strength of both the front palate and finish, it's not neccesarily a bad thing, but it is unlike anything else we've ever tasted. All in all, we liked this. It confused us, be we like that and we like this. Die the Wolf and Patty Green are clearly doing something very different than the rest of the pack.