Hamilton Distillers

“For scotch drinkers, I like to say that we want to help you reduce your dependence on foreign alcohol.”

- Stephen Paul, Co-Founder Hamilton Distillers

Hamilton Distillers was founded on a simple idea. What if you made a Scotch style whiskey with an American Southwestern twist? That is what launched their Whiskey Del Bac Single Malt whiskies, but the final product is much more than the sum of those two parts. It is the embodiment of the concept of craft and the importance of heritage and family that makes it truly unique. 

Stephen Paul got his degree in education and taught for eight years before deciding to go back to school for architecture. While enthusiastic about design, when faced with what felt like an eternity of school and apprenticeships before actually becoming an architect, he decided to drop out to open a furniture company. He started Arroyo Design in 1986, named after his in-laws for whom he was very fond, and from the start he had an interest in making something unique and special to the place he had grown up his whole life. 

“When I started woodworking I became aware that if you wanted something visually spectacular you had to go to rain forest woods, and that didn’t appeal to me. I realized we have this incredible, beautiful wood growing all around us in the Sonoran desert. It’s not endangered, and I love this place. The Sonoran desert is so rich culturally, environmentally and ecologically. It’s just a wonderful place to live, so the regionality and the sense of place is what drew me to use mesquite for furniture.”

Mesquite trees grow throughout the southwest, all the way down to South America. The specific species which grows in southern Arizona is called Prosopis Velutina, or Velvet Mesquite. It gets its name because the leaves make the tree look like velvet from a distance. One problem with mesquite from a woodworking standpoint is that you can’t just buy it from your local lumber yard, and even when you could buy it, you couldn’t get it dry.

Drying out the wood is important. If you don’t do it beforehand, the wood will dry out in a person's home, causing a range of problems. Stephen started doing something that few woodworkers in the country do. He purchased a kiln and began drying the wood himself, a process and skill set that would come in handy later down the road. 

The furniture business was very good to Stephen and his family, and he was able to develop strong relationships with his customers. At the end of the day, Stephen would take the mesquite scraps from his woodshop and bring them home to throw on the grill, a very popular cooking technique in the southwest. His wife, Elaine, had turned him onto scotch and more specifically, single malts. They were not connoisseurs by any means, but enjoyed a dram with their barbecue from time to time. One night, while grilling over the mesquite wood scraps, Elaine had an idea. She wondered if you could malt barley over mesquite smoke the same way that the Scottish malt barley over peat. It was a relatively simple idea, but one that rooted deep in Stephen’s mind.

“When she had that idea, I was so riveted by the concept, and again, what could be more wonderful than to create another thing from this place.” 

Stephen wanted to take a crack at turning this idea into a reality, but he had no idea how to do it. He needed a still so he could learn the process, but unable to source one locally, and fearing that it may be illegal to even buy a still without a license, he wound up sourcing a small 5 gallon alembic still from Portugal. Early runs were not met with much success.

“I was making a lot of mistakes. That’s how I learn. I got the still in 2007 and I had no plans. I just wanted to see if I could make something good from the desert. I just made bad stuff in the beginning.”

Stephen continued tinkering with his new hobby out of his woodshop, while continuing to run the furniture business, even testing it out on some of his customers who were also whiskey fans. His daughter, Amanda, worried that there was a bit too much exposure on his experiments, urged her father to get a license and do it the right way. Another distillery had already broken the ice in Arizona, so Amanda and Stephen, now partners in this quest, were able to get a Series 1 Producer’s License with relative ease. In 2011, Hamilton Distillers, named for Stephen’s mother’s maiden name, was incorporated and they hit the sand running. They had a lot of help from early investors, many of whom were customers from the furniture business. They believed in Stephen, and over the years had built up a trust in him.

“We did custom furniture for 30 years … Mesquite is very difficult to work with. It’s full of cracks, and knots, and wormholes … people would say ‘it cracked while it was growing, will it crack again in my piece of furniture?’ I would say no, but if anything ever happens we’ll take care of it, so we guaranteed our product ongoing, which some of my friends that went to business school thought I was insane for doing, but I was trying to give credibility to that wood as a fine furniture wood.  So what carried over to the distilling project? Persistence, attention to detail, keeping your head screwed on right. Those were critical to both endeavors.”

When Hamilton Distillers first got started, they received a lot of help from people around the industry. Stephen would bounce his business plan off of the guys at Kings County Distillery in New York. He reviewed the malting process with the people over at Catoctin Creek in Virginia, and he received invaluable advice from both Lee Medoff of Bull Run, and Christian Krogstad of House Spirits, among others. 

After incorporating, Hamilton upgraded to a 40 gallon alembic still, again from Portugal, and Stephen was lucky enough to meet Nancy Fraley, an accomplished blender, Director of Research, and instructor of blending for the American Distilling Institute. He started sending off their distillate to her to review, and she did not hold back with her feedback. 

“She would basically rip me a new one. She was like, ‘this sucks … here’s what you’re doing wrong.’ That was invaluable. If you’re not daunted by failure, the learning process is exhilarating…”

Stephen was falling into predictable pitfalls as a novice distiller. His cuts were a little off, and he was misjudging his fermentation. With Nancy’s help, he was able to adjust his process and with the hard work and attention to detail that Stephen has always brought to his creations, the whiskey got a lot better.

And whiskey was the sole focus. A lot of start up distilleries resort to making vodka or gin, something that doesn’t need to age so they can get on the market right away and start making money. Operating a distillery is costly, and when your product needs to sit around in a barrel for a while before it can be sold, there can be pressure from investors to bring in revenue to keep the lights on. However, Stephen’s investors were different. 

“[Whiskey was] all I was interested in. I didn’t want to make vodka or gin. Early on when I was raising capital for the 500 gallon system I felt kind of guilty, like I should make vodka, and some of my early investors said no. They said this is awesome. Just focus on your passion.”

The investors of Hamilton Distillers believed in a product made by the desert for the desert, and they knew that Stephen was creating something that would make them proud. That “something” is called Whiskey Del Bac. Bac, a word that derives from the Tohono O’odham people, Native Americans from the Sonoran desert, means “place where the river reappears in the sand.” Del is spanish for “of the,” so Hamilton Distillers make whiskey of the place where the river reappears in the sand.

They malt their own barley, one of only a handful of distilleries in the country to do so. This was initially out of necessity, not desire. Stephen wanted to make a mesquite smoked single malt, and he couldn’t find any commercial malt houses that sold mesquite smoked malt. He also didn’t want to call around to these malt houses asking for it, and give away his great idea, so he had to learn how to malt.

Malting is a process wherein you trick a grain into germinating, or sprouting into a plant, in order to create an enzyme that helps convert the starches in the grain into sugar for fermentation. It is an intricate and delicate operation, which is why so few distilleries do it themselves. But for Hamilton Distillers, it is just another example of their unyielding dedication to craft. 

Stephen started off floor malting, which is a traditional Scottish style of malting barley. He built a custom meat smoker-type drier, which was basically a vertical cabinet with multiple trays stacked on top of each other. He would fill the trays with the malt and build a mesquite fire underneath to smoke and dry the barley. It did the job, but they could only do 70 pound batches at a time and it was hard to control the fire underneath. The enzyme in the barley is very sensitive to heat, and if you heat it up too fast you can destroy it. 

They realized they needed a new system, so they teamed up with Global Stainless Systems in Portland, Oregon to design a new kind of malting process, which is unique to them. This process involves two tanks. The first is a steeping tank, where the barley rests in water for a few days before being moved to a combination germination and kilning tank, called the GK tank. The GK tank sits on a screen floor with an empty chamber underneath it, so they can pump in whatever they need to help with the process. They irrigate at first to help with germination, stirring the grain four times a day to keep it from clumping together. Once it has the enzyme, they transition the tank into a drying tank, which ends with kilning at a high heat. When it’s time to dry the malt, a burner box outside the malt house is used to build a mesquite wood fire and with ducts and high-powered fans the heat and smoke are pumped into the tank so it flows through the grain bed. When they start the drying process, they keep it at around 90 degrees and the smoke clings to the wet grain. As the drying process continues, they elevate the heat a little bit at a time until it’s around 200 degrees to “cure it.” Once the grain is dry it won’t absorb any more smoke, but that final process does add a little flavor while also puffing up the grain so it’s less crunchy. This system has been up and running since the summer of 2014, after nearly two years of designing.

They then mash and ferment that grain, before double distilling it, again in traditional Scottish style. Back in 2015 they upgraded to a 500 gallon copper pot still, which was also made by Global Stainless Systems. Hamilton Distillers has never sourced spirit from any other distillery, and has been dedicated from the beginning to producing everything they sell. 

“I wanted to do it. I wanted to approach the whiskey like I had approached the furniture. Authenticity. I didn’t want to be an imposter at all, and I wanted control over the product.”

Their whiskey is aged in 15 gallon new barrels from the Barrel Mill in Minnesota, which is a departure from Scotch single malts, primarily aged in used barrels. The smaller barrels help them to get more interaction with the wood over a shorter period of time, and the new oak allows them to pull out more flavor from the barrel a bit faster. This allows the product to get out on the market after only maturing for 12 to 14 months. The plan is to move to larger, industry standard, 53 gallon whiskey barrels, which are more cost effective but require a longer maturation period. Experiments are underway to identify the time required in these larger barrels to meet the same flavor profile while growing demand makes this transition a challenge.

A few times a year, Hamilton Distillers release a special whiskey called the “Distiller’s Cut,” where they have been experimenting with special cask finishes, like calvados, cognac, sauternes, and sherry. They are always cask strength, and one of their recent releases scored an 89% from Whiskey Advocate. 

When Stephen first entered the spirits industry, he thought he was doing something really exotic. He was blissfully unaware that he was one of many craft distillers that would lead to the craft whiskey boom in America, or that there were others making an American single malt, but that wasn’t the only thing that surprised him about the industry. 

“I thought I was going to make this great product and the world would beat down my door to get it. I didn’t realize how much effort you had to put into promotion, marketing and sales.”

Hamilton Distillers did something that a lot of craft distilleries do in the beginning. They overreached by trying to be in too many markets too quickly. They are currently sold in fourteen states, with three more coming soon. A couple of years ago they decided to try and scale back, and really win their own backyard. 

“Amanda and I went up to visit Matt Hoffman at Westland Distillery [Seattle, WA]. He made the point that they had been in too many states, and he said that they had pulled back and were just gonna focus on six or eight states and in those states they were focusing on one city and actually one neighborhood within that city, so they were really dialing in. That’s when we started to have second thoughts about our efforts to get out there too much. It’s costly. We were doing a lot of in person market work, and thanks to our CEO Kent Cheeseman, [now] we’re really focusing on Arizona.”

Despite stretching themselves a bit thin, their whiskey is very popular and has continued to evolve over the years. Stephen credits one of their old distillers, Nathan Thompson Avelino, with helping them refine their spirit and their brand. 

“Nathan became a better distiller than I ever was. He really took our whiskey to a new level. He came in as a volunteer. I think maybe he had toyed with distilling at home, but didn’t really know all that much. Together we distilled on the 40 gallon still and took the product into the local Tucson marketplace. I was still running Arroyo Design, and he came over to the new distillery with me, and he got to know our 500 gallon system much better than I even know it today. Nathan had a really good palate. He was responsible for our fantastic Distillers Cut blends. Nathan was amazing.”

Nathan worked there from 2012-2018, and has since moved on, with plans to open up his own distillery. He was still blending for Hamilton Distillers up until this winter. Their new Head Distiller is Veronica Townsend, who came over from Nauti Spirits in New Jersey, but she is much more than just a distiller. She runs the distillation process, along with Stephen, has taken over blending, and also oversees the malting process, leaving her mark on every step along the way.

To Stephen’s knowledge, their mesquite smoked whiskey is the first of its kind, though he acknowledges that Santa Fe Spirits in New Mexico released a mesquite smoked single malt around the same time. Despite what one might assume is a fierce rivalry, Stephen and Colin Keegan from Santa Fe have a good relationship. Stephen has even tried to get Colin into some accounts in Denver when they were up there together.

“He was looking at me like I had eight heads. Why are you doing this? Part of it was we’re not distributed in Colorado, but I was like, hey, why not? He makes very good whiskey.”

When one craft whiskey succeeds, all craft whiskey succeeds. In Stephen’s experience, the craft distilling community is a very welcoming and supportive group, and as such, the American Single Malt community is also very close. Hamilton Distillers is a member of the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission, which is dedicated to identifying a set of standards for American Single Malt, which is currently completely unregulated. Collectively, their hope is for it to be officially recognized by the Alcohol & Tobacco Tax & Trade Bureau (TTB) as its own specific category. If you become a member of the commission you must adhere to their standards as follows.

• Made from 100% malted barley

• Distilled entirely at one distillery

• Mashed, distilled, and matured in USA

• Matured in oak casks of a capacity not exceeding 700 liters

• Distilled to no more than 160 proof

• Bottled no lower than 80 proof

  Whiskey Del Bac has rebranded a few times over the years, from the names of the products to the logo and bottle shape. In the early days their three whiskies were called “Unsmoked,” for their unsmoked single malt, “Mesquite Smoked,” and “Mesquite Clear” for their unaged mesquite smoked single malt, but they found those names to be somewhat uninspired. Now the unsmoked is called “Classic,” the aged mesquite smoked is called “Dorado,” and the unaged mesquite smoked is called “Old Pueblo.”

  The original bottle used to have a more old timey feel to it, wide and rectangular and with the word “whiskey” in script like something you would see in a saloon in an old western. 

  “We did like our old bottles a lot, but from a bartender’s standpoint and a retailer’s standpoint, it was not terribly workable. Bartenders would grab it on it’s side, pour and put it back on the back bar on it’s side. Retailers didn’t like it because it took up a bottle and a quarter worth of space. We literally had retailers in New York say, ‘We love your whiskey. Come back when you’re in a round bottle.”

  They simplified their label to be cleaner, with more universal appeal, while still communicating where they are from. The bottle is more reminiscent of a heritage Scotch now, playing with the concept of these two worlds blending inside the bottle.

  Almost ten years into the business, Hamilton Distillers and Whiskey Del Bac have a lot to be proud of. Their spirits have won countless awards, including double gold medals at the San Francisco World Spirit Awards, and in 2017, Forbes Magazine listed them as one of the top ten craft whiskies in the country. As they look to the future, there are a lot of exciting prospects on the horizon. 

  They are currently in a capital raise to expand production to meet growing demand for their award winning single malts with aspirations to develop a new distillery that can serve as a tourist destination and touchstone for Tucson, Arizona in the next few years.

  The pandemic has certainly had an impact and made them more appreciative of the good fortune to have such a strong family of investors, loyal and growing consumer base, and outstanding employees. The expansion of production will enable them to get into the larger barrels.

  “In a larger format [our whiskey] is going to gain in complexity, and become more nuanced. We’re making better whiskey than we did three years ago. We’ve dialed the smoke level back in our Dorado, which was pretty overpowering in the beginning and now we have it where we really like the balance. We’re playing with some [new] ideas, and Veronica is playing with different malt toasts and special finish casks.”

  Hamilton Distillers and Whiskey Del Bac were born out of a question and Stephen Paul’s inquisitive nature, dedication to craft, and willingness to fail in order to succeed. This is what has pushed the product forward through the years, but this is not the story of one man alone. This is a story about family. His wife, Elaine, who introduced him to scotch and asked that early important question. His daughter and Co-Founder, Amanda, who pushed him to make the business legitimate and has been lockstep with her father every step of the way since. The local investors who believed in the product and their hometown. The fellow distillers and industry professionals that helped shape the process and the spirit along the way. And a talented and influential group of employees, old and new, that bought into making the dream come true. All of these people are a part of the Whiskey Del Bac family and a part of their story. A story that doesn’t say, “I did it,” but one that says, “We did it, together.”

TASTING NOTES:

Classic (45% ABV)

Nose: Chocolate fudge, raisins, orange citrus, and allspice

Palate: Creamy and spicy, there is sugar coated roasted almonds up front, giving way to toffee and brown butter that settle into bakers cocoa and tobacco for a short finish. 

This whiskey is tasty and very easy to drink. Modeled after Highland or Speyside scotch single malts that are 12 years old or older, this punches way above its weight for a one year old whiskey. 

Old Pueblo (45% ABV)

Nose: Lays barbecue potato chips, lemon and green pepper

Palate: The mouthfeel is oily with early flavors of roasted peppers and orange peel, transitioning to sweet and savory notes of honey glaze beef jerky and caramel popcorn, that linger with a short smokey campfire finish.

This is excellent and very unique. Barbecue in a glass. Neither of us had ever had an unaged single malt before, and the bar has been set very high. 

Dorado (45% ABV)

Nose: Cherry cola, vanilla, sweet smoke

Palate: Hot and oaky with hints of burnt sugar and cherries, there is orange peel and strong vanilla on the mid palate leading to a short finish of burnt ends brisket and smoke.

Significantly more mild than a heavily peated scotch, the smokey flavor is still present and balanced with the sweeter flavors from the new oak barrels. It’s a unique combination of American whiskey and scotch. We are very excited to see how this whiskey continues to evolve as they move into larger barrels.