Shadow Ridge
A lot of American whiskeys bill themselves as “small batch,” but what does small batch really mean? It’s an unregulated term, so unlike many of the rules or laws that govern bourbon and other American whiskey, there is no legislative force dictating the use of such branding. Elijah Craig Small Batch Bourbon is one of the most popular small batch brands on the market. It’s made by Heaven Hill Distillery using between 100-200 53 gallon barrels, which comes out to approximately 70,000 9-bottle (750ml) cases per batch with several batches released annually. It is readily available around the United States and the globe. There is nothing small about it, and by this metric, every craft whiskey in America would fall into the category of “small batch.” “Handcrafted” is another unregulated term that has been adopted by many, even among craft brands, but whose hands are doing the crafting? How many hands are involved? More often than not, these terms are meant to evoke a sense of intimacy and care that is brought to these products when in reality, its purpose is mostly just marketing. The spirits business is an incredibly expensive business to get into, with a lot of barriers to entry. So the truth is that if you are going to get into the business you are either going to need to sink every dollar of savings you have into it, take on massive amounts of debt, and/or bring on investors and potentially compromise your vision in order to survive. Shadow Ridge Spirits Company, soon to be SR Distilled Spirits Company, out in Oceanside, California is bucking the traditional model. One of the few black owned distilleries that actually make their own products, Sean Hallman and his wife, Lisa Ireland, through their passion for distilling, truly embrace the concept of hand crafting their “ultra small batch” spirits.
Sean Hallman was born in Long Beach and raised in San Diego before moving to Upland, California when he was in the 2nd grade. Even at that young age, he knew that one day he would come back to San Diego. He remembers riding in the car, looking out one window and seeing the beach, then turning his head to look out the other window and seeing snow on the mountains. San Diego had everything. Sean left California to get his undergraduate degree in business management and management information systems from the Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After graduating in 1994, his business degree left him feeling like a master of none. He worked for a little while, but wanted to go somewhere to learn the leadership skills he knew he would need to manage people effectively. He decided to follow in the footsteps of his father, mother and brother and joined the Navy. He became a surface warfare officer after completing the Navy Officer Candidate School and received orders to a pre-commissioned ship being built in Bath, Maine. It was there that he met the love of his life and future wife, Lisa Ireland. Lisa was a graduate student at the University of Southern Maine studying adult literacy and English as a Second Language (ESL). When Sean was home ported in Hawaii the two stayed together, and when Sean finally landed back in San Diego in 1999, she moved out there to be with him. She began teaching high school Spanish, and has been teaching in the same district now for 21 years focusing on ESL and AVID, a program designed to help first generation students get to college.
Over his years in the Navy, Sean took up home brewing as a hobby, especially when he was stationed somewhere cold and needed something to keep his mind occupied while he stayed indoors. Brewing is hard work, but Sean, an avid cook, took to fermentation. He loved coming up with mash bills and recipes but hated bottling. As he puts it, “beer is never going to get better during packaging. It can get a lot worse, though.”
Sean left the Navy as a Lieutenant/O-3 in 2003 and worked in the corporate world for five years, doing projects for Home Depot and managing import logistics for Target. He went to grad school at USC, getting a masters in public administration and returned to government life in 2007. He continues to work there to this day as a Director of Training Analysis and Readiness Reporting at Afloat Training Group Pacific. After getting his masters, he realized that he still had $27,000 left on his GI Bill, but he didn’t want to go back to school for another degree. He decided to enroll in a brewing program at UC San Diego Extension. There, he began making connections with some of the instructors, like Yuseff Cherney (Ballast Point Brewing, Cutwater Spirits) and Chris White (White Labs, Inc.). Sean quickly realized that he didn’t want to make beer. The market was already oversaturated and he didn’t see his place in it. Yuseff started a local spirits competition in 2015 called San Diego International Spirits Festival at Del Mar, and Sean worked there as a steward for a couple of years. Picking the brains of local distillers turned Sean on to the idea of making spirits. In 2016, he found out that one of his fraternity brothers, Sultan, wanted to make unaged whiskey. Sean wasn’t sold on the idea of white whiskey, but he went down the rabbithole with his friend for a while. When Sultan decided to pursue other ventures, Sean chose to move forward with the idea of opening a distillery on his own. He went to Lisa with the idea and she was supportive. They had been killed on their taxes the previous year, and their accountant had told them they either needed to have a kid, buy another house or start a business, so they committed to starting a distillery together. Little did they know how difficult and expensive it would be.
In the state of California, as is the case in many states across the country, in order to be eligible to apply for a distilling license you need to have a signed lease for your distillery and have all of your equipment on order. The application process can take up to two years before you are approved, and if you are interested in making aged products those can take another year or two to mature. That means someone can easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars before having the chance to make any profits. For this reason, many would-be distillers opt instead to source already made spirits from other distilleries and bottle them under their own brand, an approach that is far less expensive upfront with a greater possibility to more quickly generate a nice income. But that was not why Sean was getting into this business. He wanted to make the spirits himself, so despite this enormous uphill battle, Sean did find a space that he liked in the Shadow Ridge neighborhood near Vista, California and began the process of signing a lease. He put together an LLC and began building the branding around the name Shadow Ridge Spirits Company. While working at the San Diego International Spirits Competition at Del Mar, Sean met Trent Tilton (San Diego Distillery) who put him in touch with Casey Miles, the owner of the California Spirits Company. Trent and Casey turned Sean on to a different approach to opening a distillery. It was somewhat common in California for multiple distilleries to operate out of one shared space.
“I went over to talk to Casey and he was like, ‘you know, come in and do some pilot runs, get some stuff in barrels and see if people like it before you go and dump $300-400,000 into a new distillery.’ And so I was like, hey this is a great deal. It’s the best of both worlds really. I still get to do what I want, and I just pay for the use of the equipment.” - Sean Hallman, Owner/Distiller Shadow Ridge Spirits
Sean registered their company under the California Spirits Company’s license and began distilling there as one of eight distilleries sharing the space in 2017. It was a great opportunity to learn. They had large fermenters and a 1000 gallon stripping still, but it was crowded trying to schedule time around seven other distillers. At the time, Sean was interning at a local brew shop owned by his friend Raul Deju as part of the requirements for the brewing course he was taking at UC San Diego. There he met a man named Dieter Steinmetz who would come in from time to time to buy grain for his distillery, Oceanside Distillers. Dieter is a compounding pharmacist, so his distillery was empty six days out of the week. Sean asked Dieter if he would consider letting Sean distill there, and the two of them struck a deal. In 2018, Shadow Ridge Spirits moved its operation to Dieter’s space, renting the equipment on a part time basis. They split the cost of maintenance, insurance, barrels, etc., but they have their own recipes and processes. Sean re-registered the company under Dieter’s license. It was a different model than the one Sean & Lisa had originally envisioned, but one that made the cost of entry much less cumbersome.
“We tell people when they want to come in and sublease, plan on spending about $20,000 a year… $12-15,000 for rent plus another $7-8,000 for ingredients. A pitch of yeast is $85. $300 in grain for every batch. Barrels, I just bought 4 the other day, that was $1700. Bottles, glass, labels, etc. So you budget $20-23,000 a year instead of $100,000 a year.”
Those savings made it easier for Sean and Lisa to pay someone to help them design their logo and labels. Sean knew he wanted something that looked timeless and established, but distinctive in its own way. Not unlike the whiskey he was making, he wanted there to be something about it that caught your eye as being different, but once it had grabbed your attention was familiar enough to be a comfort. What he absolutely didn’t want was something that looked flashy or corny like you might find at a nightclub. Raul turned Sean on to a graphic designer named Alejandro Juarez. Alejandro used to own a cigar shop, so he designed the labels to look like a cigar wrapper. Sean was instantly in love with the label, but he didn’t love the color scheme. It was black and white, which reminded Sean of Jack Daniels and the Oakland Raiders, both deal breakers in his book. He wanted a splash of color, something a bit more vibrant than the dusty traditional old labels used by most of the big whiskey brands.
Sean didn’t want to make a clone of whiskeys that already existed. Even if he could replicate Woodford Reserve or Jack Daniels, he would never in a million years be able to out produce, out market, or outsell them, and for him that wasn’t the point. If he wanted to make something that tasted like something else, he would have just sourced in the first place. California has a vibrant craft brewing scene, and because of that they have established a west coast style of making beer. As a homebrewer turned distiller, Sean wanted to take the same approach to making his whiskeys, and with the flexibility of his set up he had no reason not to go for it. Sean bases a lot of his mash bills off of beer recipes, and sources most all of his grains from two local malt shops, Country Malt and Brewers Supply Group (BSG). They have everything from 50lb bags to 1 ton super sacks of pretty much any malt you could possibly need. When he is constructing a mash bill, Sean will go to these shops and taste through the malts. Sometimes he’ll buy some and bring it home to make tea with it to really understand it’s flavor profile. Country Malt and BSG use different malt suppliers so if he doesn’t like a specific grain from one place he can try it from the other. There are also a bunch of local malt suppliers he can turn to as well.
He only uses Belgian ale yeasts, with the exception of his rice whiskey which was made with sake yeast. He gets the yeast from White Labs, Inc., who supply charts that can give Sean an idea of what kind of congeners and esters they might pull from a specific grain. With this knowledge in hand he sets out to create his unique expressions, traditional enough to be recognizable, but noticeably different.
Shadow Ridge Bourbon Whiskey is made with 53% corn, 5% rye, 42% malted barley. That is significantly less corn than most commercial bourbons on the market, and a substantially high percentage of barley, which is made up of a combination of Munich, Vienna and crystal malts. Sean decided to use higher percentages of barley not only because he is very comfortable with barley as a brewer, but also because you just don’t see it done.
“The reason why people use just the two row base malt is to get the sugar. I do want the sugar, but I’m only looking at 7-12% ABV from my mash, and we ferment and distill on grain. To me the two row just doesn’t have a lot of flavor. I love German beers, I love Marzens, so for my base malt I use Munich and Vienna, which has a little more toast on it and has a lot more flavor. I use a crystal malt because it has a little caramelized flavor… It adds a different type of sweetness and a little more complexity. To me, corn sugar can be very harsh … We don’t have the luxury of letting our barrels sit around for 6 years, so I’m very conscious of my grain bill to try and make the highest quality distillate that I can.”
They bring the mash over to the fermenters at around 80 degrees, so they pitch the yeast a little warmer than most. To protect the fermentation from getting an infection, they will sometimes add some greek yogurt with live cultures at the very beginning. Not only does it help balance the pH, but it also prevents infections since there is already a controlled one introduced.
At Oceanside Distillers, they use a 120 gallon pot still from Corson. The still is steam jacketed with an agitator inside since they distill on the grain. They have an offset gin basket as well as two 10-plate columns and one 4-plate column, giving them the flexibility to make pretty much any kind of spirit. More often than not, when Sean and Lisa are making whiskey they do both a stripping run and a spirit run using the set up as a pure pot, bypassing all the columns. On the spirit run, they pay close attention to vapor pressure and are constantly evaluating the spirit coming off the still. A lot of flavor is in the tails, but they maintain a fairly narrow hearts cut to ensure that they don't pick up any off aromas or flavors. They go just deep enough into the tails to pull out some of the nutty flavors Sean is looking for. If they are strapped for time, they will use the shorter of the three column stills to do one pass on the still instead of two. Sean tries not to use more than 2 plates at the top of the column along with the dephlegmator to avoid stripping away too much flavor. At the end of the run the grain is separated to be used as chicken feed. They hold onto the heads and tails, and usually after three runs they have enough feints (around 100 gallons) to fill up the still and get a decent yield out of it.
Shadow Ridge Spirits makes five whiskeys all together, including a rye whiskey called Hallman Rye, named for Sean’s father, a rice whiskey made from 100% rice, and two different single malt whiskies. They started with the bourbon and the two single malts. Bourbon requires that you age it in new charred barrels, which are incredibly expensive. With their business model, Sean and Lisa didn’t find it cost effective to spend hundreds of dollars on a whiskey barrel they were only going to use once, so they knew from the start they were going to make both new barrel spirits and used barrel spirits. The first single malt they released is made up of 35% peated malt, 25% cherrywood smoked malt, and 40% vienna and crystal malts. Sean wanted to create a scotch style spirit that embraced smoke, but acknowledged that not everyone likes a campfire in their mouth. The combination of peated and cherrywood smoked malts was done to put an American twist on a classic style of whiskey in a way that could ease people into the world of smoked spirits. According to him, the result is a whiskey with a very distinctive finish with a little bit of back sweetness from the non-smoked malts. Despite being the first single malt that Shadow Ridge released, the other single malt, The American Single Malt, was actually the first whiskey recipe that Sean ever developed. Back in the day when people would approach him, interested in getting into home brewing, Sean would suggest they start with something that is easy to cover up flaws, like a stout. He took that same approach when crafting this whiskey. A cross between a stout and a schwarzbier, this whiskey is a combination of Sean’s standard Munich, Vienna and crystal malts along with 3% of an unhusked, roasted malt called carafa. The carafa may only be a small percentage of the mash bill but, according to Sean, it goes a long way, leading to an experience of maltiness on the front of the palate and dark chocolate and coffee flavors on the finish. They originally aged their single malts in used 5 gallon bourbon barrels from Balcones Distilling in Texas. Now they use their own used bourbon barrels to age these products.
Shadow Ridge started off filling 5 gallon barrels, and they have since moved up to 10’s, 15’s, 30’s, and just recently filled their first ever 53 gallon barrel. However, they still primarily use smaller cooperage because, due to the size of their fermenters and still and the way the schedule works sharing a space, it can take weeks to fill a 53 gallon barrel. They source their barrels from the Barrel Mill in Minnesota and Barrels Unlimited in Northern California. Sean likes these barrels because they are typically a little bigger than what they say they are, which means that Sean can maintain a little headspace inside the barrel after he fills it. This allows for the spirit to begin oxidizing right away, instead of having to wait for some of the spirit to evaporate. They use barrels with either a char level 3 or 4 depending on what the cooperages have available. He prefers to use the char 4 barrels for the rye, which he finds to be more spirit forward and because it is not going to age as long as the bourbon, so the deeper char will help to clean that distillate faster.
So far, every release of Shadow Ridge Spirits has been from single barrels. Sean bottles on demand based on orders, so some bottles might come from the same batch but aged for different lengths of time. Every single bottle is filled, labeled, packaged and shipped by either Sean or Lisa. They handle all branding/marketing, social media, and sales and remain the only two people who work for the company.
Aside from being able to sell online and through their tasting room, Shadow Ridge only sells their products to one liquor store chain in California called Keg N Bottle. They have 10 stores in total, and Sean and Lisa went with them because the owner, Tony Konja, attends local guild meetings and includes a San Diego spirits section in all of his stores. Shadow Ridge has been approached by larger chains like Trader Joe’s and BevMo, but aside from the fact that a single order from a place like that would likely completely wipe out their inventory, Sean also doesn’t believe consumers go to those stores to purchase craft spirits.
“We’ve been able to just kind of figure out our way. We have a really different business model than a lot of other distilleries, because a) we both do work full time, and then b) we’re actually really really happy being ultra-small batch. I’ve had some opportunities to expand, but again it would either be me sourcing or no longer distilling and hiring people to do that to expansion, and I’m just not ready to do that yet.”
The Navy once recruited young men and women saying “it’s not a job, it’s an adventure”. Sean understands that the journey is just as important as the final product. It’s the endeavor of producing spirits that captivates Sean. It’s the time with his wife, the interaction with customers during his weekend tours and the extra hours spent distilling to fill a single barrel. Perhaps, the distinction between “small batch” and “ultra small batch” is not volumetric, it's the difference between distilling for the purpose of selling spirits and distilling for the purpose of producing spirits. There are two messages on every bottle of Shadow Ridge spirits. The first is a toast to the men and women in uniform who protect our country, freedom and way of life. The second is a call to drink San Diego and enjoy the quality of their small batch spirits. These two messages perfectly encapsulate everything that Shadow Ridge represents. Unburdened by expectations, quotas or obligations, Sean and Lisa can truly hand craft these spirits the way they want to, and in doing so, honor their own values, their hometown and the people who fight everyday to create the opportunities for them to do so.
TASTING NOTES
Bourbon (45% ABV)
Nose: Fruit Cake, Cinnamon/Raisin Pull Apart, Malt Shop, Roasted Pecans, Candy Corn
Palate: The mouthfeel is silky with a little bit of heat. The front is slightly sweet with notes of baked tart apples with cinnamon. Spicy and earthy flavors of crack pepper, oak and mushrooms take over in the mid palate with a little nuttiness that leads to a long finish of hazelnuts and coffee.
This is one of the most unique bourbons we have ever tasted. It looks like a bourbon, but if tasting it blind you could easily confuse it for a malt whiskey aged in new barrels. What it lacks in traditional sweet notes of vanilla and caramel that you might expect from a bourbon, it makes up for with a rich complexity of flavors that keep you on your toes from start to finish. This is a really refreshing take on America’s most popular spirit and represents how dynamic bourbon can be.
Hallman Rye (45% ABV)
Nose: Grassy, Brown Sugar/Cinnamon Sugar, Caramel, Cloves, Buttered Toast
Palate: The mouthfeel is soft and silky with some wood and spice up front. The mid palate is a push and pull between dried apricots/baked peaches and roasted malt/dark chocolate. The dark chocolate notes persist into a long finish along with prickly pepper, and buttered white bread toast.
Similar to the bourbon, this rye has some unique qualities about it, specifically the roasted/malty flavors on the palate. However, this still delivers a lot of the peppery spice typically associated with the grain.
American Single Malt (45% ABV)
Nose: Wet Tree Bark, Cocoa Powder, Peanut Butter Cookie, Cloves
Palate: The mouthfeel is prickly and spicy. The flavors are sweet up front with confectioners sugar like a glazed donut. The mid palate is dominated more by coffee and tobacco before returning to sweeter notes of rich chocolate fudge brownie with dark chocolate frosting on a medium finish.
This is a very tasty whiskey that can satisfy your sweet cravings that the bourbon may leave wanting. Between the peanut butter cookie on the nose and the lingering fudge brownie on the finish, it is simply delectable. If you are looking for something like Macallan then this isn’t what you are looking for, but enjoyable in it’s own right.
Peated Single Malt (45% ABV)
Nose: Peat Moss, Fire Place, Saltines, Briny Seaweed
Palate: The mouthfeel is soft and smooth with some vanilla and caramel up front. It’s slightly nutty in the mid palate with a flash of peat smoke that transitions to cherrywood smoke before settling into chocolate covered bananas with honey on a medium finish.
The smoke on this whiskey is subtle, but great. The balance between the peat smoke and cherrywood smoke is well executed and bookended with sweeter notes to make it approachable for people who are less accustomed to smoked whiskies.