Storm King Distilling

By Devin Ershow

When you think of an adventurer a few things may come to mind. Perhaps you envision a person, hiking boots and backpack in tow, exploring lush forests and steep mountainsides. Maybe it’s a person clutching a map and a compass in search of a long lost treasure. It could be someone clinging to their boat as it crashes between thunderous waves on its way to a new land, or a hero on their way to save the day. No matter the vision, the one thing they all have in common is passion. Passion is the fuel for adventure. It’s what drives us forward in pursuit of whatever it is we’re looking for. If there is one thing you can say about David Fishering within moments of meeting him, it’s that he is a passionate person and it is his passion for whiskey that led him on his adventure to start Storm King Distilling Company. 

“My biggest thing was just coming from a love of whiskey and that’s kind of where my part of this started was with that.”

As is the case with so many people who grow up in small towns, David longed to get away when he was younger. David grew up in western Colorado’s Uncompahgre Valley in a modest but beautiful place called Montrose. Known for its rich agricultural heritage, bountiful apple orchards, world class fly fishing, hiking and majestic mountainscapes, David claims, “I don’t think you can get a bluer sky than the sky above our town.” Despite the wonders that helped raise young David, he wanted more. He wanted to set off on an adventure all his own. He made his escape when he attended the University of Southern California to get his undergraduate degree. 

His intentions were to become an engineer, but he quickly realized that while he loved science, a lot of engineering at a higher level meant doing quite a bit of math … and David didn’t love math. Struck by the world altering events of September 11th, 2001, David decided to switch gears and focus instead on international relations. After graduating from USC, he made his way across the pond to get his masters in intelligence and international security from King’s College in London. While in London he met his future wife, Sarah. 

When David completed his studies at King's College his hopes were to return to the states to work for the United States government, but finding it hard to get a job there straight away he took a position with a defense consulting company based out of San Antonio, Texas. He and Sarah tied the knot in 2008 and stayed in Texas until Sarah got a job in Washington D.C. working at the University of Maryland’s terrorism research center. Since most of David’s clients were in D.C. anyway, he convinced his company to let him work remotely (long before remote work would become as commonplace as it is now). Not long after moving to D.C. in 2010, David got a job working for the Department of Defense as an analyst, even spending some time in Afghanistan in 2011. 

Before you check to make sure you’re on the right website and aren’t reading a Jack Ryan fan fiction page, this is when whiskey comes into the picture. “My wife and I were living in D.C. when I kind of caught the whiskey bug.” David tells us. “I think part of it, at least in the sense of bourbon, it’s the American … it’s our spirit, right? If I lived somewhere else and everything else was the same, if we were in Mexico and everything was the same, I bet I’d be super passionate about tequila.” A sense of patriotism opened the doors to the wide ranging whiskey world, but David, a self-proclaimed history buff, also became enraptured with the impact that whiskey has had on American history and culture throughout the years. 

In 2012, David and Sarah made the journey to the epicenter of American whiskey production, Kentucky and treated themselves to the now legendary Bourbon Trail. “We were driving a Honda Fit at the time, and if you know what a Honda Fit is, it's a pretty small, tiny, light car. It went there fine. It came back with the ass end of it like this [puts his hand at an angle implying the back of the car was dragging on the ground] all the way back to D.C.” David says with a playful smile. “It was loaded with as much whiskey as my wife would let me buy.” Later that year, David and Sarah traveled to London to visit Sarah’s family and they decided to take a side trip to Scotland. “In one calendar year I went to the two meccas of whiskey making.”

David’s commute to and from work in D.C. took him two hours each way, so there was a lot of time on those long drives to ponder. A dream started to form in his mind of one day opening his own distillery. Small craft distilleries were starting to pop up around the area. One day David dropped into one of the new start ups, Catoctin Creek who we featured back in October of 2020. David couldn’t help but relate to their story. Like David, Scott Harris previously worked as a defense contractor. He eventually got tired of his day job and dreamed of opening his own distillery. “I was like, yeah that sounds like me!” David chuckles. 

The difference between David and Scott is that David did really love his job working at the Department of Defense. He figured he’d keep on trucking, making good money and then maybe open the distillery once he retired from government work later on in life. However, in 2014 David and Sarah were starting to think about having a family and they figured if they were going to start a family, maybe it would be better to be close to family, so they moved back to David’s hometown of Montrose, Colorado. David began working for his Dad, Greg. Greg owned a  telecom company, a company he had started long before cell phones were a part of every person’s everyday life that had adeptly evolved with the times before eventually becoming a part of AT&T through a series of mergers and acquisitions. This job paid the bills, but it wasn’t exciting for David. It wasn’t something he was passionate about. He knew he had to find something else to do that would satisfy him. 

One day in 2017, a historic property, once the Montrose Fruit and Produce Association, a building that David’s father had wanted to purchase for quite some time became available. The farmer’s co-op that owned the building came back to the Fishering family, accepting an offer they had made previously. They bought up this renowned building along with the warehouse next door and the interceding parking lot, a parcel that all in all made up three fourths of a city block. Now they were stuck with the question, what now? “I kind of flippantly said, ‘why don’t we put a distillery there?’” David recalls. “My Dad pulled out his credit card and said go out and buy a still so we can figure out what to do.”

David purchased a small 8-gallon hand hammered copper pot still from Portugal and messed around with it in his Dad’s garage out in the county where there were no neighbors. After about six months of tooling around, David started going around to liquor stores buying commercial “white dog,” basically unaged whiskey, to compare to the unaged distillate they were making. “Ours tasted better, so we were like yeah we know what we’re doing so let’s do this.” The historic building they purchased was not suitable at the time for a distillery as it was missing part of the roof, among other issues, so they decided to place the distillery in the neighboring warehouse they had purchased along with it. In 2017 they completed all the necessary permitting. They brought in larger professional distilling equipment and first fired up their new stills in early February of 2018. Later that year, in June they began making whiskey and officially opened their doors to the public and Storm King Distilling Company was up and running. 

“One of our little mantras is ‘craftsmanship without pretense.”

You might be wondering about the name Storm King, and some of you might even be picturing a muscular bearded god wielding an impressive trident. Considering the recent release of the Disney remake, Little Mermaid you may at least be picturing Ariel’s Dad. However, the name is not derived from any maritime mythology. It comes from a specific Colorado mountain range that happens to start just east of Montrose. The Cimarron Mountain Range runs south until it meets up with the San Juan Mountain Range. “The start of that mountain range is a peak called Storm King.” David informs us. He crowd sourced the design of their logo which features said mountain peak using 99 Designs settling on a design from artist Melanie J. Mitchell out of the United Kingdom. 

Much of their brand presentation is based around keeping things simple and affordable while still presenting their products as high quality. Their labels are designed so they only need one dye cut. For those unfamiliar with the thrilling world of printed labels, dye cuts are necessary for any special label embellishment such as using metallic foil or embossing/debossing. Storm King’s labels, designed by Tim Praetzel, do utilize some of these features to help make them pop, but it’s consistent throughout all their products. The elements that do change such as the name of the product or the description are designed in a way that won’t require new dye-cuts or additional costs. “All of the design stuff in here is kind of that way… The reason it’s [the spirits] in the bottle that it’s in and a lot of reasons why the design things were chosen is so we could save money and not have to have a custom bottle and all of that stuff. I would love one. I would love to have the cool custom bottles that a lot of these guys have, but we don’t have the money for that. I need to make the presentation nice but I don’t need to pass on $4 of labeling and bottling to you in the price of the whiskey.” David explains. 

Montrose is a small community. Larger in size than when David was growing up, but still very small when compared to some of the larger cities on the front range and beyond. There are only two cocktail bars in Montrose. The first is a speakeasy that opened about 6-months prior to Storm King opening their tasting room in 2018. While admittedly, running a tasting room is not David’s favorite part of the job, “having to make vodka makes me sad everyday,” it is a big part of what helps keep Storm King afloat, especially since the pandemic. While some may worry that having a cocktail bar in a small community that previously had no cocktail culture would be a risky business venture, David reminds us that “being the only distillery within 65 miles means that you’ve got a captive audience.” David encourages his bartenders to have a lot of creativity. They haven’t had paper menus since the pandemic started. There is a chalkboard in the bar with a list of the five or six drinks they are featuring at the moment. The menu changes when the bartenders decide it’s time for a change. That may mean that the drink you had the last time you were there won’t be available the next time you come in. While David acknowledges that may frustrate some of his customers, he wants them to be challenged to try new things. The hope is that once the restorations and refurbishments are complete on the old MFPA building that they will move the tasting room and all other retail experiences over there, freeing up more production space for David to focus on the whiskey he wants to be making. “We’re a whiskey distillery. Everything else that I do is to pay for me making whiskey.” David says.

“My whiskey tastes the way it does, I think, because I love whiskey. I’m not going to say that I know what good whiskey is, but I know what I think good whiskey is or what I like. Because what I like is on a pretty wide spectrum that allows me to make better whiskey.”

When Storm King began production in early 2018 they started with agave, gin and vodka. Those products help keep the lights on, but whiskey was the dream. Whiskey begins with the grains, and while David might not subscribe to the terroir in whiskey arguments that many have been trying to make in recent years, he does believe that where those grains come from makes a difference. “If you think corn or rye grown in Colorado is going to taste just like those grains grown in Indiana, or Pennsylvania, or Germany, then I would say you are way wrong.” David continues to say, “We wanted to make a whiskey from Colorado. You can make a whiskey in Colorado, and that’s fine, but we wanted to make whiskey from Colorado.” 

Montrose, Colorado is one of the world’s premier producers of sweet corn. Not only is sweet corn genetically engineered to taste better, but fresh sweet corn also has more fermentable sugars in it than grapes do. In farming sweet corn, usually only the top ear of the stalks are harvested, leaving 2-3 more ears of corn per stock. David’s cousin happens to be a broker for local sweet corn so when they first started up David felt they may be able to offer a new revenue stream for the local farmers. The problem with working with sweet corn is scale. You can take fresh sweet corn on its own, no mashing or cooking necessary, add yeast and come out with a corn wine. “It’s fine if you’re doing ten ears of corn in a five-gallon bucket, but at our scale how do you manage getting fresh corn in, processing it … it’s a nightmare quite frankly.” David laments. Then they looked at the possibility of using dried sweet corn, but the aforementioned genetic modifications mean the dried version has a lower starch content than standard yellow corn. “The yields were really bad. The flavor wasn’t good, and so that access that I have wasn’t really viable.” David says. 

Through David’s struggles with the local sweet corn, he realized he needed to find a farming partner who really knew what they were doing and knew what he needed. He wound up googling Colorado grain and found two companies, The Colorado Malting Company and The Whiskey Sisters. He reached out to both. The Cody family at Colorado Malting admitted that they didn’t really have the bandwidth to help due to contracts they already had in place with Laws Whiskey House. Check out our article on them to learn more. Luckily, David found something special in The Whiskey Sisters. “Immediately it was just a connection. I told them the story and what we were doing and they just bought in 100%.” David tells us with a smile. Like Colorado Malting, The Whiskey Sisters had also been working with Laws for the last two years, growing their corn. “I didn’t have to help them get to where I wanted, they were already there. They were already beyond it. They were beyond what I even knew I needed.”

When they first started distilling, David didn’t know what varietal of grains or even mashbills he wanted to work with. He knew he liked whiskey, but how could he know if he was going to like whiskey made from these grains until he tasted how each one was coming off the still. So to start, David produced one hundred percent single grain distillates of a wide variety of grains and varietals. He tried numerous different bourbon mash bills as well. 

The stills they use are from Still Dragon out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They are both hybrid pot/column stills. The work horse is a 264-gallon still that is used mainly for whiskey, but also agave and rum. Their smaller 92-gallon still is used for side projects and for gin. The larger still allows them to fill a 25 or 30-gallon barrel in a single run or the industry standard 53-gallon barrel in two batches. 

Similar to the uncertainty they had about which grains to use, they weren’t sure about the barrels either. “We have a lot of barrel profiles, as we didn’t want to limit ourselves when we started because Char 3 or 4 might be the standard in Kentucky, but that doesn’t mean it will be the best for us in Colorado.” David tells us. “When we started, we put a little bit of every batch in 15-gallon barrels from the Barrel Mill so that we could have some idea, sooner about each mash bill.” The outcome of all of these initial experiments was a wide spectrum of whiskey types and styles in their warehouse. 

To date they have released three bourbons. The first was a single barrel and the second a blend of three barrels. The most recent, which was released in May 2023 was a blend of two 53-gallon barrels with a 65% corn and 35% red wheat mash bill. Moving forward, especially as they start to move into their larger barrels, David is considering only releasing bourbon as single barrel bottled in bond offerings. “My bourbon? My goodness, 5 years on people ask me what’s your mash bill for your bourbon? I don’t know, pick one. Almost every barrel we got is something different.

The rye whiskey they release is a 100% rye mash bill. Thus far they have used a varietal called Elbon rye, which is all The Whiskey Sisters had available when they started. It is apparently the varietal of rye that grows the best in Colorado. They have recently been experimenting with Hazlet rye, the same varietal used by Far North Spirits in Hallock, Minnesota. It’s known for being less spice forward with a nice vanilla note.

About a year after they started production, Felicia and Stephanie, the previously referenced whiskey sisters, came to visit Storm King. While on a tour with David, Greg and Sarah they learned that in addition to running the distillery, David was also still working for his father and served on the planning commision for the town. Sarah had her own day job, served as president of the school board and ran the tasting room most nights. One of the sisters remarked that it sounded like they had a lot of side gigs. The name stuck in David’s mind and two days later he had it trademarked. He didn’t know what he was going to do with it, but he knew he liked the name. Once it came time to start releasing their whiskey, David looked out over all the different single grain whiskeys aging in different size barrels with different char levels and started asking himself what he was going to do with it all. In an ideal world, he would put them all out individually as experimental batches, but the cost of printing all of those labels was too immense to consider. Then David remembered the name he trademarked earlier, and everything clicked into place. 

Side Gig American Whiskey was born of the initial concept that Storm King makes bourbon and rye all the time, and this is their side gig. “It’s an evolving blend of straight whiskies.” David tells us. Something that initially allowed for them to create something cool with all the extra whiskey at their disposal. What started as a batch to batch process has transformed a bit over time. “Sometime in the near future once we get rid of the tasting room here and I have enough production space we will get a massive wooden vessel that is toasted and charred on the inside that I can put Side Gig in and it can sit there for the 6 months in between batches and continue to mature, but right now it’s just in a tank. I’ve got a 250-gallon tank that’s two thirds full. We will empty barrels into it, and then empty a third or so of the tank and bottle that as the next batch of Side Gig.” David explains. 

Storm King was actually considering dropping the name Side Gig as the product had outgrown its initial concept. It was no longer just the thing that they did on the side. Before they could do so they got some big news. Side Gig was named the world’s best American whiskey from the World Whiskey Awards earlier this year, 2023. World Whiskey is one of the most highly regarded and respected spirit competitions on the planet, and winning a world’s best is an incredible honor and accomplishment for any distillery. David hopes that it means a lot to the town of Montrose. “To have a distillery that’s one of the top 1.5% of entries named in your home town? … We now have a destination that has the world’s best American whiskey, right here.”

“When we were in Louisville (Kentucky) for the World Whiskey Awards, my goodness, I was so nervous, and then people just started coming up and talking to me like I was just one of the gang as it were. We were sitting next to guys from Buffalo Trace and Heaven Hill and it didn’t matter. They were talking to us like we were just another guy in the industry.”

Coming up on 5 years since they first opened the doors to the public, the journey continues. Every day presents new challenges and opportunities. In many ways, they are still figuring things out, an endeavor that may never end. “Most of what we do here on the whiskey side of things is completely out of necessity.” David explains. The aftermath of their big win at the World Whiskey Awards is a great example. “When I got back from Louisville half of my production floor was barrels, because I had taken a bunch of barrels out to make rye and bourbon. All of the bourbon barrels went to this batch (Batch 7) of Side Gig, because I sold out of the batch I had just bottled before going to the award ceremony. I sold out of it in a week and a half.” David states with a certain degree of happiness and surprise. Storm King started off experimenting because it wasn’t sure which direction it wanted to go in, and while they have garnered significant acclaim for what they have done up to this point, it certainly doesn’t seem they are ready to standardize anything quite yet. “I’ve got, I don’t know how many barrels I have now, 200 and something. There’s good whiskey in there, but none of them are like holy shit you have to stop making everything else and only make this recipe for the rest of time.” For David, it’s less about finding that perfect mash bill for his bourbon or precise combination for Side Gig and more about the legacy. David Fishering got bit by the whiskey bug while working for the government in Washington D.C. He grew to love whiskey and everything about it. He came back home to Montrose and started the distillery of his dreams, and now finds himself in the same room as the people who made the whiskeys he admired so much from the start, talking to them like equals. He currently holds the title of the world’s best American whiskey and one day hopes that Storm King will be considered one of, if not the best whiskey distilleries in Colorado. “We don’t really know which way we’re going. We know where we want to go, but trying to get there … that’s the adventure, right?” David asks. It has certainly been an adventure thus far, and the adventure is not over. David Fishering hasn’t reached the peak yet, but we can safely say it seems like he’s heading in the right direction, up Storm King. 

Tasting Notes

Straight Bourbon Batch 3 (45% ABV)

Nose: Honey, Straw, Cooked Banana, Cardamom, Orange Peel 

Palate: The mouthfeel is light and oily with just a touch of heat. Citrus and spice light up the front palate with notes of orange fruit, orange peel, black pepper, cardamom and just a hint of vanilla. Those same flavors continue to dance around the mid palate for landing in a medium oatmeal raisin cookie finish.

This is a very surprising and enjoyable bourbon. Nothing like the bourbons coming out of Kentucky, and we love that. Rather than the traditional vanilla and caramel dessert profile this offers something more akin to a fall baked good on the nose and palate.

Straight Rye Batch 4 (45% ABV)

Nose: Peach Preserves, Tart Green Apple Candy, Peanuts, Cinnamon, Vanilla, Wet Wood

Palate: The mouthfeel is silky with sweet flavors of vanilla, peaches, brown sugar and cinnamon. More baking spices with subtle black pepper join in the mid palate settling back into flavors of brown sugar and peaches.

Another surprising but delicious whiskey. This really does not drink like a traditional rye whiskey. The spice flavors are very muted in comparison to the sweeter and fruitier notes that dominate the palate. 

Side Gig Batch 7 (45% ABV)

Nose: Cherries, Anise, Rose, Vanilla, Cinnamon, Cardamom 

Palate: The mouthfeel is light and prickly. Spicy pepper and cinnamon notes dominate the front palate. Dark honey, vanilla and orange flavors join in the mid palate leading to a long and dry finish with lingering sweetness, spice and a touch of oak.

This is a very complex whiskey on both the nose and palate. As fans and producers of blended American whiskey, it’s easy to see why something like this would be named the World’s Best American Whiskey. With every sniff and every taste there is something new to appreciate.