Westland Distillery

By Meghan Swanson

Most people in America have probably tasted a variation of the time-honored, golden marriage of potatoes and cheese. Whether you call it scalloped potatoes, potatoes au gratin, or even simply ‘cheesy potatoes’, odds are this rich and creamy combo has ended up on your plate. For some it remains a comfort food, dimly and fondly remembered from their grandparents’ table; for others, a bland and boring casserole-dish-monster they would never serve at their own. For Matt Hofmann, potatoes au gratin represented mystery and magic. How could this delicious dish come from such an uninspiring vegetable? Why is it so much better when it’s homemade? These were questions that beset a 15 year-old Matt and drove him to explore past the simplest ingredients and down into the very building blocks of flavor. Even a Michelin-starred chef practicing molecular gastronomy starts out boiling endless batches of potatoes in their home kitchen; Matt, co-founder of highly decorated craft whiskey juggernaut Westland Distillery, started his exploration of flavor with a retrofitted water purifier in his college dorm room. At first blush, potatoes au gratin to award-winning whiskey seems like quite the leap; when you get to know Matt, and Westland, you’ll understand–for them, blazing their own trail is just business as usual.

“The beauty of whiskey-making is, on the surface of it, it's so simple: four ingredients. The beauty of being restricted by that boundary of four ingredients and yet the unbelievable creativity and innovation you can do within that is a very beautiful and satisfying thing to do.” 

At fifteen years old, Matt actually hated the russet potato. A stultifyingly bland food on its own, he couldn’t really understand what anyone saw in it. That is, until he tried homemade potatoes au gratin–and his high school chemistry teacher opened his eyes to the alchemy of distillation. Though young Matt hadn’t at that point ever had a drop to drink, his curiosity was ignited. “I thought, ‘Whoa, somebody would take this potato’--what I thought was the most boring thing in the world–’and turn it into this beverage that people are seeking.’ I was just completely blown away by that concept.” he says. As he got older, he was fascinated by many ways of creating flavor: brewing, cheesemaking, winemaking; but it was distilling that got its hooks into him and never let go. “This is just an amazing thing to be able to do. To take some of the most humble ingredients on the planet and make them into the most complex beverages on the planet. How cool is that?” he asks, grinning. Ironically, he confesses, his worst grade in high school was out of that chemistry class.

Chemistry grade aside, Matt was accepted into the University of Washington, commonly known as UW (pronounced U-dub). It was during his freshman year that he bought his very first still. It was a Frankenstein thing, a 1-gallon, fan-cooled, retro-fitted water purifier that he says looked like a ‘poor-quality coffee maker’, but it allowed him to pursue his passion–and he hasn’t stopped distilling ever since. In his sophomore year, he moved the operation from his dorm in Seattle into his parents’ basement, about 30 minutes south. He also was in a car accident that year (not his fault, he points out) that totaled his car; the resulting insurance payout was a windfall to a college student like Matt, and he put every dime into his distilling operation. “I would spend every weekend distilling. All the summers distilling.” he recalls. During his junior year, he dropped out. At 21, he had teamed up with a friend with a business background and they had co-founded Westland Distillery.

UW would not be the end of Matt’s post-secondary education. He would go on to obtain a general certificate in distilling from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling in London and his postgraduate degree in brewing and distilling science from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. His U.K.-based education was about more than just the content in the classroom; his degrees were mostly completed online, but “If you want to learn how to make malt whiskey, you go to the source.” he explains. He visited Islay and was inspired. “Me going to Islay was a really big deal. Just soaking in the idea–I didn’t really understand how to quantify it at that moment, but the idea that I would call sense of place or terroir. I am clearly drinking a whiskey that is from this place, and how cool is that?” he says. 

“When you see Westland, what you’re getting is very simple. It's a fusion of these two things: it’s place and the people who live in that place, and it is making whiskey that reflects it.”

When he and Matt founded Westland, friend Emerson Lamb brought his family’s business acumen–they had been big industrialists in paper and pulp a century ago–and the funding that originally got them started. “They weren’t in the timber industry, they were in the timber-adjacent industry,” Matt points out, joking, “These are shades you have to consider in the Pacific Northwest.” He also helped name the distillery. “Westland came from two things,” Matt explains, “First of all, it was the name of a home–remember, this is from like a century ago when people still named homes.” he says wryly. “When we started the business…it was the place we cracked the first business plan, in that home called Westland. Also beyond that, the idea of Westland…we wanted this classically Western ethos and mentality. This idea of possibility and opportunity and not having one leg stuck in the past. People would go West to make a new city or a new life…and that spirit was what we wanted to capture.” Emerson parted ways from Westland in 2015 for personal reasons, and that moment served as a turning point for Westland. “Up to that point, I’d had nothing to do with marketing and brand stuff. I thought there was a pretty big opportunity to do something cool with a big pet project I’d been doing since we started but hadn’t done much with. It was a product that we now call Garryana.” Matt tells us. 

Garryana is born of the Pacific Northwest’s native Quercus garryana, or Garry oak. Only a handful of species of oak trees are used in whiskey-making, among which are the Quercus mongolica (better known as Mizunara, much prized by fellow Washington distillery Bainbridge Organic), Quercus alba or American white oak, and European oak which can be Quercus robur or Quercus patrea. Until Westland, Garry oak was not typically one of them. Garry oak grows only in a highly limited geographic area from Vancouver, B.C. south to the very top of Northern California; in this long strip, it only occurs between the coastal mountain ranges and the Cascade Mountains. Due to over-harvesting by humans, the Garry oak is only growing today in about 3% of the area it used to. Matt’s eyes light up as he tells its story. “At the end of the last ice age, the Pacific Northwest, where I am right here in Seattle, was covered in a mile of ice.” he circles his hand in the air around himself. When those glaciers retreated, Garry oaks spread north from California. Their acorns fed not only the indigenous people of the area, but the deer and elk those people hunted; the people caught wise to the fact that the acorn-eating prey tasted way better, and decided to encourage their continued tastiness. For thousands of years, indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest practiced controlled burns, burning out the sunlight-eating firs and pines and leaving the fire-resistant Garry oaks behind, creating ‘oak savannas’. This story isn’t commonly known by modern-day Pacific Northwesterners. “That existed for thousands of years here, and it’s only now we’re beginning to discover that. I had no idea we had oaks here, growing up.” Matt says. “When we started to learn all about that stuff, you really treasure what this means here.” he adds. Bringing Garry oak’s story back to the public in an innovative product is just one of the creative ways Westland is marrying a sense of place and creativity in their work.

“Ten years from now, twenty years from now, fifty years from now, people will look back at this being this moment. This is it.”

Westland Distillery and Matt are perhaps most well-known in the industry not for their highly-awarded whiskeys or their use of the rare Garry oak, but for championing the idea of American Single Malt Whiskey. From the start, Westland has been making single malt whiskey–with their own creative and uniquely American twists. When they first started out, Matt saw single malt whiskey as the most revered type of whiskey in the world; he knew he could come up with a heavyweight contender in that category from right in his home state. After all, it is a great place to grow barley and boasts a world-class craft beer scene; something he didn’t neglect to look into when he got going on his own single malt. “For me, it was like, ‘Ok, it’s single malt whiskey, it’s made out of 100% malted barley, and yet nobody is looking at flavorful malted barley. How could that possibly be?’ That was the thought process at the very beginning.” he explains. That’s where Westland’s signature 5-malt mash bill, kilned and roasted to coax the chocolate, hazelnut, and pastry flavors out of the grains through the Maillard reaction, came from. He also ages their single malt in new American oak barrels; this is definitely a departure from the traditional European style. “I think new American oak, for most single malt whiskies, is too powerful. But because we’re using these big, dark-roasted malts the flavor of that distillate is so much bigger and it balances.” he explains. “You know a lot of distilleries would go, ‘This is just not how this is done.’ That’s what I was taught, in those schools - ‘you don’t do this, this is not how whiskey is made.’” he tells us. To this, we think Matt would counter: this isn’t how your whiskey is made.

“To the best of my knowledge, we were the first distillery to put ‘American Single Malt’ on the label, and that just felt very natural because that’s what it was.” Matt says. The one little problem with this labeling; to the TTB, the category of American Single Malt Whiskey didn’t exist, legally. They had to split the words into two lines to make sure they weren’t advertising a whiskey that, to the country’s governing body on alcohol, wasn’t real. Fortunately, Matt had a plan. “Okay, one of our biggest challenges is that we’re making a type of whiskey that doesn’t have a framework for it, and a framework of understanding–not just at the consumer level, but also at the trade level–so…let’s make one.” he explains, spreading his hands with a smile. “That’s a very Westland thing to do. Sometimes those things work, sometimes they don’t.” he admits with a laugh.

In 2016, in conjunction with the American Craft Spirits Association Conference, Matt hatched his plan. “The idea was very simple, it was: let’s put out a call to everyone who is producing single malt.” he tells us. Eight distilleries answered the call, and they all got together in a big back room provided by a supportive Binny’s liquor store in Chicago. The official business took all of 45 minutes to iron out. “The premise, I think, was already well understood. We were trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. We’re trying to capture this thing that people are already doing and trying to put it into words and into structure rather than trying to create imaginary rules to fit something.” Matt says. “That’s very important, actually, when it comes to American Single Malt and the definition. We’re not trying to reinvent the definition of single malt…we were all in nearly complete agreement right away. From there it was easy, it was just building the number of distilleries that were brought on and making sure they were on board with the definition.” he explains. The American Single Malt Whiskey Commission (ASWMC) was born.

The commission’s years of work seem to be finally paying off; as of summer 2022, the TTB proposed an official legal definition for American Single Malt Whiskey. The comment period was closing soon at the time of our interview with Matt, and as the ASMWC stood on the cusp of achieving their dream, we asked how that felt.  “The lead-up of being like, ‘When will it happen, when will it happen?’ was so hard. I can say that now, because the wait was like a lot longer than we thought it was gonna be.” Matt says with a smile. “Now that we’re in it…I think the mindset has just changed because, like, the end-game is here. It’s gonna happen one way or the other.” he states. “We are not only living through history, we are making history right now. What an incredible opportunity and privilege that is.” he adds. “When it hits, when the moment comes and it becomes official, the job is not done–this is almost too depressing to think about–-in many ways, this is just the starting point.” Matt explains.“Now, American Single Malt Whiskey is ‘real’. At this point, Westland is 12 years into this business. Now when we talk to journalists, retailers, bars, this is what American Single Malt is. That just gives people the boundaries–and it’s a huge set of boundaries within which to play.” he finishes. Matt’s excitement for the category is infectious, and shared by many other distillers and whiskey fans; we can’t wait to see how it plays out.

“This is kind of the place that Westland grows up and becomes that leading American Single Malt brand around the world.”

There’s no doubt Matt has had big dreams for Westland from day one; he wants to take their uniquely Pacific Northwestern single malt whiskeys and share them with the whole world. “We got into this business with the vision of Westland being a globally competitive brand that is synonymous with the category–which we do believe can happen at the global level.” Matt says. “The easiest analogy is Japanese whiskey. When you think about Japanese whiskey, immediately you’re thinking about two brands–maybe three, with Chichibu now–but certainly for most of the time now it’s been Yamazaki and Nikka. When you’re able to be at the forefront of something, your brand can kind of lock that in forever, and to be able to do that means you need to reach a lot of people quickly.” he explains. Big dreams like this take big money, and that’s what led Westland to begin seeking out a minority stake investment partner, ideally one who could bring an existing distribution network to the table. “We learned very quickly–it’s not all sunshine and rainbows running a distillery, believe it or not–we didn’t need two sales people to make that happen, we needed two hundred salespeople to make that happen. Maybe two thousand salespeople - to really reach people all around the world takes a lot of people power, and it takes a lot of money.” says Matt. That’s how they ended up in talks with Remy Cointreau, which acquired Westland in 2017. “They [Remy Cointreau] ended up falling in love with the business, and they made an offer for the whole thing–after Emerson having left the business and his family still being involved, all told it was a good way to make a clean transition for him and his family and for us going with Cointreau.” Matt tells us. 

The apocryphal tale of the small craft operation being bought up by the corporate giant and losing its soul is one that has been circulating in different fields since the dawn of the industrial age. Wasn’t Matt leery of signing Westland over to a huge, foreign business? The fact that Remy Cointreau also owns Scottish distillery Bruichladdich eased his mind. “Bruichladdich’s vision for how to run a distillery being very interested in terroir, being very interested in raw ingredients and provenance and place, they were like, our heroes. So the fact that they were still doing all the cool stuff that they were doing before [acquisition by Remy Cointreau], was like, okay, that’s still going to work.” Matt explains. So far, it’s going well in his eyes.  “How much do they impact as a global company on a distillery that’s trying to do local stuff? They’ve been excellent. Excellent, excellent. They’ve been super-supportive of the way that we want to make whiskey, there’s been things that we do that are more expensive–when you compare it to Bruichladdich, actually there’s a lot of things that are more expensive–but there’s been no pressure at all to try to force us to standardize one supplier for something.” he tells us. “There’s growing pains that come with being a part of a larger organization. There’s a lot of meetings, there’s a lot of powerpoints, there’s a lot of Excel, that sort of stuff. They’re a publicly-traded company, so there’s a lot of structure that comes with that you have to get plugged into.” Matt says ruefully. On the other hand, Remy Cointreau has brought the financial power to help Westland expand into realms they previously didn’t have access to. “They’ve funded a lot of things we couldn’t do before, like the replanting of Garry oak as part of the Garryana program. The funding of the WSU Breadlab…that’s money that’s a very long-term proposition that’s there.” Matt explains.

“Whiskey as an idea is so compelling. The history of whiskey is so beautiful, it’s such a humble thing, and I’m attracted to the humbleness of both the grain that goes into whiskey…and it’s coming from places where grain is the only thing you’ve got.”

As you might expect from a guy who once liked a potato dish and from there ended up making his career out of distilling things into their most basic chemical building blocks, Matt is not content to understand something simply on its surface. “Our approach has been very diligent about breaking down assumptions, and just trying to challenge whiskey-making and how we could push it forward.” Matt explains. He looked at distillation like an engineer would, asking ‘why?’ at every step. To make single malt, he needed malted barley. “You can get malted barley anywhere on the planet. We thought, ‘Wait a second, this is a really good place to grow barley.’” Matt recalls. This led him to his love affair with grain–seriously; both his phone and desktop backgrounds are set to beautiful, National Geographic-worthy close up shots of heirloom barley stalks. Back in 2010, Westland was so set on using local malted barley, they were willing to set up their own malting company when they couldn’t find anyone who was doing it already. Fortunately, they attended a grain conference in the Skagit Valley that year, and met the founders of Skagit Valley Malting–Westland wouldn’t need to get into the malting business, and Skagit Valley Malting has become one of the biggest craft malting operations in the country.

The Skagit Valley is also where Matt would meet Dr. Stephen Jones, director of the aforementioned WSU Breadlab. Washington State University is the state’s land grant school, and its main campus is nestled in the rolling wheat fields of the Palouse region, hundreds of miles away from Seattle on the sunnier eastern side of the state. Dr. Jones left the Palouse and the main campus, striking out west to Mt. Vernon, where he sidestepped the limitations of traditional agricultural education and the commodity grain system to do something radical: breed grain that tasted better, grew healthier, and was more affordable. To Matt, meeting Dr. Jones and finding out about the WSU Breadlab was kismet. “We’re stuck in a post-World War Two-era agriculture system, when actually we can have environmental sustainability, we can have economic viability for farmers, we can have nutrition, and we can have flavor. We can have all those things together, and most people–including myself when I started this journey-didn’t think that was possible.” he explains with fervor. The WSU Breadlab is the only laboratory of its kind in the world, and operates fully on donations–obviously, the commodity grain system isn’t keen on contributing to upending itself. Westland is a dedicated financial contributor to the lab’s PhD work, funding a PhD student studying barley. “To me, this is the future. Ten years from now when you think of malted barley–today what most people see is this pale blonde two-row malted barley…but people are going to see black barleys, purple barleys, red barleys.” Matt says, sweeping his hand out over an imaginary field of healthy, tasty, multi-colored heirloom barley in the middle distance. 

Another absolute key component of Westland’s single malt whiskey is peat, but that also proved a challenge to source locally. “When we started distilling, we found the peat bog we wanted to work with locally right away. But no malting company in America, to the best of my knowledge, had ever made peated malt.” Matt recalls. “That project was a big passion project of ours.” Skagit Valley Malting collaborated with Westland in 2016, and produced, to Matt’s knowledge, the first commercially made batch of American peated malt. “Our whiskey is about American Single Malt being made in the Pacific Northwest. So that [local peated malt] was one of the points we couldn’t do before and now we can.” he says. That New World peated malt went into a single malt whiskey they’re calling Solum, which will be a limited release as part of their Outpost range making its debut around March of 2023.

“When you grow up here in the Pacific Northwest, you are surrounded by beauty. I think everybody–no matter what walk of life or political persuasion you come from–you value and treasure the outdoors that’s here.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when we all were suddenly blessed/burdened with an abundance of time we had previously spent doing things like working together in offices, dining out, and traveling, Westland used some of that extra time to knuckle down on its sustainability goals. It wasn’t a tough decision for Matt or hard for Remy Cointreau to support (they are aggressive in their own sustainability goals). “In general we just wanted to take it [sustainability] seriously, and taking it seriously meant being more transparent about it.” Matt explains. There was never a doubt that sustainability would be part of the heart of Westland Distillery, but how to quantify that? They started with…everything. They measured their carbon footprint, obtained an Envirostars certification, and threw funding into regenerative agriculture. At the time of the interview, they were in the end stages of becoming a certified B Corp. “It’s huge, it’s all-encompassing. It factors into every decision we make and will continue to going forward.” Matt says. By 2025, their plan is to be fully outside of the commodity grain system; 100% of their grain will come from regenerative agriculture systems. “I think the Pacific Northwest is leading, or maybe the West Coast, you could say, is leading globally in what we’re doing in terms of farm-to-table agriculture, regenerative agriculture, things like that.” Matt says proudly.  “If you want to take this seriously, for this business to be doing this 100 years from now, you can’t not be sustainable. It just seems like it’s the right move to do. Easiest decisions I ever make.” Matt declares.

Being straightforward about their origins in the Pacific Northwest and the pride they take in the natural beauty of the region has informed Westland’s story from the beginning.  “Even without tasting the whiskey, you can look at a bottle of Westland and understand that it comes from a certain type of place. It’s not trying to look like Scottish branding. Our brand ethos is not like that–and that’s not to be disrespectful, it’s just that that is their thing and this is our thing.” he explains. “It just felt very natural. It was not like, “Oh, this is going to be our brand story.’, so to speak, it was like ‘This is what we do and how we got here.’” Matt recalls. “The most natural way to describe what we were trying to do and what we were thinking was just to lean into who we were. I think that was the smartest decision that we ever made, to not try to pretend to be something we’re not.” he says. “It comes with a lot of education to do something like that, but I think the payoff is so much more rewarding. At the end of the day, it’s also the truth.” he points out. “We’re just trying to make a whiskey that is evocative of our home in the Pacific Northwest. That’s a combination of two things: the raw materials that grow here, the agriculture of the climate, and also who we are as people: West Coast Americans, or Pacific Northwest residents.” he says with a smile. “When I do a tasting with people, that’s all I want people to take away. I say it right away, I want you to enjoy the whiskeys, but I want you to understand why they taste the way they do and how they reflect where they come from.” Matt explains. 

“I love it here. I love the culture that’s out here. It’s far from perfect, and of course the history of the West is far from perfect, but that restlessness that brought people here…to me, I believe that that restlessness still exists…it’s just a place where things seem possible.”

Matt Hofmann is a unique figure; to go from distilling in a UW dorm to funding PhD work at a WSU lab is not something probably any other Washingtonian can claim. “You could call me some sort of ambassador between the two.” he says of the two rival universities with a laugh. But his spirit, the restless voice inside that says ‘Why?’, and sometimes, ‘Why not?’, is something he shares with other innovators of the West. It’s something he understands as a common binding thread of the region, running through the stories of so many pioneers of the past and future. “We thought ‘Westland’ was quite beautiful in the way that that doesn’t tie you to a certain geography specifically. It’s not ‘Seattle Distillery’, it’s not ‘Washington State Distillery’, it’s like, this is this mentality transferred into this idea of running a whiskey distillery.” Matt explains. His story illustrates that one can find inspiration in the most unlikely of places–such as in a dish of potatoes au gratin–and that getting to the heart of a simple question can lead you to places you’d never dreamed.