First, the industrial era of the 19th century, then prohibition in the 20th century and finally the development of “Modern” market forces have dissolved the ties to “tradition” of distilling in America. Daric, our master distiller, did not grow up distilling with his grandfather, nor did he start pushing a broom in the distillery as a teenager. He was an enthusiastic home brewer/cider maker who was drawn to the pre-industrial age of distilling, when distillers were farmers who wanted to add value to their farm produce. This means Daric is not shackled to what factory distillers could reasonably produce in their massive ethanol plants. Daric follows his own path to create remarkable whiskies that are unlike anything else in the marketplace.
Daric is the first generation of his family to not grow up on a farm and is acutely aware of the decline of the American farm. Van Brunt has worked hard to cultivate our relationship to the land our grain is grown on. A farmer is really more of a steward of the soil than he is a farmer in the way that we have come to think of a farmer since the 20th Century. We don't believe in the use chemical fertilizers or herbicides or pesticides. We don't believe in the patented seed strains of Dow and Monsanto. We DO believe in rotating his crops and the use of organic fertilizers to control pests and protect and care for the soil. It's an important part of Van Brunt's story, because we don't use commodity corn in our whiskey. Commodity corn is the main ingredient in “big” whiskey, and it is commodity corn that is destroying our farms and our farming families across the country. (For more on this a book from a few years ago called “The Omnivore's Dilemma” explores this issue very well)
Malt is the “magic” ingredient in western culture's whiskey tradition. Malt is simply a sprouted barley seed. The seed was born to grow more grass. (Barley is an annual grass which sprouts from seed every year.). The seed has a store of energy in the form of starch so that the grass can grow until it reaches the sun. Brewers and distillers in the west hijack this process to produce the beer and whiskey we all love. The barley seed is sprouted in the malt house and is allowed to grow just a little bit before it is dried out for further storage. The main point is that this sprouting process activates enzymes that break down starch into sugars (the food for the yeast from which all beverage alcohol is produced) How it's dried has a huge impact on its flavor. Dry it out the bare minimum, it has the most enzymes intact and has the most starch (read most alcohol potential), but the least flavor. Brewers use a little more heat to dry it and it develops those bready, malty flavors we love in our beer. Apply even more heat and you develop caramel flavors and eventually roasted flavors.
