My honest to god thoughts on Strathcona Spirits
Today was my last day at Strathcona Spirits! Now that I’m no longer on the payroll and have nothing to lose or gain, I feel like I can speak honestly to what it is Strathcona Spirits produce in that tiny little pink shoebox. Speaking as a man with a decent palate, a lot of (maybe too much?) experience tasting spirits of all kinds, and having started Canada’s Best New Bar 2018 (woot woot!), let me give you my however-educated hot take on the sauce cooked up at Strathcona Spirits.
In my travels around the province as a sales rep, I have tasted many (if not all) of the now 28 craft distilleries in our fair province (and those that have gone the sad way of the dodo as well). Some of them are bad. Some are mediocre. Some are good. Very good. In fact it leans towards very good, and I think this is owing to the small scale of production. I suppose that’s no eureka moment, but some people still don’t get this. When you work in such small batches with a molecular attention to detail, and when you are committed to cutting no corners in sourcing your raw material or hurrying the process of fermentation or buying cheap old worn out barrels or cheaping out on bitter / boring juniper from this cheap region or that (not naming names), the spirits dripping out the other end of the still simply have a much better chance of being excellent. Doesn’t mean they will be, but the odds are much better.
I think what some people do not understand is the utterly gargantuan scale at which some of their favourite international spirits are made. They think “how could something made in my backyard for only three years possibly be as good or better than this much longer-lived product that’s fame has brought it half way across the world to my local liquor store, that has achieved so much fame that they are now an international standard, and yet selling for $10-$20 less a bottle!” Oh boy… it is not that these international products cannot be good. Some of them are great (and some of them deserve a total moratorium... and some of them are the very products some of my favourite bartenders shill for every year as the competition rounds start, booooo!, just kiddingggg I love you guys and who wouldn’t love to go on a big fancy all inclusive trip somewhere and be recognized for transforming at-best-mediocre spirits into something that tastes palatable, you are champions in my eyes no matter what). The fact is that most of the world’s best spirits, wines, beers, ciders, cheeses, etc etc etc, are not made in large enough quantities to be widely exported, if at all. The insane scale at which those other bottles were made guarantees that the attention to detail is lost (would you rather be served a dish made for you or a dish made for an army and scooped into your bowl? would you rather have a wound stitched with a needle or a chopstick?) and this means the bad batches are just blended in with the good batches and the base spirit itself is almost always bland at best or rubbing alcohol at worst. There are great spirits made on massive scale, absolutely!, but the chances get worse, NOT BETTER, as the scale increases. For some reason, however, there are still craft bartenders who see this scenario the opposite way, thinking the larger brands are more likely to be good and the smaller distilleries are just learning and pawning off their learning process to the public at twice the price while hiding behind the good faith of being locally produced. This does happen, yes, in all things, but not nearly as often as you might think, and what is the all-too-common reverse? Huge multi-nationals pawning off their shill onto us and putting the marketing mega budget lipstick on the proverbial pig. We all know how many of the best marketed brands make bland boring weak tasteless garbage. But if you think that big brands have the benefit of the doubt and small distillers don’t, I can’t help but think that the marketing worked on you, fellow bartender. If this is your default setting, I strongly encourage you to reconsider. Yes, your craft distillery cannot fly you to the distillery and comp your first two cases when the new cocktail menu drops or give you branded umbrellas for your patio, but I can guarantee you there is a lot more heart and soul in that bottle. Anyone who appreciates wine knows that scale matters (and we celebrate the difference between vintages and vineyards, vive la différence!). Do you want an estate wine? Or one that is blended from a hundred vineyards so that your last bottle of Apothic tastes just like your next one?
With all that said, I will be the first to acknowledge that there is a huge discrepancy in quality among craft spirits, just as surely as there is for internationally marketed spirits, and nothing out there is automatically good just because it is produced in Alberta, or anywhere else for that matter. But I have now begun to ramble and get off track. I really bring all this to the fore for the simple reason of testifying, now that I have nothing to gain from it, that it is my honest to God opinion that Strathcona Spirits are making the best damn juice in the province. I have tried the different distilleries’ products. Some are well made but boring. Some are interesting but not well made. Some are both (kudos!) and some are neither (but maybe they will be eventually!). But at the end of the day, I think that what Strathcona is distilling is always creative without being eye-rolling and yet still coming out wildly delicious, which is the true challenge. It’s like trying to make music no one has ever heard before (easy) or trying to make music that sounds good (easy): the true challenge is making music that no one has every heard before that also sounds amazing.
How do I love thee, you Strathcona Spirits, let me count the ways: Eschewing all flavoured vodka yet making an exceedingly flavourful vodka, easily one of the best vodkas I’ve ever tasted, anywhere and from anywhere. Big bodied. Bold. Expressive of our central albertan wheat and the terroir it flourishes in. A bread basket of a vodka for the bread basket of North America. And then making a big bold low-toned robust gin that can put some hair on your chest, a gin equivalent of left-bank Bordeaux while nearly everyone else out there these last ten-gin-renaissance-years seems enamoured of delicate light floral gins that one might liken to champagne, if I can torture the metaphor. I like those floral gins too, but I strongly believe that Strathcona makes a bartender’s gin, one that performs outstandingly well with amaro and vermouth, and at the end of the day, those are the only gin drinks I will ever order. I mean sure, shake with it all you want. Such a waste. I will avert my eyes. And then aging that gin in virgin oak quarter casks, it’s nuts, I can’t believe Adam was bold enough to try this, I can’t believe how well it worked. A very expensive experiment, and it paid. The BAG is what won me over to Strat, because every other barrel aged gin I had tasted before this one was gross. (I’ve had some other good ones since, but still, most are gross). I will say that, in my own personal opinion, the barrel aged gin is the most finicky of the bunch and requires a true bartender to wield it well. Some of the most fascinating drinks I’ve tried by bartenders using our spirits have been ones with the barrel aged gin. But that’s because it doesn’t behave like gin, it doesn’t taste great in tonic, it doesn’t go well with dry vermouth, so it takes someone who knows how to work intuitively with the oak aspect and carve new paths forward (or just subs it into whisky classics!). I maintain that it makes the best Sazerac riff out there. First virgin oaked quarter casked gin in the world, and a gin suitably big and with a low enough profile to actually benefit from barrelling, none of these herbs or flowers or vegetables that just clash with the natural flavours American oak imparts. And then there is that ruby queen, the Pinot Gin, a lucky stroke of genius. It is easily my favourite of the whole line. Finishing gin in ex-BC Pinot Noir casks means pulling out all the old sticky oxidative pinot living in the staves of the oak, and damn! The way it just melts into the gin as it sits, the gentle toasted french oak nuttiness sneaking in there, the dried cherry and forest floor and cola notes from the wine, all combining with the low baking spice and bitter orange peel profile of the gin, the result is this uncanny sarsaparilla and orange marmalade and cherry dr. pepper aspect that’s as delicious as a sipper as it is beautiful in every cocktail I’ve tried it with.
And then there are the whiskies. I have been enjoying little samples from the barrel at full strength over the time I’ve worked here and I am always stunned. The belgian yeast was a stroke of genius, seeing as we’re using witbier/hefeweizen hard red spring brewer’s wheat to begin with. I am pretty sure these are the first virgin oaked wheat whiskies, at least from what I have ever been able to find online or asking the various whisky nerds and store owners I encounter in my travels, and a virgin oaked wheat whisky is well overdue. It is a brilliant new category that Strathcona is pioneering, and one that Edmonton is authentically positioned to spearhead, seeing as our Fort Edmonton pioneers were making wheat whisky and topping it with just a splash of rye while our neighbours to the south were drinking straight rye. Wheat is the last of the four major grains to be reevaluated and elevated (so move over malt, corn, and rye) and these Strathcona whiskies are going to be such big bold burly unrepentant whiskies, just the way I prefer. I wish I could have still been around to sell them when they dropped.
In writing fiction and poetry we have a simple rule: show don’t tell. Any talented salesperson, knowing it or not, has absorbed this rule in sales as well. As the rep for Strathcona Spirits, it would be extremely suspect for me to walk into a place and say: honestly, in my opinion, our distillery is making the best spirits in the province. Even if I cushion that by talking about the other Alberta distilleries I love, it would still ring hollow. Now that I am gone and stand nothing to gain (I have been waiting so long for this), I just want to step up to the microphone and say that I have tasted more Alberta craft spirits than most, and in my honest opinion, Strathcona Spirits are the best, and that is my honest personal opinion. They are full bodied. They are strong in flavour while smooth on the palate. They are inventive. They are interesting. They are dynamic. They are hand made. They are purposeful. And as someone who started championing these spirits long before I worked for them, I maintain that they are patently superb spirits for cocktailing. I would even go so far as to say that they are better as cocktail ingredients than as stand alone spirits, and that is their great advantage. Don’t get me wrong, they are wonderful sipped, but their flavour design is so conducive to playing and marrying well with other bottles and ingredients. I love them. I hold about six other Alberta distilleries in high esteem, sometimes it is all of their line, sometimes just some of it (and may I take a moment to shout out some of the more interesting products: Wildlife Amaro, Burwood Honey distillate, and the Eau Claire Equineox). I still feel like more distilleries need to take more risks and try to invent their way forward. Not in kitschy ways but in fundamental and elemental ways. I will not list the many ways I feel Strathcona does this because this is getting way too long. And I should also mention that I would never speak ill of other craft distilleries because we are not each others’ competition, we are all in this together. Bombay is our competition. Crown Royal is our competition. Grey Goose is our competition. If we can peel even a portion of their drinkers over to Alberta craft, we will all win together.
I don’t know how much spirit drinking I’ll be doing now that I am moving onto my newest adventure but I know I’ll still be ordering Strathcona drinks off the menu and anxiously waiting for the whisky releases.
What is your newest path, Joe, you might ask? Well, kind soul still reading this beefy prose in our age of declining attention spans, your old boy Joey Gurba is taking a partnership role in Garneau Block, a fledgling natural wine importing agency! If you know me well, you know I’m obsessed with wine. Gabriella has been kind enough to invite me on board to grow this thing into a juggernaut for wines that are alive and fascinating, and we have five new wineries coming to you over the next eight weeks. Wineries from Mount Gambier (Australia), Maryland (USA), Puglia (Italy), Castilla y León (Spain), and Châteauneuf-du-Pape / Côtes-du-Rhône (France). If you follow me on instagram, rest assured, you’ll see no shortage of coverage. And do follow @garneaublock if you haven’t yet. And, of course, if you don’t follow @strathconaspirits yet, thou must check thyself lest thou wreck thyself. They’re good folks, good good folks, and even in this trying time of layoffs and all, they have been converting the still over to making hand sanitizer and giving it away for free (for as long as they can afford to). If you’re not quarantined, drop by and grab some (inevitable) quarantini supplies and a bottle of free hand sani ASAP (or order from your favourite liquor store, most of them are delivering now). Quick, go, before we are all forced into our houses indefinitely.
Thanks for reading all this. I’m embarrassed by it on some level, something about it feels a little uncouth, but I have always been a little uncouth and unconventional, right? And since I am not trying to sell any Strathcona to anyone anymore, I’m pressing send and speaking my heart for these guys. Gooooooo Strathcona.
