Ah, the glories of alcohol. It s seen us at our best,

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2 Ah, the glories of alcohol. It s seen us at our best, our worst, and our most hung-over. Vodka is the definitive alcohol for making a statement, whether that is one of sophistication, or one of drunken expletive. In most cases, vodka is considered to be a neutral liquor in the spirit world, and can be found anywhere from a classy James Bond martini, to being the-hair-of-the-dog in your Sunday morning Bloody Mary. The media has made vodka notoriously glamorous, sophisticated and sexy. National distilleries spend millions of dollars per year on swanky marketing campaigns boasting about how their premium vodka stands out above the rest. We now can t help but wonder, what makes a premium vodka premium? To answer our question, we sought out Guy Rehorst of Great Lakes Distillery, crafter of Milwaukee s own premium vodka, to give us the 411 on the world s most universal mixer. Milwaukee s drinking image goes beyond beer and brats with the award-winning Great Lakes Distillery, makers of

3 Alcoholmanac: So, first things first, what are you drinking? REHORST: I m drinking a vodka and Press. A true Milwaukee cocktail: Milwaukee vodka and a Milwaukee mixing soda. Alcoholmanac: Sounds good! Anyway, how did Rehorst come to be? REHORST: Let s see I had another business that I sold a couple of years ago and was just looking t o g e t i n t o something new. About 2½ years ago I was getting frustrated because I w a s h a v i n g trouble finding something new to do that interested me, and I just happened along the whole c r a f t d i s t i l l i n g m o v e m e n t. I t s very new in this area, but it s been going on along the West coast for a while now, and it s starting to grow throughout the rest of the country as well. I was surprised that Milwaukee, or Wisconsin for that matter, had no distilleries here and I thought, this could be a good niche. Alcoholmanac: Were you on vacation in the West coast or was this something you just stumbled upon? REHORST: No, I ve always been interested in spirits and the idea kind of started as a joke. We were out one night and were joking about what I was going to do when I grow up and I said, Gee, maybe I can make spirits. We laughed it off and the next morning I started doing some research and found out that it s a viable thing to do. Alcoholmanac: Your hamster started running on the wheel and you said, Hey, let s make something? REHORST: Exactly. 14 Alcoholmanac: Before opening the distillery you were in the IT/DVD business? REHORST: Yes, I manufactured CDs and DVDs. Alcoholmanac: What made you decide to suddenly leave that? Was it boredom, or? We buy everything we can, whenever possible, locally. REHORST: In a sense. That company grew very quickly, and as it grew I began to hire on people who were better than me at the jobs I used to do. So, I pretty much hired myself out of a job. I wasn t needed around anymore and frankly I grew bored with it and decided I needed to find something new. I asked my partner to make me an offer, and after a couple of months we were able to come to a price. I sold that business and pretty much invested everything I got from that business into this one. Alcoholmanac: Well, obviously this is doing pretty good for you. Now, I see that there are only three of you running this place. REHORST: That s right. Doug and I do the production end of it, and Ryan is our Sales and Marketing Manager. Alcoholmanac: You must really know your craft! So where does vodka originally come from? REHORST: Well, there are two stories. Poles will tell you it comes from Poland and Russians will tell you it comes from Russia. My understanding is that it originally came from Poland. It was probably a potatobased product initially, but around the same time in history it started showing up in Russia. Alcoholmanac: So is there a difference between Russian and Polish vodka? REHORST: Not too much. Of course, if you ask a Pole that, they ll say there is, and if you ask a Russian that, they ll say there is. The concept is pretty much the same and it s very old; that is to take what you start with which constitutes as basically a beer, and separate the alcohol from it. One of the things I like about distilling is that it is thousands of years old and it s very low-tech. Alcoholmanac: So we ve got Russia, Poland and now Milwaukee! This works out great! REHORST: That s right. Alcoholmanac: Now, how exactly does your vodka differ from other types of vodka? REHORST: Our vodka tends to be well, we think it s smoother. You ll taste it later and you can tell me. It has a little natural sweetness to it from the wheat mash that we use that carries through the whole distillation process and makes it into

4 the product. It is a natural sweetness though. A lot of distilleries will actually add sugar to their vodka and the government allows up to a certain amount of that to be done without having to label the product that way, so it s kind of a sneaky way of making a bad vodka smoother. Alcoholmanac: Is that why I ve seen a lot of billboards and magazines advertising a lot about carbohydrates? Do you think sugar is what makes the difference with that? REHORST: I think [the role the sugars play in that] is a little exaggerated. They can also use citric acid. That s another additive they can add to the final product. We don t use anything. Basically our product is just what it is. Alcoholmanac: So, it s pretty much diet friendly if need be? REHORST: [Laughs.] Yes, very much so. Alcoholmanac: Well that works out perfect! You call yourself an artisan distillery. What, exactly, is an artisan distillery and how does it differ from other ways of making vodka or other liquor? REHORST: Well, we make our product in small batches that s probably the biggest difference. We do it in a pot still as opposed to a column still. Column stills are the kind of stills used for making ethanol for automobiles as well, so they are not really designed to make a good tasting product so much as a really efficient fuel. Our pot still is actually a brandy still that has been modified. Brandy stills are designed to try to carry through as much flavor from the original mash as possible. Alcoholmanac: How is your brandy still modified to accommodate vodka? REHORST: It has the addition of a couple of what are called rectification columns, and what they do is they allow us to control how pure that final product gets. Alcoholmanac: You mentioned the mash earlier. What exactly makes a good mash? REHORST: There are a couple of key things. There is the grain you use, and the yeast you use. Those are probably the most important aspects of that. We use a wheat mash... basically our product gets its flavor from wheat, and the yeast we use is very temperature tolerant. It is specially designed to, during the fermentation process, create some esters and other things that will also affect the flavor. Alcoholmanac: And that s definitely what we smell right now. REHORST: Yes, and if they are good, the product will taste good, and if they are not so good the product

5 people don t drink the right liquor. won t taste so good. So there are yeasts made for everything under the sun, but we have found a particular strain that really works well for our product. Alcoholmanac: Approximately how many bottles do you produce in a typical day? REHORST: Well, it s a batch process, so throughout the course of a week we ll produce about 700 bottles. Because it s a batch process, things look dead around here most of the week, and then in one day we ll have a bunch of people in here bottling. It all kind of happens at once. For a long time not much really happens here, and then all at once we get really busy. In one day we work like bats out of hell trying to bottle up enough product. Alcoholmanac: Do you buy everything you use locally or do you happen to import it? REHORST: We buy everything we can, whenever possible, locally. We buy the grains from a company in Chilton. They can t guarantee that all their grains come from Wisconsin, but they are a local/ regional company, so the odds are pretty strong there. Alcoholmanac: In addition to being a forerunner as the first vodka distillery in Wisconsin, you re also supporting other local businesses. That s great! So I have to tell you, I m what one might call a vodka snob. I gave up drinking rail about 3 years ago. REHORST: Good for you. Alcoholmanac: I know. I had a very wise woman, named Crazy Mary, 74 years old, tell me honey, life s too short for bad booze and cheap cosmetics. REHORST: I love that. Alcoholmanac: It s true; it s the smartest thing I ve ever heard. So, with that in mind, would I be able to tell the difference between Rehorst Vodka and Grey Goose or Svedka? REHORST: [To his assistant, Doug] You know what Doug, you wanna go run out to my car and grab the my Grey Goose is in the trunk. [Laughs.] Alcoholmanac: While he s working on that... do you think that the type of liquor a person consumes is a direct reflection of their personality and character? REHORST: [Laughs.] Ummm you know, that s probably very accurate. There are probably a lot of people who don t really understand themselves and therefore are not drinking the right liquor. A l c o h o l m a n a c : [Laughs.] They re not drinking the right liquor for their personality. REHORST: That s right. Exactly. Hopefully we can fix that and give everybody some good liquor. I think down deep people, they re all good, they should all drink good liquor. [Laughs.] Alcoholmanac: [Laughing.] They really should it would make the world a better place. So, if that s the case, what would you say the image of Rehorst conveys, like, what kind of person drinks Rehorst? REHORST: You know, in a sense it s the everyman drink because it s good enough that it makes a fantastic martini, which those who only drink martinis, I think, can really appreciate Alcoholmanac: I went through that phase REHORST: Yeah, well we love those people they drink a lot of vodka. [Laughs.] But you know, even I m amazed when I go out to do tastings at some bars. My perception is that maybe they re not the right audience for the product, and I have to always stop myself because I m always surprised. It s amazing how everyone, from the working class all the way on up to the martini sophisticate, can appreciate the difference and the taste. It s like your quote, life s too

6 short for bad booze I think there are a lot of people who understand that and take advantage of it. Alcoholmanac: So, how do you go about setting up these tastings in random places because, I mean, there are different companies that do their own thing like Jack Daniel s has the Jack Daniel s shot girls and whatnot. How do you go about finding these places, or do they come to you? REHORST: It happens both ways. Typically we ll talk to a customer and offer to help with promotions and ask if they would be interested in doing a tasting. We have to market our product. It s key for us to actually go out and meet people and get them to taste our vodka. The bigger companies they spend most of their marketing dollars on advertising and trying to build an image from images rather than necessarily the taste of the product itself. So we go out and actually pour the product, get people to taste it, and are amazed at how often people prefer our product over what they perceive as being a better product. So we go in and we ll offer to do it at places and they are usually pretty receptive because, quite frankly, it s pretty rare when the distillers actually come in a pour the product and talk about the product. Nobody knows the product like the distillers. The girls are pretty, but the fact of the matter is, they don t really know the product. One of my favorite things was when we went into one of my customer s place a week or two ago and we were talking and he had [a premium] vodka. [Pulls out a bottle.] Alcoholmanac: What is that?! [Pointing to the bottle.] REHORST: That is [a premium] Vodka. Alcoholmanac: Get out! [Laughs.] REHORST: [Laughs.] I told [the supplier], I don t think you re going to see [the marketing manager] flying into Oconomowoc to sell his vodka to people. Just remember that we re here and we do that. [Laughs.] Alcoholmanac: [Reading the label] Oh my gosh, and it actually says here the world s finest super premium vodka. REHORST: Yes. Alcoholmanac: The [marketing manager] thinks so, huh? REHORST: And he prices it at I think that one was about 43 bucks a bottle. And our product I think is better. Alcoholmanac: That is intense. REHORST: The [marketing manager] also doesn t drink by the way, which makes it even more strange. Alcoholmanac: He doesn t even drink how can someone market a product that he himself doesn t even drink? Alcoholmanac: Un-believable. So, these places REHORST: Well, you said the magic word market. There are a lot of marketing companies that sell vodka. They disguise themselves as distilleries and they are not. Somebody makes the alcohol for them or they buy it from an ethanol plant, they slap their label on it or their design and you go are mostly corner bars on the Eastside and martini lounges it s not like you re going to find Rehorst vodka at a corner bar in Cudahy? REHORST: You know, you might be surprised. As I alluded to before, I m constantly amazed that a place that I might perceive as being a little overcast still has its customers that will still drink the good stuff. We don t turn down anybody when it comes to introducing our product to customers. Not everybody wants to Interview continued on page JOIN US FOR LUNCH Salads Paninis Pastas Pizzas includes soup or salad ALL FOR $6.95 UNWINDING HOUR 5 7 pm, Monday Friday $2.50 Domestic Beers $3.50 Imports & Micros $4.50 House Wines $5 Martinis, Mojitos & Margaritas DAILY SPECIALS MONDAY Industry Night TUESDAY Charity Night WEDNESDAY Wine Flight THURSDAY Ladyʼs Night FRIDAY Fabulous Fridays Call for details Live Laugh Love CHEF MICHAEL FEKER Personal Chef, Cooking Instructor Conveniently located at the corner of 6 th and Virginia. For reservations, please call Try our Wauwatosa location,

7 Interview continued from page spend the kind of money that premium vodka costs for a drink, but there are people who do appreciate it. Alcoholmanac: What exactly makes a premium vodka premium is there a certain way you have to do it, or, much like the [marketing manager], can you just slap on a label and say, Here you go? REHORST: Well, typically people just slap it on there and there you go. We like to think ours is a premium because it is hand made. It is a small batch product. We make our recipe and we constantly taste it to make sure we re getting it right. Alcoholmanac: [Laughing.] I bet you get a good buzz after a while of working here constantly tasting it. REHORST: Very small sips Alcoholmanac: You have my dream job! REHORST: [Laughs.] 7 in the morning to, you know, 9 at night tasting. Alcoholmanac: What about those vodkas that claim a certain number of distillations? How does that affect the finished product? REHORST: Well, what a lot of distilleries want you to believe is that the more distillation, the better the product. The fact is that s only true up to a certain point. If you talk to a chemical engineer, they ll gladly tell you that any more than three times distillation is a waste. My belief is that companies that claim more distillation than that are lying. It s a great marketing thing. Vodkas are very hard to differentiate you know, they have to find a way of differentiating their product from other people s, and that s one of the ways. I recently saw one that said nine times distilled and the fact of the matter is, after a certain number of times through a still, it just doesn t get any better. Typically that is three times. People ask me all the time how many times we distill our product and my answer is always the same: we distill it until it s right. If that s 32 three times, great. If we have to do it a fourth time because we screwed up on one of the earlier passes and that s really the only reason you would ever have to go more than three times then we do it four times. We do everything entirely by taste. As we re distilling, we constantly taste the product. If we re not happy with the flavor profile we re getting out of the still, it s going to go back in and go through again until it s right. Alcoholmanac: So for you there is no set number of times of distillation. Do you think the larger companies just pass it through that many times because they are working off of a formula rather than actually tasting it? REHORST: Well, I think there is a The Pot Still - where all the magic happens. lot of marketing crap in there. The fact of the matter is, most large-volume v o d k a s a r e m a d e i n continuous stills, which means they are not done in a batch so it s not like you collect it and bring it back in. They are done in large industrial ethanol plants where they dump mash into the top, it runs down to the bottom and the alcohols boil off. It s a continuous process. They keep dumping mash in and keep collecting ethanol out. Alcoholmanac: I see. REHORST: It s very misleading. There are certain brands of vodkas that claim x number of distillations compared to others that I know for a fact have a lot fewer, and they re crap. So, it s kind of an urban myth that the more times distilled equals a better product. Alcoholmanac: Well I m glad we could clear that up. In a city such as Milwaukee, known as the drunkest city in America and Brew City USA, how do you plan on coming forward and really making your presence known in the market? REHORST: Well, our market is just local. We tend to be a Wisconsin product and frankly, we don t need to be successful in New York and L.A. I think we can do a great job and maybe even make a little money just serving a local market with a better

8 product than they are getting from France, Holland, or the U.K. Alcoholmanac: What if it does catch on in New York or L.A.? Would you consider selling it out there? REHORST: In very limited quantities. The fact is, if we wanted to get into those markets and supply that kind of volume we would have to change the way we make it and it wouldn t be as good. So we re just t r y i n g t o make a good product and make it locally and use local ingredients whenever possible. That s kind of our design. Alcoholmanac: You never know, it might catch on out there. You might find it at some of the high-end clubs as the top shelf vodka they are making $60 martinis out of saying, This is straight out of Wisconsin. You can t find this stuff here and they make it in small batches. REHORST: Well it s strange to me that that should be the case. People usually associate beer with Milwaukee. Beer was very popular here because you have a huge supply of water and a huge supply of grain. And those are the same ingredients you use to make most distilled spirits, so I think it s very logical to have a distillery here. There was a distillery here in the past, actually several distilleries in Milwaukee, before prohibition. Alcoholmanac: Does Rehorst have a signature cocktail? If so, do you have the fixings on site because, really, I could use a drink... REHORST: [Laughs.] You know what I should have been better prepared for that. We do. We actually have a couple of cocktails. If you look at our website, we ve got a couple on there that are very unique. One thing we re been trying to get bars to do is our own thing the Milwaukee Martini. It s Milwaukee s only vodka, shaken in a martini shaker, served straight up. If you want to add a little vermouth I suppose that s okay too, but frankly we believe our product stands alone very well. There has been a tendency for people to buy flavored vodkas but, being flavored vodkas, there tends to be some artificiality to them. They don t taste necessarily natural. We try to encourage people to, rather than buying flavored vodka if they want to make a raspberry drink, use straight vodka and add real raspberries. I think it makes a much better drink. Alcoholmanac: With that in mind then, would you ever consider making flavored vodka? REHORST: We have discussed the possibility of doing that. If we do, they will be natural flavors; we will not use artificial flavors. Alcoholmanac: How about dirty vodka made with olive juice? REHORST: [Pointing to his assistant, Doug.] That guy right there actually had that idea. Distiller Doug, he wants to put olives right into the vodka, redistill it and have the dirty martini right there. Doug: I want to try different types of olives, like kalamata. REHORST: And we have time for this one. Alcoholmanac: A dirty vodka would be absolutely amazing! REHORST: It s an interesting idea, and we ll probably play with it some day and see if we can pull it off. Doug: I have a feeling it s going to be tougher than we think. When it comes to vodka though, the sky s the limit. REHORST: I ve got to show you something here. Alcoholmanac: What is that? REHORST: This is chipotle vodka. Take a whiff of that. Alcoholmanac: Whew! REHORST: Kinda smells like beef jerky. Alcoholmanac: Yeah, it does. Doug: If we put a few of those into a batch and redistill it, it would clear it up a little. REHORST: We tried a couple of different peppers, and the problem was they were just way too hot. They are only hot. This one has got the smokiness and just a slight hotness at the end. A Bloody Mary special. Alcoholmanac: That is awesome! So, why make just vodka and not some other liquors, such as gin or my personal favorite, whiskey? REHORST: Oh, have we got a treat for you but you gotta be patient, you ve gotta age whiskey. It takes time. Vodka was the logical first product because it s a white spirit, which means it comes out of the still clear and it s sold that way as well. Brown spirits such as brandy and whiskey get that way because they are aged in wood. It took us two years to get the distillery open, and we couldn t wait another 3, 4 or 5 years to sell an aged product. Vodka is a good enabler in that it brings in cash. It takes us about a week to make a batch, so we can get our ingredients in and week later or so be selling bottles of vodka. Alc o h o l ma nac : More p r o d u c t o u t, m o r e money in. REHORST: That s right, it gets the cash flowing. That s the reason for that initially. We re now producing gin, which is a natural extension from vodka because, again, it is a white spirit. You start with alcohol and some botanicals in it and then redistill it. It s a fairly quick process. We re also considering doing rum. I d love to do whiskey, I really want to do whiskey, but if we do it it will take about 5 years to age, so you might not get to try any from us for about 6 years or so. Alcoholmanac: Tell me about your gin. What are some of the unique ingredients? REHORST: Most gins 33

9 are made with between six and fourteen ingredients or botanicals. We use eight. Juniper is, of course, the biggest ingredient. Coriander is another common spice. We have two botanicals that are not used in any other gin and that I think give our gin a unique flavor. One is sweet basil, and the other is Wisconsin ginseng. Wisconsin is the largest producer of ginseng in the U.S. and is widely considered to be the highest grade ginseng in the world. We ve also got Saigon cassia, which is a very strong cinnamon-like product. There is also some citrus in there, and we actually use some Madagascar vanilla which has, in the test batches we ve done, given it a very smooth, kind of creamy taste to it. Alcoholmanac: Your hopes for your gin? REHORST: Well, we realize our gin is never going to be as popular as our vodka. Everybody drinks vodka, few people drink gin. Gin is a very unique spirit. There is a much wider category with gins as far as different flavors. A lot of people who tell us they are not really gin drinkers have told us they were really quite surprised. It s not their father s gin. It s a little more botanical, more floral, and it makes simply an incredible martini. Hopefully we ll be able to convert a few people to drinking gin. A lot of people are missing out on some really good gins because they are afraid of them. People see it as tasting like a pine tree, but we toned down the juniper and brought up the other botanicals including citrus, sweet basil, and ginseng and I think it makes it a very different product. I think people will be surprised. Alcoholmanac: Vodka, at least in the club scene, is really taking over the market, but far and wide, Milwaukee is still seen as a beer town. Do you think your product can help shed the beer and brat image? REHORST: Well, there s nothing wrong with being a beer and brat town. There are some great beers made here and I, personally, eat more than my share of brats each year. Some people, unfortunately, associate that with a sort of low brow image, but I think that s sort of an outsider s view of things. I think that having quality, craft-distilled spirits could help to eliminate that. There are a lot of quality vodkas being sold in Milwaukee and if we could be just a small percentage of that, and people begin to recognize our product as a quality product form Milwaukee, it would be good for all of us. Alcoholmanac: But in order to shed that image, you ll certainly have to become nationally or internationally known at least at some level. REHORST: Well, that s where that silver medal we won in San Francisco comes in. We realized that we need to get some of that recognition, and we re getting that now. Even so, we have no plans to rush into becoming a national brand. We want to be a local brand. We want to be a high quality spirit, made locally and sold locally. Alcoholmanac: Do you think the sort of Renaissance Milwaukee is going through right now might help your product sell better? I mean, we have Intercontinental Milwaukee Hotel now, and with the freeway systems finishing up, Milwaukee can be expected to draw in bigger business and with it, business clientele. REHORST: I think it definitely does. I know for a fact that a lot of the hotels we re in downtown love our product and they love the fact that they can tell their guests that they can offer them something unique to Milwaukee. Alcoholmanac: So, obviously you plan on expanding. Are you going to stay at this location, or would you look elsewhere? REHORST: Yeah, well, we ll definitely need more room. Whether that s here or at another location, we re still kind of exploring that. We would like to get situated in such a way that we could offer public tours which we can t really do now. Alcoholmanac: Why is that? REHORST: Zoning mostly. There aren t any bathrooms really associated with this particular space. We share those with other tenants, and it s just not convenient. Alcoholmanac: Have you ever thought about marketing things other than just your vodka like, say, Rehorst gift packages or glasses? REHORST: Well, we started selling just this last October [2006]. We finally got all our permits in order, and by the time we started selling it was a little too late to come up with a holiday gift pack, but a lot of people I think gave Rehorst vodka as gifts for the holidays. I think next year we ll try to be a little better prepared and we ll maybe package it in a holiday box of some kind. I was amazed; I had people calling me from Oregon and California wanting to know where they could buy more because someone in Milwaukee had bought them a bottle for Christmas. Alcoholmanac: Well you can count us in on those holiday gift packs next year, but until then, where can we find Rehorst products? REHORST: You can find us in about 350 liquor stores throughout the state, and you can get a cocktail with our product in about 650 bars and restaurants throughout the state. Alcoholmanac: Wow. REHORST: So, our distribution has just kind of exploded in the last two months. We just distribute in Wisconsin and, frankly, that s all we re looking to do right now. We would rather have a little bigger piece of the local market than a tiny piece of a lot of different markets. Alcoholmanac: Makes sense to us. REHORST: That s what we re shooting for.