High West Distillery & Saloon has a new head honcho.
Well, not exactly new.
Isaac Winter, who’s been with the brand for almost a decade, was promoted from director of distilling to master distiller. He now oversees High West along with other spirit production across the Constellation Brands’ portfolio, High West’s parent company.
So that means a bit more travel, like to Tennessee for Nelson’s Green Brier, where they produce Tennessee whiskey, and even to Mexico to oversee tequila production at Casa Noble Tequila and Tequila Mi Campo. That responsibility has had the biggest learning curve, Winter admitted.
“If you thought High West was the Wild West, doing that big tequila operation in Mexico is definitely a different ball game,” he said, explaining that he’ll take a handful of trips to the facility each year.
He doesn’t exactly have a tequila background — “I like to drink tequila,” Winter joked — but draws from his master’s program in brewing and distilling science, a program he attended in Scotland in 2013.
With tequila, there are a few differences, namely the importance of terroir, or environmental factors, in the final product. It’s similar to wine production in that case — for example, the same agave grown in the highlands will have a different flavor profile from one grown in the lowlands. It’s another lever to pull in the art of flavor creation, Winter said, which has been exciting to learn.
Despite the broader responsibilities, High West remains Winter’s primary focus. Otherwise, it’s business as usual at the Wanship distillery. Except now, Winter may be found in the gift shop signing whiskey bottles, an added guest experience he started.
Much of his work now happens behind the scenes, overseeing quality, experimentation and long-term planning instead of physically operating equipment on the distillery floor.
Thinking ahead is crucial in the whiskey industry, Winter said.
“Our time scale is on the order of six, eight, 10 years,” he said. “With whiskey, it’s like, ‘I’m going to do my best to make distillate that I really like, that’s beautiful and well-rounded, and then I’m going to put it in a barrel, and I’m going to kiss it good night for five years.’”
That timeline was one of the biggest adjustments after transitioning from beer to whiskey.
Before High West, Winter worked at Uinta Brewing and the Red Rock Brewing Company, where he first met former High West master distiller Brendan Coyle. For beer, it’s usually 28 days from concept to beer in a glass, Winter explained. So it’s a totally different world.
“We talk about in the whiskey industry that you really only get to make whiskey, like, four or five times in your life,” he said. “And so there are these different signposts in your career where you can look back at everything you’ve made and then try and come up with the best, new process moving forward and try again.”
Winter credits much of his own development to mentors who guided him into the industry. After studying chemistry at the University of Utah, he went to Scotland for the master’s program guided by Coyle’s own experience.
“He was really the one who gave me the script to convince my mom that I wasn’t running away to join the circus,” Winter said. Coyle had completed the same program years earlier.
“All of my family is in healthcare in some way or another,” Winter said. “So, I feel like I’m a little bit of a black sheep trying to do booze.”
Still, he found the technical side of distilling fit naturally with his interests in chemistry and engineering, while the creative side appealed to his love of cooking and flavor development.
“One of the things that I really like about it is you can get really, really technical,” he said. “At the same time, a lot of the really fun aspects of whiskey come from postproduction, post-maturation.”
At High West, that creative process often happens collaboratively. Winter works closely with Tara Lindley, director of blend and sensory for the company.
“If I’m master distiller, she’s kind of master blender,” he said.
Winter said the team-based approach has become a defining part of High West’s culture, something he said Coyle strongly encouraged during his tenure — the importance of “cross-polinating” the team.
“Whiskey is a team sport,” Winter said. “Tara comes from the wine industry. I come from the beer industry. We’ve got on our core sensory team, there’s a woman who came from forestry, there’s a woman who’s in chemical engineering.”
The variety of perspectives, he said, creates more nuanced whiskey because different team members approach flavor and production differently.
“It’s not just necessarily one person making all the rules,” he said.
It’s an unusual philosophy, Winter said. But unusual has always been usual at High West over the years.
While the company is known for blending sourced whiskey distillate to make well-known products like the Double Rye and High West Bourbon, Winter said the distillery has always embraced unconventional projects in-house.
“This ethos of trying to make really interesting whiskey that we can’t find elsewhere has been part of the story forever,” he said. “When we first started up, we made products like vodka 7000, which had a lot of our own stuff. We made two different clear, unaged white whiskeys that were all of our own stuff. We (even) made a peach vodka, so we’ve always played around with stuff.”
Some products, including High Country Single Malt and Bottled in Bond, are made entirely from whiskey distilled in-house on the company’s copper pot still, Agnes.
He describes the Wanship location as a “custom whiskey lab” where the team experiments with styles and grain recipes that are uncommon elsewhere in the industry. Like a new project using heirloom corn, a blue corn, and a red or magenta corn.
“When you start mixing in blue corn, magenta (or) red corn, you can just create lots of layers of flavor that I think are going to benefit us,” he said. “Anything that we can’t find out in the marketplace that we need to really give us that fun accent on the blend, or richness, maturation character, what have you, we’re trying to make here.”
He is also experimenting with alternative aging methods inspired by his brewing background, including aging whiskey in giant wooden foeders more commonly associated with sour beer production.
“It’s just a really, really big barrel,” he said. “Instead of pulling out a bunch of vanilla and a bunch of oak tannin, you can push kind of more fruit and silkiness.”
They’re also experimenting with aging whiskey in concrete tanks used in white wine production and in rare Japanese oak barrels from Hokkaido that create flavors reminiscent of sandalwood, incense and roasted pineapple.
Outside whiskey, Winter has also become deeply involved in High West’s Mountain gin, one of his favorite creative outlets — “That’s like my baby,” he said.
The gin incorporates ingredients like hops, another nod to his beer days, and fresh bay leaf and cardamom for spice.
“I think gin, from an artistic perspective, is just like such a blank slate, and there’s so much that you can do. … There are almost no rules with gin. It has to be juniper forward, but then, kind of the world is your oyster,” he said. “What’s a High West gin look like? And to us, it’s loud, it’s a little bit in your face.”
He recommended trying it in a simple martini to get the full experience. As for whiskey, Winter prefers a Manhattan all day.
As High West approaches its 20th anniversary in December, Winter said the distillery has several smaller releases planned throughout the year, along with the return of a “cult classic” from the company archives.
At this point in his career, Winter said that by industry standards, he’s coming up on his second time making whiskey, so he credited the support and encouragement of mentors for where he’s at today.
“There’s been so much serendipity in my career, and I’ve had great mentors and advocates,” he said. “Each phase of my career, I think, has been very lucky to have people who believed in me or who saw something that they wanted to help foster.”