Tenth Ward Distilling Company

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to Whiskey Lores Whiskey Flights, your weekly home for discovering great craft distillery experiences around the globe. I'm Drew Hanish, your travel guide and author of two bestselling travel books experiencing Irish whiskey and experiencing Kentucky Bourbon. And today we're going to conclude our time in Maryland, the town of Frederick, by walking up South Carroll Street from McClintock Distilling, taking a left down East Patrick Street before we get to our next destination, 10th. 10th Ward Spirits where we're going to meet the owner, affectionately known as the Boss Lady Monica Pierce. As we make our way over in that direction, I have to tell you how surprised I was by how many distilleries there actually are in Maryland. When I started doing my research, you start thinking about Kentucky has 50 plus distilleries and Tennessee has 40 plus distilleries, you think, well Maryland, they probably have a handful of them, but in total I found 21 distilleries scattered throughout the state from Secrets Distillery in Ocean City where the owner is bringing a taste of the islands with both rum and whiskey into the state to Pathfinder farms using bloody butcher corn grown on their own farm over in Boonsboro or Mendels Schmitz, which is trying to help revive downtown Hagerstown.

(01:30):
And of course there's Baltimore, but just in the vicinity of Frederick, there are four distilleries including McClintock, 10th Ward Spirits Dragon Distillery, where if you're a Dungeons and Dragons fan, you'll feel right at home. Or the Springfield Manor Winery and Distillery that not only focuses on whiskey and wine, but also has fruit brandies that are made from fruit grown right on the farm and lavender gin. And we haven't even started talking about all the breweries there are in the area. It's easy to get lost in all the choices. I'd love to tell you more, but we're here at 10th Ward Spirits, so just as a tip, if you're interested in visiting Maryland, head out to whiskey lo.com/maryland and there you're going to find 21 distilleries that you can either click on the profiles or click on the little map tab there. You'll be able to see where they're all located across the state. Click on the one you're interested in, make sure to add it to your wishlist by clicking on the handy wishlist feature. Now, 10th award spirits is going to be a little bit different from some of the other distilleries that I've visited currently. They are serving up flights and cocktails, but the actual distilling is happening offsite. I'll be sure to ask mon why that is and what experiences are available at this downtown location. But before we get to that, I wanted to learn how Monica had gone from a career in environmental services owning a distillery.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
I started off even prior to this in hospitality in general, I started waitressing when I was 14, kept on bartending throughout college and parts of my career. I pursued a career originally in conservation biology, traveled the world, even got a master's degree and had one of those moments where I was ready to leave my job. The environmental slash nonprofit world can be challenging. It's a lot of doom and gloom. There are also a lot of people that are trying to do good that might not be doing things the right way and you're working sometimes in impoverished communities. And so I had some also ethical struggles with what I wasn't sure the path I was going down. And so I, breweries were starting to pop up and boom, that was during the big brewing boom and I was more of a whiskey drinker and I was kind of like, I want to do something different. And just had one of those moments where I said, screw it, and I emptied my bank account, jumped off the cliff into business ownership back here in my hometown where I grew up. So

Speaker 1 (04:13):
I'm sure bartending has changed a lot from the days when you were doing it back then to the world we're in now and probably what you were wanting to create in terms of your experience there. What are the biggest things that you've seen change?

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, that's so true. I mean, I started off in a college bar though, so I was learning how to make Yeager bombs and open 20 Bud Lights at a time. But the craft of mixology has grown and especially with the internet and social media, you see so much more creativity. Their Instagram accounts dedicated just to garnishes or just to syrups, so that's really neat and you'll hear a little bit more about our brand, but our slogan is wore off ordinary, and so that makes it fun for us as a spirit based company to then launch into the cocktail world because we can also be creative and do really neat and unconventional things. But yeah, it's a whole world now.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah. Well, how was the bootstrapping experience, because I'm sure it's pretty tense in those early days.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
The loss have changed in Maryland even since we started. So we started off with 1600 square feet, no employees. My mom helped on the weekends sometimes and slowly just grew based off of demand. But yeah, you don't pay yourself. I bartended at night, so I would get off at two in the morning and wake up at 8:00 AM and start working and then open the tasting room and go from there or sometimes work a farmer's market and then open the tasting room. So we slowly grew. Also with the legislation that changed, gosh, when was it 2018? 2018? No, not even 2018. It would've been later on maybe 2019. The law changed so that you could make cocktails in Maryland. Distilleries originally could not, and that's when we relocated our front of house operation downtown to Patrick Street where we have a cocktail bar and private event space that's also where people do their tastings. And then eventually we grew out of our original space for production and now we have a 9,000 square foot production facility here in Frederick. So we're sort of operating out of two buildings. But yeah, the growth path has probably been the hardest part of it all is figuring out how and where to grow and what works

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Probably takes a good sense of humor to handle all of this stuff and all the changes that come along.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, we like to joke that we were tallying how many times we said the F word in the first year.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
Hopefully that has changed. So talk about the name 10th Award. It's an interesting name and it's fun to kind of get a clue in to what inspires somebody to choose a name for their distillery.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Actually, it's funny that you mentioned that you had been talking to Braden from McClintock earlier because originally our name was going to be Carol Creek Whiskey. Our location backed up to Carol Creek here in Frederick, but wasn't fully on the creek. We had established our LLC name. I think we had just gotten our location and then McClintock announced that they were opening right on the creek.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
And we sort of backtracked and rethought it and started doing a lot of research in our area. The prohibition era was interesting to us, the history of Frederick, the history of spirits and learned a lot more about what were the wards, what were the voting districts of Frederick found some really amazing literature and imagery and learned that we were in what was the 10th ward of Frederick, the Roman numeral for 10, which is the X. That is the part of the logo that you see on my shirt and on our labels here was what established that logo. And then we inscribed the original font as a part of the name and the logo. And then a lot of imagery, especially in our watermarks on our labels are images of the map, which is a fun addition and adds a nice little layer to everything.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yeah, it's interesting to see all the different talents you have to have as a business owner in being park marketer being, I mean, were you in doing the distilling early on, how did you evolve into getting spirits made?

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, that's a great question. I actually started off with a business partner who was a historian, and so that's where some of that research and interest in the name came from. I bought him out about a year and a half in so he could move on to do other things and hired a distiller from there. So he started off apprenticing at a distillery called Copper Fox out of Berryville, Virginia. They're fantastic if you haven't gotten a chance to talk to them yet. And so that's where we had gotten the technical experience. I had some marketing sales, of course, hospitality experience, and so we were able to split our responsibilities that way originally. But since then I've been owner and operator of most of the jobs when needed.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
So this idea of warding off ordinary, this leads to a lot of experimentation. So how do you go about expanding your own palette and choosing what botanicals, especially in the terms of the gins you're making, how do you build this awareness and did you have a curiosity in that before you really started diving into building out the cocktail experience?

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah, that's a great question. Some of our spirits came from random ideas that turned out to just be a genius item that worked like our smoked bourbon. For example, items like the gin and the absent that had big botanical bills, or not big but have a botanical bill in general that we want to be successful. We did a lot of research on, and during the time that we were developing those flavors, we actually did our own studies with customers. So we would have an option of three spirits with different botanical blends, five hours of one hour sessions where people would come in, taste, fill in a survey, and we would select from there. So initially for what we consider to be our core product line, we did a lot of market research for other items that are maybe limited releases. We have a fantastic bottle and canned cocktail club that I can speak more to, which is super fun to be a part of those. We do more team-based r and d because they're quick releases that are usually just fun and something different.

(11:04):
In that case, what we usually do is we get together, we have an all-staff retreat every year where we go somewhere fun and work together and work plan people come with ideas for future releases. We do a whole big voting conundrum where everybody gets to look through the list, decide a couple of things. The distillers then take what we voted on and they come up with a few ideas together creatively using resources, their own brains, their own experience. We really like to rely on some pretty cool books. One of our favorites is the Flavor Bible, if you've never heard of it,

(11:42):
So you can say, okay, look, this has Blackberry in it, and it's a book that has all of these chefs have come together and decided what pairs with which food item. And so you go to Blackberry, it's like an encyclopedia in the book, and then it'll list 30 food items that pair with it, and then you go, okay, vanilla sounds great, let's look up vanilla. And you can come up with some pretty cool ideas that way. Sometimes we want to find something a little more unconventional, so we do more research, we get creative, and then from there we develop a product and test it and taste it together until we're happy with it.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
When I first got into tasting, I was so wanting to go back to my experiences working in the paint business where when you matched colors or you tried to mix colors, you had a wheel and you could look at something on this side of the wheel and whatever was on the other side of the wheel would cancel the other one out and kind of gray it out or take it out. And I thought, man, if there was a flavor wheel, and in fact when I first saw the bourbon flavor wheels, I was like, oh, here it is. But it's not really that, but really understanding, especially in the world of cocktails, but also in distilling what flavors impact other flavors is such a powerful tool to have.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah, we actually use the flavor wheel when we're training our staff. So they go through a rigorous tasting process, they learn the difference between the sensory portion of things and taste and smell, and we sort of developed our own side tasting sensory area for absence too that's separate from the wheel because absence sometimes has other components that you want to evaluate when you're tasting it. So I'm all about the flavor wheel. I think it's a lot of fun to utilize in a good tool.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
Yeah. Do you find Absent to be polarizing because I'm a black licorice fan, so when you say an nice, it's the first thing I'm all for it. But it's funny when I'm on tour, sometimes if somebody's got a gin that's very has an nice or an anise forward, you'll hear people say, oh, you get a variety of reactions. Is that kind of what you see with it as well?

Speaker 2 (13:52):
Absolutely. It's polarizing, not just because it's heavy on those licorice notes, but also because of the propaganda that's associated with Absent. So there's a lot more education and training when we're interacting with customers on that. We're fortunate enough that despite the polarization of the product, that it does really well and it's a great product of ours. Not many craft distilleries are making ASIN two, so it's been successful for us in the market.

Speaker 1 (14:21):
Well, let's talk about your whiskeys because what's interesting in the difference between making a gin where you really get to kind of experiment upfront and you're going to know the experience that somebody's going to have pretty much right off the bat, whiskey takes a little bit more planning. And how do you feel that planning, how the importance of planning plays into crafting your whiskeys

Speaker 2 (14:48):
Incredibly important. And we even learned some lessons on, we started with only white whiskey because we needed to get the doors open and to bring some money in, and they did really well for us because we distilled fantastic white whiskeys, but we knew that we needed to fill barrels. We also made a spirit that I am sad to not make anymore called a caraway rye. It was a rye whiskey mash with caraway seed, and it was amazingly delicious. It tasted like an aquavit. It had a lot of complexity to it, but it was polarizing and traditional whiskey drinkers weren't into it. People that liked different things loved it, but it just doesn't sell as well as a bourbon, for example. And so we did a lot of research in the first year, and my business partner then was the type that just wanted to only do different things, even though everybody was asking for a bourbon, and I was the type that was like, okay, but we're trying to run a business, so

(15:47):
How do we do this and still be unconventional? So we again, did similar testing where we did some quick aging with chips and things like that of a multitude of products and got opinions from people. For us in Maryland, rye whiskey was a no-brainer. So I think that also definitely should play a factor. Your area, your terroir, the history of your region in what you're making. Maryland rye was just designated the state spirit only a year ago, but many of us have been doing it because we've just known for so long that it was something we wanted to get behind. So that's where our decision making process sort of took us when we did our research. But yes, I 100% agree that everything from your cooperage barrel size mash bill to how you even tell the story, where it comes from, all of those things are incredibly important. We're very fortunate enough to be able to source all of our grain locally, so I feel like our spirit just has a unique flavor to it that is only 10th ward tasting. That's a little bit of the history there.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
You have me intrigued by this caraway and you sense that there'll be a point where people have gotten educated on the basics and that they will want to push flavor and they will want to probably open up in the future to something like that.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
I've seen it, so we've been doing it for eight years now, and I've seen it grow even after year one. And maybe part of it is that our brand has grown too, so that we see more spirit enthusiasts coming to us. But yeah, I'll see people that are more familiar with terminologies that originally customers weren't using. And part of that is maybe because the distilleries were coming behind the breweries, it reminds me a little bit of the IPA craze where at first people didn't realize the happy beer was also typically stronger and they liked the taste of it and then realized they were getting pretty drunk. And then there was the craze of sessionable and sour beers that were a little more accessible. And so I sort of have seen that then start to happen with whiskey, which has been really neat. I don't know yet if we'll continue to bring back strange things as people become more experts in this, but I will say that we might do it just for fun reasons, like when our 10 year anniversary comes up or maybe for a club release because our club members are the ones wanting something different, so we at least have a little bit of a market there.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
Is your club local or is that something that people who visit the area and they go home, they can become members and get bottled?

Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah, it depends on where you're living and where we ship to. So we can only ship to a few regions, so anybody within the Maryland, DC, Virginia sort of area should be able to participate. Our canned cocktail club is monthly, but our bottle club is quarterly and we'll hold them for up to a year. So we do have a number of members that live a couple hours away that'll just come in to do their pickups once a year, for example. Another option is people will have a family member in town who will do their pickups for them, and then when they visit with them, they'll do it. Or we have people that just make the trip. We have a club member who lives in New Jersey who comes down once every couple of months and has a fantastic time and brings a bunch of stuff home with him. So people are more than welcome to join as a member. They can cancel any time. They can put it on hold anytime, but yeah, if you're living in, I don't know, Texas for example, it might be challenging.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
I hear you. The world of control states and the rest, that makes it a little more difficult. If somebody's coming to Frederick and they are looking for a distillery experience, what kind of things can they experience when they come to visit 10th Ward?

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Because our production facility is in a separate location, we did sort of an elevated tasting experience for a long time. We have a video of the production process. It starts with our farm goes all the way from mashing to distilling to barrel aging, and throughout that video we do a guided tasting.

(20:08):
We teach our customers how to nose and taste the spirit. We walk them through the flavor wheel, they learn how to pick out tasting notes and things like that. We usually get to try a special unique release and get to know the team member who's leading them through that process. We stopped when we moved to the new production facility, COVID happened. We brought them back for a little bit, but have a lot more footage to gather. Now that we've grown, we have a new still in. And so over the next six months, we'll be redeveloping what that experience looks like. So I would say maybe around holiday time 2024 where people can start to see availability for that experience again. But otherwise, if you just walk into our facility on Patrick Street downtown, you'll be greeted by one of our fantastic team members. They usually recommend walking through the spirit options first. You can pick a tasting pour, you can do a full pour, you can do a flight, maybe pick your favorite spirit, enjoy a cocktail afterward With that, there are a lot of options there for anybody from straight spirit drinkers to the cocktail enthusiasts when they arrive. And we do just some fun things as an extra experience because we are partially a cocktail bar. So we have live jazz on Thursdays, music on Fridays, some random holiday events and anniversary events and things like that.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
And you do something called a flight of cocktails. What does that consist of?

Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. So this is something that I've also seen grow a little bit in the mixology world. We also do draft cocktails, so we tend to pick what is the most popular of one of our items and put it on draft because then the bartenders are very quickly pouring it, which is nice. We're probably the only bar downtown Frederick that has an old fashioned on draft,

(22:05):
And I'm very proud of it. You'll get people that might poo poo it because it's not being handmade, but it was so popular and people loved it so much that why not make the exact same recipe in bulk? So that's where the flight comes from. So the flight is three mini draft cocktails that you get a chance to try the three favorites of our customers, which is of course, like I said, why they get selected to be put on draft. And I think that's the best bang for your buck because then you get a little bit of everything.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
Is there something that if somebody is coming to taste a cocktail that you would say, boy, I would say taste this one because this is the one that kind of speaks to who we are,

Speaker 2 (22:47):
The Diamondback Crk.

(22:50):
Okay. And the reason I say that, I'm not sure how familiar you are with Maryland with the Diamondback Terrapin is a turtle that is native to this area, and so it's named for that with the nod to Maryland, but it also has Maryland's only absent in it as a highlight that comes in a Cak, a Maryland rye that is a 100% single malt rye made from all grain malted and grown right here in our county. And it doesn't have a ton of mixers. It has just enough bitters and the other items that you need in a cach to be delicious. But I think it's the most true to where we are in Frederick and who 10th Ward is.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
Very nice. And you actually have a relationship with the restaurant next door. Do you do any kind of pairings and that sort of thing with them?

Speaker 2 (23:42):
We have not with them probably because they're a burger place, so their food is fantastic and it serves a fantastic relationship and purpose for us where we have customers that are drinking, but we don't have a kitchen to be able to offer them food to safely be consuming more alcohol while they're sitting there and having a good time. And so it's an amazing relationship. It keeps our customers there longer, it keeps them happy. And we have these QR codes on the menu that people can scan. So they'll deliver the food right, exactly to your table. They'll know exactly where you're sitting. One good thing that came out of COVID is that people figured out how to use QR codes because before they would just walk in with a bag of food and yell your name and have to figure out amongst 70 customers where Monica's sitting. But we do like to do pairings with other types of restaurant accounts of hours. So occasionally we'll post something like that on our calendar to promote our relationship with them.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
Somebody coming down to Frederick, first of all, how easy is it to park around your area? Is it kind of like street parking or

Speaker 2 (24:55):
It's a mix of street and garage. We're fortunate enough to be right across the street from a parking garage, so if you're circling and can't find something, just zoom right in there. But downtown has a, you can go to downtown Frederick Partnership, their website. They have a full parking map accessible for anybody trying to figure it out.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
Perfect. And for somebody visiting the area, what's something they should do that would pair nicely with a visit to 10th Ward?

Speaker 2 (25:22):
While we're on the subject of booze, I'm not sure if you knew this, that Frederick has the most breweries, distilleries, and wineries in the state and the most per capita in the nation right now.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
Yeah, our tourism department, our economic development departments have done a fantastic job at just understanding and cultivating the growth of our industry through agricultural relationships all the way to promotion. And so we've got a fantastic variety of things from IES to Brewery trails, you name it. And our folks within Frederick County have developed, not necessarily a passport, but a guidebook that you can get at most of our facilities or at our visitor's center and look through all the options that Frederick has to give. So that's one of them, especially if you're downtown Frederick, a lot of it is walkable. You probably wouldn't even be able to visit everybody in one day. So I usually like to recommend walk along Carroll Creek, see the beauty of just downtown, which is a hip and historic place. That's our slogan in Frederick and find some food because we also have a fantastic variety of restaurants.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Fantastic. Fantastic. Monica, it was great meeting you. And thanks so much for the walkthrough on the history and how you've evolved and the cocktails, and it's all fun stuff to learn about and hopefully will draw a lot of people into Frederick to experience the town and to stop in and experience 10th Ward.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
Absolutely. I'm very grateful and thankful that you reached out.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Well, I hope you enjoyed this virtual flight to 10th Ward Spirits. If I piqued your interest in traveling to Maryland and this distillery, don't forget to head to whiskey lore.com/maryland where you can view the profile of 10th Ward Spirits, nearly two dozen other Maryland whiskey making distilleries, and then use the convenient wishlist feature to add this and those other distilleries to your member dashboard where you can keep your list of favorite distilleries and get maps, tour booking links, and get access to hundreds of other distillery profiles from Scotland, Ireland, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, and now Maryland to start your journey@whiskey-lore.com slash Maryland. Stay tuned because I'll have some closing travel tips if you're planning on visiting 10th Ward Spirits. But first, it's time for this week in whiskey lore.

(27:53):
Well, there's great news coming out of more a Scotland on the edge of the space side region where after ceasing production in 1983, the historic Dallas Dew distillery is set to reopen under new management the Dallas Dew, which translates to Blackwater Valley. And Gallic is a distillery that has a historic but somewhat uneven past built in 1898 by Alexander Edward originally named Dallas Moore. It primarily produced whiskey for blends, but over the years, the distillery faced numerous challenges, including a fire and a takeover by the massive DCL conglomerate. In 1983, it was shuttered due to a water shortage and then handed over to the state's care reopening as a museum. A decade later, it became a popular visitor's attraction, but again, was shuttered and sat idle for years. Well, after nearly a decade of feasibility studies historic environment, Scotland confirmed that a CO distillers company is going to take over operations and HES will retain guardianship of the site.

(29:02):
The new managers will first work on getting the historic equipment back and working order. Then according to a CO managing director Edward Odom, there are plans for a state-of-the-art visitor center with exhibition and museum space in a cafe or a restaurant to be enjoyed by visitors in the local community. There will also be a cooperage displaying the art of the Cooper, a working malting floor, and an interactive virtual reality whiskey experience that delves into the science behind Scotland's famous spirit, but as well as showing how whiskey is made. We intend to tell the social and economic story passed in present of whiskey production in side for visitors. Planning to trek out to the Ben roic Distillery, Dallas Dew Distillery will become a perfect nearby pairing for travelers.

(29:53):
Well, as we prepared to head back onto the commuter rail for our trip back to the airport, I wanted to give you my three reasons why I think you should put 10th Ward spirits on your whiskey lore wishlist. First, if you're a lover of cocktails, the 10th ward's dive into the flavor Bible will yield some amazing creative inventions that you can explore like the queen's bees knees or the smoked fashion. And remember that their cocktail lab menu is always changing, so you'll never know what you're going to find. And for the cocktail, curious, the cocktail flight is an option that is quite unique in the world of distillery travel. Second, make sure to pair your visit to downtown Frederick with a crafted cocktail or a flight at 10th Ward while ordering in some tasty food from Maxwell's next door. And from there, you'll be ready for an evening stroll in the park, one of the planned events at 10th Ward, or a night of Entertainment at Sky Stage.

(30:53):
And third, for corporate event planners who might be looking for a unique place to get away from the hustle and bustle. You can look to the laid back town of Frederick, and then 10th Ward Spirits will provide a great event space with a talented wait staff and creative food and spirits options to make your conferences night out a success. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's visit to 10th Ward Spirits in our trip to Maryland. It's time to reach for the clouds and make our way across the Atlantic from BWI Airport to a flight change in Iceland, and then onto our next destination in Northern England by way of Edinburgh, Scotland. Make sure to join me and to guarantee your seat. Don't forget to subscribe to the Whiskey Lore podcast. I'm your travel guy, drew Hanish. Until we meet again, cheers and Slava for transcripts and travel information, including maps, distillery planning information and more. Head to whiskey lore.com/flights. Whiskey lore is a production of Travel Fuels Life, LLC.