Booze Tastes Better in Ski Towns
Dec 10, 2018
Mountain towns are some of the best places to find award-winning craft spirits. These are our favorites.
Ski bums have been using the off-season to make booze for, well, ever. They’re now being joined by entrepreneurs and master distillers who want to live in ski towns and catch powder days. There’s another reason for making spirits at altitude: You end up crafting whiskey, rum, vodka, and gin with water from the very top of a watershed—before cow poo and road runoff contaminates it. “Sixty percent of any bottle of spirits is water,” says Karen Hoskin, owner and founder of Montanya Distillers in Crested Butte, Colorado. “If we don’t choose that ingredient as carefully as every ingredient, we are shortchanging our customer. We have the best water in the world up here in the Rocky Mountains at 9,000 feet.”
Which is why mountain towns are now some of the best places to find award-winning craft spirits. In 2018, Breckenridge Distillery won the Innovator of the Year award in the Icons of Whiskey competition, and Montanya has taken home too many rum awards to list here. Several other distilleries are also rolling in the medals.
Read the full article here.