Rocky Mountain Revivalist
How a love of German ‘hefeweizen’ finds Todd Leopold resurrecting 19th century American rye whiskey.
Words by Douglas M. Ford
Photography by Kim Cook
“The whiskey market is a very fickle thing. You couldn’t give rye away fifteen, twenty years ago. Who’s been keeping the lights on in Scotland? It’s been Johnnie Walker until about ten minutes ago, but now it’s become all about the white whale: people want what they can’t get. The market is in a very squirrelly place right now.”
Todd Leopold is perched on a bar stool in his distillery’s cavernous tasting room. His phone pings away in the front pocket of his well-worn overalls as he scratches at his graying beard. Comfortable and animated, he is holding forth about his favourite topics: fermentation, distillation, bacteria, and the business of capturing flavour in a bottle.
Outside the window, the low white distillery walls are stark in the January light. Rabbits chew the winter grass in the iron-fenced front gardens. A metal silo shines in the sun behind the squat malt kiln that is capped by a traditional, black pagoda roof, its furnace fans humming. Welcome to Leopold Brothers’ distillery, three acres that could easily pass for a Scottish farmstead, incongruously wedged shoulder-to-shoulder with container depots and nondescript warehouses in a low-rise industrial park of suburban Denver, Colorado.
Inside, the visitor centre is warm and woody in the high plains sunshine. The floor and tasting bar are rustic, the wood recycled from railway boxcars. Leopold divides his time between his visitors and his stills as he shares his love of history, science, and even NHL hockey. He is in his element.
Todd Leopold has been called ‘the distiller’s distiller’, and for good reason: he is experienced, educated, and far more interested in keeping his stills running than he is in selling, marketing, or supersizing his company. As he puts it, “I work the late shift. It’s rare for a distillery owner to actually distil, but I got into this because I want to make things.”
Leopold fell into brewing, and later distilling, by accident. His literature major in college was a far cry from the history, philosophy, engineering, and organic chemistry that keeps Leopold Bros running today. With a wry smile on his face, Todd strikes into a generous series of anecdotes about how a mechanically inclined young man became one of the most respected distillers in America. Humorous and hopeful, they are stories of brewing, of professionalism, of family, and of plans for the future.
“I had been trying to figure out what to do with my life when I came across a book on hefeweizen written by an American who went to one of the best brewing schools in the world,” Todd recounts in his relaxed Western cadence. “I thought, ‘That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard, I want to do that!’” He shakes his head and chuckles. “I was just a young, dumb kid. I didn’t know you could learn how to be a craftsman; I thought you just got a job at Budweiser. But that’s what led me to the Siebel Institute in 1995, and then to German brewing school afterwards: to learn how to make hefeweizen. That’s the beer that made me fall in love.”
Steeped in the lore of malting and fermenting, Todd convinced his brother Scott to open a brewpub in the shadow of the University of Michigan’s football stadium. The caveat of their state liquor licence was that they could only sell what they made so Todd found himself studying again, first at a distilling school in Kentucky, then as an apprentice at distilleries in Austria and Germany, specialising in eau-de-vie.
“I made vermouth, vodka, gin, triple sec: everything that went on the back bar,” Todd says. “That’s what got me into distilling: necessity.”
Being the closest bar to the biggest football stadium in the U.S. was a clever business tactic, but it didn’t protect them from the crash of 2007. When their landlord was foreclosed, Todd and Scott were pushed out, and the brewpub came to an end. The brothers returned to their native Colorado, now focused entirely on distilling. It was a chance for Scott to put his environmental engineering degree to use on a personal scale. They began to draw up plans for their new distillery.
“Scott wanted to change the world by building pollution-free factories. That was his interest,” Todd recalls. For his part, the more Todd learned about the techniques and processes that were part of America’s whiskey-making heritage, the more he became interested in the traditions that had been set aside because of inefficiency or expense, most often at the cost of flavour and quality. It wasn’t long before Todd realised he needed to malt his own grain.
“What we like to do here is to look at the old practices and understand which processes were eliminated based on money. Malting was thrown out based on money,” Todd explains. “Once I knew that we were building a distillery from the ground up, I said, ‘This is it, we’re doing it now.’ Because the floor malting is its own microenvironment, with bacteria that is going to carry through into our whiskeys as the years go by. Commercial malting is all about uniformity but here the inconsistency – the temperature differences on the floor – is what gives richness and depth of flavour.”
To continue reading…