Q&A: Brian Ellison, Death's Door

After getting our lips round their mouth-watering gin, we thought it a damn good idea to grab a few minutes with the creator of such a stand out dram. So in the dusky surrounding of The Big Easy in Covent Garden, we chatted to Death’s Door founder and CEO Brian Ellison about bread making, booze and drinking beer with Will Chase. It went a little something like this…

So Brian, Death’s Door; how did this come about?

My background is actually in economic development and I started working with families on Washington Island, Wisconsin, to restore agriculture back to the island. I had two brothers, Tom and Ken, that agreed to grow grain for me and we grew winter wheat to make bread and baked goods. It was a good experiment. We made bread loaves that sold at local hotels but we soon realised we’d have to sell these loaves of bread for $25 if we were actually going to make any money! The ultra premium bread category wasn’t progressing as much as the premium alcohol category!

So we moved onto making beer. I worked with a local brewery to create an island wheat beer, which was a huge success. It’s still produced now by Capital Brewery, which makes up about 30% of their production. Using the wheat from the island and malted barley, we worked with them to make the beer and then our 5 acres of cultivation soon expanded to 20 acres, 100 acres and then we were like, what else can we do? So I started looking into other products and spirits seemed to make a lot of sense because you can’t sell a loaf of bread for $25 but you can sell a bottle of gin for $25! So I looked into distilling and at the time, 2005/2006, there wasn’t really any other craft distilleries around, unlike today, so I really couldn’t find anyone to do it. So that's when I started to study distilling and how to distil.

Did you just grab a book or did you head back to school?

Michigan State University has a good distilling technologies program, so I went and took classes there and, this may be hard to believe, but actually one of my classmates was Will Chase. We hung out and drank a lot of beer together!

After studying did you go straight into distilling?

My whole idea was to find someone else to distil the spirits but I couldn’t find anyone else to do it so I was finally like, all right, I need to find a way to make this myself. A little winery in Iowa let me use their stills at weekends to do our first distillations. They worked with me to develop our vodka and soon after that we created our gin and it went from there. Then a cousin of the guy who owned the vineyard wanted to open a distillery in Madison, so we worked together to open that. I was making my product and he was making his. One day he approached me and said; “I really like making product but I don’t like selling, so why don’t you teach us how to make yours and you can sell it.” This was such a great thing to happen as it allowed me to move from being the guy with wet socks in my boots, to being the guy that could go out selling and talking about the product. So I filled my Volvo station wagon with bottles and talked to anyone in Chicago that would listen to me and buy bottles. I just kept talking to people until it took off. I started distilling in 2007 and quit my regular job in the middle of 2009 to do it full time. We went from 700 cases in our first year to now over 57,000 cases last year.

You must have needed to expand with those numbers, so how did you do it?

We ended up building our own distillery. We out grew the co-op distillery and so we decided to build our own. Now we have a 25,000 square foot distillery with a 500-gallon German pot still.

Have you named your stills? This seems to be quite a thing in England but have you?

No I haven’t! I name my children, not stills!

And where does your brand name come from?

There is a passage of water between Washington Island and the mainland called Death’s Door, so that’s where it comes from. We’re not just morbid people!

So let’s talk about your gin. Talk us through your choice of botanicals.

Well I don’t come from the industry at all so I’ve never worked in a bar, never worked in a restaurant and never actually really drank much spirits before I got into this, so for me I came into it with open mind. You have to remember at this point in 2005/2006 they weren’t all these different gins trying to find a new take on gin. But for me it was all about using local botanicals that was important. We can’t grow citrus in Wisconsin, as it’s a little too cold, so we would never use it.

We had a small table of distillable botanicals we were trying. We were working with a chef from the island who said the best foods are the ones with the least ingredients. You don’t focus on how many ingredients you have but what it actually tastes like. I really liked the idea of having a gin with restraint and when we picked juniper, coriander and fennel, we were like; this really works! They balance each other out so well and you can single out each botanical

Have you ever thought of aging your gin?

Yes! In fact our distillers thought about it before I did. They had been keeping some in old rum barrels and when I first saw them I was like, what’s in those barrels? Why are we aging gin? But in all honesty I have no interest in launching it as a product, I want to focus on the current ones we have.

What your perfect serve for your gin?

I think a Negroni is great. At 47% ABV our gin really stands out.

Supporting the local community seems very important to you. How much of your product is local?

Supporting our community is very important. All of our grain comes locally and we try to get as much of our juniper from Washington island, which is grown wild, hand picked and used in every batch. Our coriander is local too and so is the fennel, which is a very provincial flavour and very prominent in our region. Everything we are doing is about the products we make and we want to represent the community, so we will only make exceptional spirits.

When did you start exporting to the UK?

It was 2008 when we started exporting the UK, which a lot of people didn’t realise as we were not that well known at the time. We met our importer at a San Francisco bar show who basically said; “I want your gin in the UK!” He paid cash up front and we ended up in the market that way. It was slow at first but it’s made its way now. We are one of the best super premium American gins in the UK today.

You currently have a gin, vodka and wondermint. What else have you got up that Death’s Door sleeve of yours?

We're actually in England for meetings with our importer about our new make products, one being a new age whiskey that is in the market right now. It’s a 72 hour aged whiskey made from malted barley and wheat from Washington Island. It is fermented with champagne yeast rather than whiskey yeast and rested on un-charred barrels for 72 hours before bottled and shipped out. It’s perfect for cocktail bars. It will be a placeholder for our aged whiskey, but it will be a couple more years before that comes out.

We also have a seasonal only Cringle Cream. It’s a rum cream using Caribbean rum, real Wisconsin cream, cane sugar with cringle flavour, the state pastry of Wisconsin. It’s a big round Nordic pastry covered in icing and nuts. It’s really sweet and nutty but actually tastes like butterscotch pudding. You can enjoy it with coffee or on the rocks, it’s part of our let's be fun drinks! It’s only for the holidays so we are doing pre-orders this August.

You can find out more info on the brand here

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