Still Life

Dennis Robertson, co-founder of Soft Tail Spirits in Woodinville, discovered grappa in Italy; now he makes it in Washington.

Already a mecca for craft beer and varietal wines, Washington has opened its doors to craft distilleries and invited a host of midnight moonshiners to step up and vie with big national distilleries for precious liquor store shelf space.

Dry Fly Distilling in Spokane and Soft Tail Spirits in Woodinville are leading the charge, and with solid marketing know-how and a superior local product, they hope to bring Washington to national distilling prominence.

The idea for Soft Tail, the first craft distillery in western Washington, was born on a 2000 trip to Italy where co-owner Dennis Robertson saw grappa being made from grape skins. Robertson’s stonecutting business shared its building with a winery, and he wanted to take advantage of the excess grape material. The idea was shelved because of business commitments and the difficulty involved with obtaining a distillery license.

But because of recent changes in the law, Robertson foresees a boom in the spirits business. “It’s a natural progression, from microwineries to microbrewers to microdistilleries. I think it’s happening not just in Washington but across the United States,” he says.

Prior to 2008, Washington distilleries, of which there are few, had a hard time promoting their product because they were not allowed to provide samples to customers. In 2008, Dry Fly helped push legislation through the state senate allowing sampling and direct sales to customers, as well as lowering the licensing fee. Kent Fleischmann, one of the founders of Dry Fly, felt that beer and wine producers had a much easier time making their product available. “We wanted to level the playing field,” Fleischmann explains.

Dry Fly got its start on a fly-fishing trip when Fleischmann and his partner Don Poffenroth were drinking a bottle of what Fleischmann calls “inadequate vodka.”

Fleischmann and Poffenroth were tired of drinking low quality liquor, especially when they didn’t know where the ingredients originated. “We wanted to make spirits better,” Fleischmann notes.

He felt it was important that craft distilleries produce a high quality product while supporting local industry, so he added a stipulation to the bill that a craft distillery must use 51 percent Washington-grown products.

The craft distiller law originally set maximum production at 20,000 gallons per year and

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