Mine Hill Distillery wants to stock your bar. They’re working throughout the year to provide professional and amateur mixologists with the ingredients they need to make cocktails their way, which distiller Chris Byles claims is the best way to make them.
To do it, they’re distilling some of the finest grain-to-glass spirits in the state. Nestled in Roxbury, the second-to-last town in Connecticut to allow the sale of alcohol, the distillery occupies three carefully restored buildings: one a former cigar factory, one a converted train station and the third an old lumber storehouse.
Grain-to-glass is what you might conjure up when you picture a distillery. It’s sourcing raw ingredients like wheat, rye or barley and using some complicated equipment to create time-honored spirits. In other words, they only bottle what they make themselves. It’s how Byles has done it throughout his career, having built two distilleries in his home state of Texas before striking out to work stills in Montana and Wisconsin.
Through that time, Byles picked up quite the passion for what you can do to spirits, as well as what you can do with them. He’ll be quick to give visitors tips and tricks to tweak their old-fashioneds to their preferences, but ask the right questions in the Mine Hill Tasting Room, and he might start telling you about ways to use their Amaro to cook burgers or top your ice cream. That’s right: Amaro.
Mine Hill distiller Chris BylesD.H. Callahan
When the distillery opened in 2019, they started, as many small distilleries do, with their whiskeys. Whiskey is the only spirit they make that requires substantial time to age. So they started there, allowing their product to mature as they experimented with other spirits. Gin and vodka are the logical next in line.
Very few distilleries venture into the world of Amaro. In fact, Mine Hill seems to be the only one in the state. The decision was partially a fun experiment and partially a tactic in their game plan to provide cocktail enthusiasts with the ingredients they need to concoct their own creations. Similarly, Byles is making his Amaro his own way, using maple syrup as a sweetener. By his estimation, he may be the only one in the world using this process as such a scale, adding 170 gallons of Vermont Maple Syrup to 490 gallons of wine from Hopkins Vineyard, just up the road in Warren, Connecticut. They mix it all up with a secret blend of herbs and spices, age it for over seven months and end up with a unique spirit perfect for mixing, cooking or even sipping over ice.
Amaro isn’t their only tactic for filling out a cocktail bar. Understanding that not every casual cocktail creator wants to use a nicer, pricier spirit as their base, the distillery released their Iron Trail line. Named after the historic iron blast furnace just up the road from the distillery, their Iron Trail bourbon and vodka offer quality distilled spirits at a more affordable price point.
As we leave summer behind us and evenings reclaim their crisp temperatures, now is also a great time to explore the possibilities of Mine Hill’s signature bourbon and rye. The tasting room and their website are chalk full of cocktail ideas, but as Byles says, the best cocktails are the ones made to your taste. So have fun with their spirits, and enjoy the process.
To see their full lineup and get some cocktail suggestions, visit minehilldistillery.com.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
