Colorado vodka: it’s as if Red Dawn happened, and the Russians whupped the Wolverine insurgency. Two decades after that fictional infiltration, premium vodka’s percolated the American zeitgeist as its most popular liquor. While giant multinationals pump out the bulk of mainstream product, small batch distillers push the vodka vanguard forward from unlikely places like Palisade, Colorado.

Why Palisade? It’s an agricultural oasis in the otherwise arid high desert near the Utah border. Ask any Grand Valley native about Palisade peaches, or the sweet corn from nearby Olathe, and you’ll uncork memories of summer treats that stretch back to childhood. For many years, local artisans have turned those fruits into wine, honey into mead, and more recently produced vodka, bourbon, and brandies.

While long coal trains rumble just outside their converted warehouse, the alchemists of Peach Street Distillers turn sacks of Olathe sweet corn into handcrafted hooch. Just inside the entryway, barrels of bourbon await the day when charred oak and the unwavering march of time yield a mature, tawny elixir. While their bourbon ages, this fledgling company sells two flavors of their Goat brand vodka, and brandies made from local fruit: apple, apricot, peach, cherry, pear, plum and grape.

Olathe sweet corn lends a rounded and faintly sweet character to a “plain” vodka unlike any mainstream high dollar brand. Their peach flavored vodka doesn’t screech with shrill artificial flavors produced in a New Jersey laboratory. Goat’s flavored vodka is to Norah Jones what Absolut is to Kelly Clarkson. Real peaches play a decrescendo of subtle fruit and nut notes during its fading moments in the mouth.

Despite the steamroller of conventional marketing that claims good vodka is supposed to lack any flavor or color, I prefer a vodka with character. Fifteen years ago, I tasted a bootleg bottle of Lithuanian potato vodka wrapped in plain brown paper that hid the pale golden hue of its magical contents. Its deep flavors upended my understanding of how a great vodka should taste.

With a blatant disregard for pretty packaging, that humble, unlabeled bottle held the best vodka I’ll never taste again. That kiss from a Soviet bloc supermodel in babushka’s clothes ruined me for any vodka after that.

Until now, that is. American microdistilleries are sprouting up in all corners of the country, echoing the micro beer revolution of the 1980’s. Small producers put out distinctive liquors from the verdant hills of Vermont, to the dusty Texas hill country, from Los Angeles to Bend, Oregon. If we could overhaul the archaic morass of liquor laws that stifles this burgeoning industry, we’d have a spirited revolution in grown up drinks. Unlikely? Probably. But stranger things have happened. Perestroika, anyone?

Peach Street Distillers
144 South Kluge #2
Palisade, CO 81526
970-464-1128

Across town from the Peach Streeet Distillers, Fred and Connie Strothman own the Meadery of the Rockies, Confre Cellars, and St. Kathryn Cellars, a consortium that produces an unusual range of fruit wines, hard ciders, port-like fortified wines, and mead. Examples of the fruit wines include cranberry, pomegranate, and sour cherry, all of which feature fruit forward flavors and high residual sugar. I’ve had good success using them in cooking applications like a Montmorency cherry sauce, and they pair well with spicy foods where their fruity sweetness is a welcome partner.

Mead occupies a microniche within the wine industry, with home brewers far outnumbering commercial producers. With very few commercial examples worth buying, its obscurity remains sadly assured for those without a home brewing buddy. Some commercial brands I’ve tasted are sickly sweet, and sometimes spiced to distract from off flavors produced in their fermenting tanks. In contrast, Meadery of the Rockies produces award winning meads in four sweetness levels. The bone dry version resembles an oaky Chardonnay, and the sweetest shows its honey origins clearly. I prefer the two products in the middle of the sweetness range. Their fruit wines are blended with mead to expand the line with six more products.

Brewing honey into wine presents some unique technical challenges. Honey’s antimicrobial properties have been known since ancient times, when Roman soldiers used it in a poultice to heal battle wounds. Those same properties require special strains of brewers yeast and some fermenting techniques specific to mead. Heating the honey is a brute force measure to defeat it’s antiseptic properties, but it cooks off subtle aromas and flavors. Strothman developed a secret cool temperature process, which results in pleasantly multilayered, clean tasting meads that are fun to introduce to suprised first time drinkers.

These days, wineries from Iowa to North Carolina chase visions of becoming the next Napa or Sonoma regions. With a global wine glut driving down retail prices, do we need more generic merlot crowding the field? So far, the Grand Valley has avoided the pitfalls of that me-too-ism. Maverick artisans here have rekindled the Colorado pioneer spirit by creating trailblazing products unlike any other on the market.

Meadery of the Rockies
3701 G Road
Palisade, CO 81526
970-464-7899

Whatever happened to Sam the Butcher, the sort of old fashioned, service oriented guy who’d gladly deliver Alice her meat? How did that archetype fade so quietly that we hardly missed his demise? As recently as the`80’s, hanging sides of beef were common sights in the back rooms of retail markets in America. The guy who handed your steaks across the meat counter processed the entire carcass into retail cuts, and dispensed sage cooking advice, too.

“Making pot roast? Buy the 7 bone chuck roast instead of the tenderloin. Rack of lamb? Let me french the bones for you.” Try getting that kind of expertise or selection at a Wal-Mart supercenter.

Across the street from one such Wal-Mart in Colorado sits a one year old butcher shop, run by a soft spoken man with fourteen years of meat cutting expertise in his hands. While you’d think that the big box neighbor would help to kill his business, it ironically highlights the differences between Sam the Butcher and Sam Walton. That juxtaposition drives discerning customers to House of Meat.

The best steaks in Grand Junction aren’t served in a dark, clubby restaurant with plush red leatherette banquette booths that smell of ancient cigar smoke. That sort of place doesn’t exist in a restaurant landscape dominated by casual dining chains. No, the best steaks in town are grilled at home, supplied by independent butchers like Jason Hicks.

Start with quality meat, and you can make your own great steak. House of Meat sells only the top two USDA grades of beef: Prime and Choice. Most supermarkets sell only the next lower grades, and tag them with misleading marketing fabrications like “Butcher’s Choice.” Hicks sent me home with two of the thick, well marbled ribeye steaks he’s slicing in this photo. Seasoned simply, grilled quickly over blazing oak coals and finished with a compound butter, it made a phenomenal dinner (ahem - if I say so myself). If only I can remember what I blended into the improvised butter mixture: anchovy fillets, freshly grated Pecorino Romano cheese, smoked Spanish paprika, and what else, what else?

The display case tempts busy customers with ready to cook meats like fajitas, bacon wrapped filet mignon, and andouille stuffed chicken breasts. But Beef Wellingtons caught my eye because these pastry wrapped, mushroom and veal demiglace topped tenderloins take forever to make from scratch. There’s two types of cooks who’ll take time to finely mince a mountain of mushrooms and reduce it with shallots and butter into a classic duxelles: home cooks who want to impress their loved ones with this old school classic, or the rare professional like chef Tim Dougan willing to prepare this labor intensive dish for you.

In the House of Meat kitchen, Dougan cooks heat-and-eat specialities like white chili, Palisade peach pulled pork, beef stews and a rotating menu of braised dishes sold by the quart. We took home the spicy, fruity stewed pork made with regionally famous peaches from the neighboring town of Palisade. It’s a delicious pulled pork, albeit different from the hickory smoked Carolina barbecue style I’m accustomed to.

If the products and expertise described here don’t immediately remind you of a similar shop near you, perhaps you ought to seek one out before it’s too late. Supermarket butchers across the country are being driven to extinction by the next meat industry trend. “Case ready” meats come prepackaged in trays ready for stock clerks to unload directly from a truck into a display case. I object to the disappearance of knowledgeable experts from supermarkets squeezed to cut costs. Their replacement with increasingly prevalent plastic trays of “flavor enhanced” meat isn’t a value-added improvement in flavor for the consumer, but a profit-added proposition for producers selling salt water at meat prices.

In a retail environment where local supermarket chains battle Wal-Mart by laying off their skilled meat cutters, independent butcher shops have an opportunity to thrive, provided that consumers care enough to demand honest, high quality meats. Which Sam will you choose?

House of Meat
2546 Rimrock Avenue, Suite 200A
Grand Junction, CO 81505-8666
970-243-6111

Regular readers will know we got skunked on a recent elk hunting trip to Colorado. Rather than come back without an elk story for you, dear reader, I visited an old fashioned butcher that processes all sorts of meat, from wild beasties to hogs and beef cattle raised by the local 4H.

The distinction between wild game taken by hunters and ranched game sold to restaurants is important because hunted meats can not be sold for public consumption. In order to be legally sold in this country, domesticated game animals (like all other livestock) must be slaughtered and immediately processed in a USDA inspected abattoir. While these barriers exist to protect public health, they also make delicous game meats less accessible and more expensive to the average food lover.

Hunters bring their game to “no kill” facilities like Old World Meat, which fabricates elk carcasses into steaks, roasts and delicious sausages. At the height of the hunting season, over two tons of elk are processed here each day, but Old World still returns orders with next day service.

The sheer size of an elk requires hunters to halve or quarter it to haul it out of the woods. At left, shop co-owner Matt Anderegg poses with two hindquarters as delivered by a customer. An elk carcass resembles a scaled-down side of beef, and is cut in much the same manner. Major differences: elk are not as thickly muscled as cattle, and run far leaner due to their active outdoor lifestyle.

Prior to fabriation, any stray hairs and debris are singed off the exterior with a propane flame thrower. The outermost layer of meat and silverskin is sliced off and disposed. The clean, interior muscle is cut to each customer’s specifications, immediately packaged in butcher paper and flash frozen. A 400 pound elk ultimately yields about 100 pounds of delicious venison, according to Anderegg’s estimates.

Notice the leanness of elk meat in both these photos. Elk tastes like expensive, dry aged beef in that its minerally, meaty flavors are concentrated compared to ordinary, unaged beef. Unlike other kinds of wild meats, elk has little of the gaminess you might expect. I asked the Andereggs what contributes to off flavors of game meats, and an interesting debate ensued. Matt’s brother in law Rick Nehm suggested that diet plays a major role, and cited how antelope tastes like the highland sage on which they feed. Dumpster diving bears reportedly taste like garbage, while those living far from human contact don’t. I’m told that mountain lion tastes horrible no matter what.

The way that game is handled after the kill also plays a role in its flavor. For hunters, the Andereggs offer these basic tips for optimal quality:

• Cool the meat as quickly as possible in the field by skinning, gutting, and bleeding immediately.
• Expose more surface area to the cold winter air by cutting the carcass into quarters.
• Do not rinse the meat, nor allow ice to contact it directly.

How many butcher shops these days sell entire sides of beef, or whole hogs custom cut and wrapped for your freezer? The Anderegg family has since 1967. They make over thirty kinds of fresh, smoked and fully cooked sausages, and house-smoke hams, bacon and turkey. Stout 1/4 inch slices of their bacon at bottom right are the thickest you’re likely to find unless you slice your own slab bacon.

On the day I visited, chicken and apple sausage was being made. Shot with high velocity from the muzzle of a full auto sausage cannon, the machine simultaneously twists the filled collagen casings into links of consistent size and density. Whoever said you don’t want to see sausage or politics being made was only half right.

Beef jerky and elk snack sticks (at top right and left) had just finished curing in the smoker. The skinny snack sticks resemble the Polish sausages called kabanosy, except these are made of ranched elk and pork. Offered in their most popular teriyaki flavor or a not so spicy “hot” stick, they made for the perfect car snack on our drive home to California. Well, almost perfect: an Octoberfest lager would have paired great with these delicious sausages. Thanks, Matt, for your road trip gifts!

Expert meat purveyors are a dying breed even in places with a strong ranching and hunting tradition like Colorado’s Western slope. Where I live, it’s incredibly rare to find a butcher shop with extensive expertise in wild and domesticated meats, let alone in-house smoking and curing capabilities. I was thrilled to stumble across Old World on my short visit to Grand Junction, and look forward to visiting again (with my own elk, hopefully) next year.

Old World Meat
1765 Main Street
Grand Junction, CO 91501
970-245-2261

Ever take a trip somewhere and get bummed out to come home to your usual humdrum routine? If there’s a word for that in some other language, it’s probably a German, twenty syllable, consonant-rich monstrosity. In my younger, wanderlustful days, I travelled constantly for work and usually missed that interesting some-other-place to return home to New York, as if the New York City suburbs were a sucky place to live. Stupid, stupid, stupid…

Now that I’m older and shittier, I’m rather comfortable with my suburban Orange County life and better appreciate the joys of living here. In the first days after our vacation, I ate tacos at my favorite hole in the wall taqueria, Costa Mesa’s El Toro Bravo, and hit the weekend dim sum at Irvine’s China Garden. I felt like a junkie fresh out of rehab.

Our hunting expeditition to the Western slope of Colorado was terrific except no elks graced us with a viable target. I enjoyed the lakeside view from our rustic cabin on a snowy mountain at 10,000 feet of elevation. The little sprites went fishing, and we pan fried just-caught cold water rainbow trout with a parmesan and instant potato flakes crust, sauced with a lemon beurre noisette. The 4 wheel drive went out on the truck as the sun was setting, stranding us in the mud during a snow squall, when the windshield wipers decided to quit too (thanks alot, GMC).

Despite all that fun, there’s no place like home, and sleeping in my own bed with a warm cat dozing at my feet.

A week outside the usual routine gave me perspective on the foodways both at home and in Colorado. Stay tuned for a story on butchers that process wild game, and a small town where artisans turn renowned local fruit and corn into wines, vodkas, and brandies.