Tiff:
When creating a distilled spirit, it is usual to start either with an established spirit type or with flavour, but when Seth O'Malley and Brad Whiting created Wilderton, they approached it from a very different standpoint, starting instead with a layering of botanicals that could not easily be identified as any particular flavour, the friends wanted to create a liquid that would function like a spirit without trying to be an already existing one.
The result is their two expressions, Lustre and Earthen, both of which were born out of a curiosity about the depth of feeling that botanicals could easily express.
To find out more, we speak to Seth O'Malley about botanicals distilling and what it means to live and drink wild and free.

Thank you for joining us, Seth.

Seth O'Malley:
So glad to be here.

Tiff:
Now, Wilderton of course gets its name from the wilds of the Oregon landscape in which you both live. Is there more to the name than that though?

Seth O'Malley:
Well, I mean, you're correct. I mean, Brad and I are both, I think, fairly infatuated with this place and our spirits are a way of expressing our love for nature and expressing just the power of botanicals to create a beautiful sensory experience. I think one thing that I would add to that is that when we were thinking about Wilderton, we wanted to create a spirit for people who, for whatever reason on whatever occasion, are deciding not to have alcohol, who want a non-alcoholic cocktail, but want the same craft and ingenuity and complexity that they would get from a traditional alcoholic cocktail.
But we got to thinking about how we could tell that story, which is really a story of inclusivity, by thinking of what we're doing as also a space, as embodying and hosting that inclusivity that we want to see in the world and in hospitality. And so, we started thinking of Wilderton as this mythical place where we don't have that historical trade-off that people have had to make. Do I want something that has alcohol in it, or do I want something that has depth and complexity and intensity and craft?

Tiff:
You've engaged legendary bartender, Jim Meehan, to create some cocktails that we will actually be featuring during this week. That was one thing that was interesting about the cocktails that he created - half of them were non-alcoholic as you would expect, but the other half were actually alcoholic. So you want people to be able to reduce their ABV as much as not drink at all?

Seth O'Malley:
Yeah. When Jim did that, that felt hugely validating for me because when we set out to make non-alcoholic spirits, there's this initial crossroads we reached, do we want to make something that is a non-alcoholic analog of something that already exists, or do we want to make something totally new to the back bar, new to the world? I was strongly of the opinion that we ought to do the latter, for a number of reasons.
One is that my background is in traditional alcoholic botanical spirits, and I have enough respect for the old categories to know that they really rely on a lot of peculiarities and particularities with fermentation, with alcohol. If you take those things out of the equation, everything falls apart. So, I knew that it would be inevitable that someone would go out there and make a non-alcoholic whiskey, someone would go out there and make a non-alcoholic gin, but I didn't want to be that person.
What I wanted to do was make something that you can put on the back bar, and that has merit, and that belongs on that back bar because it tastes like nothing else, because it is so clever and so unexpected that its lack of alcohol is one of the things that makes it special, but if you pour it in a glass, it's not going to taste like anything else that's on that back bar. Jim glommed onto that fact pretty immediately when he tasted it and said, "Look, I think you're pigeonholing yourself by just recommending putting this in non-alcoholic cocktails, because the fact is, if I add this to alcoholic cocktails, it adds this totally new dimension just based on these totally unusual flavour profiles."
So, you can think of it as a non-alcoholic spirit that functions beautifully as the base of a fully non-alcoholic cocktail. That's great. That is one of the ways to use Wilderton, but another way to think of it is as a composed botanical spirit with these totally fresh, totally clever flavour profiles that you can add and use the same way you might use in some cases, a bitters, or in some cases, a modifier spirit, an herbal liqueur. And I'm thrilled to see both uses.

Tiff:
Yeah, it must be great to realize both from a business perspective in terms of being able to expand your reach, but also from just a pride in the liquid that you've created.

Seth O'Malley:
Yeah, certainly.

Tiff:
While creating liquids that are outside the normal realms of expected flavour or expected category, may sound very freeing, how difficult was it actually to create that?

Seth O'Malley:
Well, you're correct that it was very liberating in a lot of ways, and it was also challenging for the same reasons. So, when we got to thinking about what we like about a spirit, any spirit, any alcoholic spirit that is, we really boiled down the way that we relate to them, to this really core set of values that we believe makes a spirit good.
One is intensity. A spirit is a concentrated product. It should deliver an intense sensory experience.
One is atmosphere, every spirit envelopes the palate, partly due to that intensity, but also due to its complexity and the creative choices that the distiller makes along the way.
And then finally, balance. Every spirit has its own particular type of balance, but we believe that you should have a big first impression, it should develop on the palate and it should have an interesting aftertaste. And so, we agreed that we would set out to create products that check all of those boxes, let's say. And so, I went really abstract at the beginning and I took out a piece of paper and I said, "Okay, let's think about themes of light and dark."
And I know that sounds very heady and very synesthetic, but it actually started priming this creative process that would eventually result in Earthen and Lustre. And so, Lustre is built around themes of light and where I went with that is citrus, things that you would enjoy in the summer. Things that flower in the summer, roses, fresh herbs, tarragon, lemongrass. Things that, to me, evoked cheer and sunshine and bright.
On the other hand, thinking about themes of dark, we went to these moodier spices, things like cubeb pepper. We started thinking about really earthy flavours. So, you'll find patchouli in the Earthen. We started thinking about the types of flavours that we might engage with in cool weather, and so there's a baking spice component. There's some incense notes that make it feel very cozy.
I think making that initial leap away from traditional spirits categories was frankly terrifying, but once the gears got turning, we just ran with it. And years later, and many iterations later, and many trials later, we had these products that we could not wait to get to the market. But I should also say that telling that story concisely through the packaging and in an in-person interaction, is much, much more difficult. There's so much more to say there than if we were saying, "Hey, this is a gin without the alcohol." So, we believe that we have chosen a much more arduous route, but one that we think will ultimately be more rewarding.

Tiff:
If you approached it from the angle of light and dark, would you say that the two expressions are perhaps seasonal?

Seth O'Malley:
In certain ways, yes. I think that Lustre naturally has an affinity for a patio occasion in the afternoon and in the summer, and Earthen moreso suited to things like toddies, goes really nicely with ginger ale and this warming, mule type drink. But on the other hand, they both have so many facets to work off of, that the individual cocktail can play up or down those seasonal-ish elements.
And ultimately, we also do find that most people strongly gravitate toward one or the other. So, whereas I might agree that I'm probably going to drink more Earthen in the winter and more Lustre in the summer, most people when they come to a tasting table quickly identify with one more so than the other.

Tiff:
How difficult has the education process been when people are at the tasting table?

Seth O'Malley:
It's been an evolution. If you give me an hour, I'll give you a great education, tell you everything you want to know and didn't want to know about how we make it and how I thought about it, but I'm also a terrible salesperson. And so, finding a way to condense that, distill it, Focus that message in a way that's going to make sense to Jack and Jill consumer coming up to the table, that's been a journey. And so, I think that we have different core messages for the trade, for instance, for bartenders. I really like to nerd out about botanicals and tell them all about vacuum distillation and really educate them on the sorts of things that give us merit based on the craft and everything else.
When it comes to a one or two minute interaction at a tasting table with someone who's not necessarily specialised, really the key is to get them to taste it in a simple cocktail, to taste it by itself. And they'll immediately go, "Whoa, I've never smelled or tasted anything like that." And so, that captures their attention.
And then to show them, "Okay, well with Lustre, if you mix it with tonic, garnish it with orange, you have this incredible tonic, it makes you feel sort of like you're drinking a gin and tonic, but it's totally different, totally special in its own way. Earthen, add a little bit of ginger ale to it, or ginger beer, add a little lime wedge, and you've got yourself this complete cocktail experience that maybe reminds you of a whiskey and ginger, but is also totally new."

Tiff:
Well, since we can't do tastings here, why not take us on a journey? Which will be interesting because if they do not relate to any particular flavour, how do you describe the flavours of each of these expressions?

Seth O'Malley:
Yeah, well, you're right that it's best if the liquid is there and we're tasting it together. And so, what I'll usually do is do a guided tasting, "This is what you're noticing. This is what's in the spirit." The spirits do a lot of speaking for themselves, but I will tend to call out the various tasting notes in the order that they open up on the palate.
So, with the Lustre, the first thing you're going to notice is this really complex citrus profile. So, you're going to get some bergamot, you're going to get bitter orange, you're going to get some lemon, lemongrass. You'll notice all that on the nose. Once you taste it, you'll get this big initial blast of citrus and then followed by some herbal complexity from tarragon. You're going to get some sweet spice notes from coriander, Turkish rose. And then finally, you're going to be left with a lingering heat and a little bit of orris root. Orris is a classic gin botanical that grounds formulations and that helps extend the finish. It's actually the rhizome of the Iris flower.
And with the Earthen, first thing you'll notice is a little bit of smoke and some spice jumping out of the glass. Smoke comes from lapsang souchong, which is a traditional black tea that's made in China. The tea leaves are dried over smouldering pine logs, so it adds this really beautiful, subtle smoke element to it. You'll notice that. You'll notice a little bit of baking spice.
Once you taste it, the exposition of flavours is very complex and very long. What you're going to get first is again, some of those spice notes, a little bit of smoke, a little bit of mint, and then it's going to open up into this really complex spice character with some woody notes from the cubeb, a little bit of cinnamon. You're going to get a little bit of florality as well, so some rose in there. And then it's going to finish with this very long, exotic, woody finish that comes from notes of patchouli, of frankincense, and of something called benzoin resin, which contributes a little bit of vanilla and this amber-y finish.

Tiff:
Okay. Now, you talked about starting the thought process off with light and dark, but there are a million botanicals out there that you could have chosen. How did you bridge between the thought of what you wanted to achieve and which particular botanicals you'd use?

Seth O'Malley:
So, when Brad approached me, I was running a botanical spirits distillery, making things like gin, fernet, amaro, aquavit. So, I was very well versed in the canon of botanicals that have been historically used in alcoholic spirits. Before then, I worked in tea. I was a tea educator and had a lot of experience sourcing teas.
And so, what those two different career paths gave to me was this really strong intuition around what does well in alcohol and what botanicals are expressed well through water. And not to get too technical about it, but if you make a cup of juniper tea, it doesn't smell very much like gin. And the reason for that is that gin is characterised by the alcohol soluble parts of the juniper berry.
There are botanicals on the other hand, that do exceptionally well in water and that if you extract in water, you can get a very clear, beautiful expression. And so, while I was working at the distillery, I was actually running these tests constantly. I would source botanicals with the goal actually of having every botanical that's permitted for use in food in the US.
And so, I keep this library of every urban spice you've ever heard of, plus some. And at the time, I was running these trials to see, okay, what does it do at 0% alcohol? What does it do at 50% alcohol? What does it do at 100% alcohol? And so, I had this really strong knowledge of what sorts of botanicals to work with. That's why you see something like Turkish bay leaf in the Lustre. Bay leaf is obviously very strongly associated with water. We add it to our soups all the time, but ironically, you boil off most of the flavour as we're reducing the soup.
But what I realised is if you extract it in water, in a closed environment, and then especially if you then take that extract and you concentrate it, if you distill it, you get this totally beguiling eucalyptus, fruity, Mediterranean leaf note. And so, I knew that that belonged at the core of Lustre, for instance. So, that is to say, I started by doing some very, very exhaustive testing of ingredients. And I said, "I don't want to be apologetic about the fact that water is the main ingredient. I want to harness the power of water as a solvent, to dissolve these flavours from botanicals, and be proud of it."
And so, I took this huge catalog of ingredients. I reduced it to ones that I knew would do really well with water, and then I ran from there. I would also add that studying perfumery was very, very instructive and composing flavours with top notes and heart notes and base notes, thinking about those while composing flavours and composing these formulas, really helped to deliver spirits that had that balance that I was looking for.
And you'll find that Lustre is briefer on the palate, it's a little bit more easygoing, because I intentionally used more of those top notes. And as a result, that gives it more brightness, more lightness, and it's a little more, I guess, nimble on the palate. Whereas, when you taste the Earthen, that's composed of a higher proportion of these base notes, and so it gives it this gravitas, it gives it the staying power on the palate, and it's part of what makes Earthen so contemplative and relatively weighty compared to the Lustre.

Tiff:
I must say, in terms of flavour, your head must be a really interesting place. The knowledge that you have would be amazing.

Seth O'Malley:
Yeah. It's exhausting for other people to be around, I'll say that.

Tiff:
Oh please. Well, not for me. I think it's great.

Seth O'Malley:
Oh, thank you.

Tiff:
Now, I suppose the experience that you gained through the distillery allowed you to quite easily upscale from experimental stage to full production.

Seth O'Malley:
Yes. It's never easy. I think all distillers start with bench top prototypes that are the size of a Mason jar, and then maybe jump to a 55 gallon drum, and then a 275 gallon tote. And it's never linear. It's always a journey. Sometimes it's a happy journey, where you realise that if you just do scale up the recipe, you end up learning more about it and you end up liking the balance, but it totally shifts no matter what. So, I experienced that when I was making alcoholic spirits and experienced it in exactly the same way with non-alcoholic.

Tiff:
What do you think is the major difference between distilling alcoholic and distilling non-alcoholic spirits?

Seth O'Malley:
Well, one huge leap that I had to make was getting to understand a whole new regulatory landscape. This is probably completely unexciting except to any distillers who might be listening, but alcohol is regulated, basically as a vice. Most of the regulations around alcohol are about ensuring that the government gets its revenue from it.
And of course, they're concerned about safety and everything else, but alcohol is also one of the world's finest preservatives, so there's a lot of technical challenges when you take that excellent preservative out of the question, and you're also responding to different people. And so, getting to know an entirely different branch of the government has not exactly been straightforward, fun, or easy, but that's been, I would say, one of the salient parts of that transition.
And then, working with municipal tap water instead of alcoholic spirits, not engaging in fermentation and then finding ways to distill that are gentle and that don't distort the base material too much, has also been a big learning curve. With a great brandy, you don't want it to taste just like a concentrated version of the wine, right?
There's something that happens in the still that transforms your wine through heat and through the properties of copper to take that wine and turn it into an eau de vie. When you're distilling rose petals and lemongrass, it's a much different situation. You don't want it to come off smelling like a burned potpourri. You want it to come out of the still smelling like this four-dimensional, ultra bright, ultra complex, fresh rose. And so for us, getting to know vacuum distillation and distilling at low temperatures has also, I believe, really unlocked this water distillation process compared to alcohol.

Tiff:
Right. Okay. So, it's an adventure that you've enjoyed?

Seth O'Malley:
Oh, certainly. It's been intellectually, incredibly exciting. It has also felt a little bit lonely at times. As a distiller in Portland, Oregon, where I'm based, we have a great community of people who collaborate and share secrets and share equipment. And when I made the switch to Wilderton, I'm still friends with those people, but there's no one I can really talk to about this type of thing that I'm doing.
But I also believe that there will be more of us, hopefully. This category is growing all the time, but what we're realising is that not everyone is using the same craft spirits approach, the same adherence to tradition, where it serves us. And so, I'm hoping that we become one of many non-alcoholic spirits distilleries that actually does distill and that actually does use traditional principles of distillation to create their products. We believe that's important, not only for the story, but we believe that it results in a better and more interesting product at the end of the day.

Tiff:
Now, of course, lockdown was pretty much a boon for non-alcoholic, but you said you hope that there will be more people coming into it who are looking at it from very much a craft angle. What do you see as the future of the category?

Seth O'Malley:
Well, you're correct that lockdown was great for non-alcoholic spirits. I think it caused a lot of people to examine their relationship with alcohol. And we are in a place culturally, where are people's identities I think are becoming a lot more complex. But I think before lockdown, when we said that we were making non-alcoholic spirits, we would often encounter pushback from people who drank alcohol and have to explain, "Well, no, no, no. Actually, Brad and I drink too. We're cocktail people, we're spirits people."
And after lockdown, and of course, we're still in and out of various versions of it, it seems in perpetuity, but since that core period of time, we're seeing a lot more reception from people who have gone through this healthy evaluation of their relationship with alcohol. And more people are categorical non-drinkers, for whatever reason, they're saying, "I don't drink alcohol." But there's also this growing number of people, millennials have been drinking less than gen X-ers, and gen Zs are drinking less than millennials, but there's this growing number of people who identify as just drinking less alcohol or drinking alcohol less often.
And so, I really believe that the future of the category is not about something that is only for sober people, just as alcohol is not only something for lushes. That more people are going to be aware of this grey area where I want to be sober most nights of the week, or I want to have a really beautiful cocktail with lunch, but maybe I'm not a day drinker. And there's more and more awareness and normalisation of drinking less and being intentional about the way we drink.
And something that I love about the Jim Meehan cocktails is that they run the full spectrum of completely non-alc, 0.00% ABV, to something with the alcohol content of an old fashioned. And something that I've also been noticing in more and more bar menus, and I think this is awesome and totally brilliant, is arranging cocktails not by alcoholic and non-alcoholic, or worse, mocktails. I don't like that language …
They'll arrange them in terms of alcohol content, maybe ascending. So, it'll say on the left, "0%." And then you'll have some that are low alc, and then finally, you'll get to the bottom with your old fashioneds, or God forbid, your Long Island iced teas. But treating it as this whole range, so people can plot themselves along it and say, "I would like to have a medium-low alcohol cocktail experience." I think that's great. I think that that's super empowering and non-alc spirits are there to help support that full spectrum of ABVs.

Tiff:
Now, speaking of Jim Meehan, how did that come about?

Seth O'Malley:
Well, Jim has moved from New York to Portland. So, he's here and obviously as a distiller and a long-time fan of PDT and everything that he was doing out in New York, I was really excited that he was here. So, he opened up a restaurant called Takibi, he's the beverage director. I'm sorry, Jim, if I'm butchering that. He is in charge of the beverage program at Takibi. And right around the time that we bottled our first products, he was in this exploration phase where he wanted to get to know every spirit that was made in Portland.
He was very devoted to elevating local terroir, elevating local craft. And so, I rather meekly dropped off a couple bottles of Earthen and Lustre, and he said, "Okay, I'll taste these later." And he tasted them in succession with basically every other local spirit, non-alc spirits as well, local and not from here. And just fell in love with them, particularly the Earthen, he put it on his cocktail, in this very, very unusual non-alc cocktail that included a Japanese buckwheat tea. It just blew my mind.
So, it started off very organically. We dropped off samples to him, he liked them, he put it on the menu. That's what you want from a trade relationship, but the more we got to know him-
Yeah. The more we got to know him, the more we realised how advanced he was in the way that he was thinking about non-alcoholic spirits. And we asked if we could just have an afternoon with him to sit and chat about his ideas. And we learned that we had so much to learn from him as a representative of the trade and have just continued keeping this relationship with him and having him taste some new concepts that we're working on.
And he's gone to make all of these beautiful cocktails that I think you're featuring on your website. It began totally organically. It began with a respect for what he does and his affinity for our work. And the rest has been history. He's been an incredible advocate and really a great friend.

Tiff:
Now, we are featuring five of the cocktails, but there's actually quite a few that he's created, which of these is your favourite?

Seth O'Malley:
My favourite is actually the Early Toast. This is a cocktail that, it's based on the breakfast martini. And it's totally my style of drink. I like bright, fresh, citrus-y cocktails. I'm a huge fan of the Corpse Reviver and a non-dirty martini, and this one just really scratches that itch and really shows off how Lustre can play in that sort of setting.
So, it's two ounces of Lustre, it's three quarter ounce of lemon juice, tablespoon of orange marmalade, an egg white. And you do a dry shake and then you add ice and then you shake again, you double strain into a stemmed cocktail glass, like a coupe. It's fabulous. I highly recommend that. And it's something that you can drink in the morning and in my case, not be cranky and tired by midday.

Tiff:
Where can people find the rest of Jim's cocktails that he created for you?

Seth O'Malley:
They are on the website, along with other cocktails that other folks have made, but we've got a good number of them and they're just incredible. If people have the time and have the materials to make all of them, I would highly recommend that, but otherwise, look through and find ones that speak to you. I think that they all are pretty clear what kind of sensory experience and occasion they're going to provide.

Tiff:
What do you want people to take away from their experience with Wilderton?

Seth O'Malley:
I hope that Wilderton expands people's horizons. I hope that they taste it and they go, "Wow, I didn't know that these flavours were possible. I'd never considered that something like this might exist." And then from there, open up their minds about the range of flavours that cocktails can have, the range of occasions that you can enjoy a cocktail in. I think that the worst thing that we can do as people in general and as drinkers, is pigeonhole ourselves and say, "I am this particular way. I have this fixed way of being, and I'm closed off to everything else."
I think that more and more, people are no longer identifying as, "Well, I'm a whiskey person, or I'm a cognac person." More people are tasting more things and becoming more complex and interesting about the way they drink. And Wilderton really speaks to that way of being, that curiosity and that openness to new types of cocktails, new flavour experiences and new occasions. And for the trade specifically, that's the way that I want a consumer to relate to it, but also for people who are creating bar menus and envisioning the type of space that they want their bar to be, I hope that they are taking a serious reflective approach to hospitality and making sure that they're reaching everybody.
So, if someone comes in who is pregnant or comes in who is in recovery, or someone comes in who just wants to have a great drink and not have booze in it, that they're fully opening their doors to those people and fully supporting them and those decisions that they're making. There's a lot of ways to serve that hospitality occasion and we believe that Wilderton is a really great way to do that and to make it easy for them, so that they can just grab a bottle off of the back bar, rather than having to make these ad hoc, really complex, non-alc cocktails.

Tiff:
Now, if people do want to start experimenting with Wilderton themselves, where can they find it?

Seth O'Malley:
Well, if they happen to be in the Portland area, a lot of specialty grocery stores up here have it. That also goes for actually, all of Oregon and Washington. But assuming most of the people listening are not from our neck of the woods, our website, wildertonfree.com. You can order both products there and we will ship them from our little warehouse.

Tiff:
Will you ship overseas as well as locally?

Seth O'Malley:
Not currently, I regret to inform you.

Tiff:
Right. Are there plans to expand and starting exporting?

Seth O'Malley:
There is, yes, but right now our focus is on our own backyard. We've got our hands really full, especially with the Portland area, with the Seattle area. Now getting into California and expanding into the rest of the country. So, it's there, we're thinking about it, but it's not imminent.

Tiff:
Now, if people do want to find out more about you guys, they can, of course, go to your website, which is wildertonfree.com, or connect with the brand on your socials.

Seth O'Malley:
Absolutely. @wilderton_free, we're all monitoring the DMs on there. You might hear back from me if you send us a message. We're there for you. And we're a new brand and a new business and we want to be there to educate you and to support you through your journey with our product.

Tiff:
Well, look, thank you so much for joining us, Seth. I do hope your vision of a world in which non-alc and alc play beautifully together, does come true, but thank you very much for taking the time.

Seth O'Malley:
Yeah. Thank you, Tiff. This has been awesome.

Tiff:
Cheers.