Distillery Long Island Spirits
Distiller/Owner Rich Stabile
Head Distiller Charles McIntosh
The Spirit Pine Barrens American Single Malt
Hops n’ Grains Two-Row, Montreal, Caramel and Chocolate barleys; Cascade hops
Price $65 for 750ml; $39 for 375ml
Fave Food Pairing Hot apple cobbler
Rich Stabile is a spirited pioneer if ever there was one. Not only was he the first in the post-Rumrunner era to make field-to-bottle vodka, gin and whiskey on eastern Long Island, he was also the first here to craft an American single malt.
A quick lesson if you’re scratching your head and saying, “Wait, isn’t single malt… Scotch?” The answer is yes, but no.
The Scots certainly spearheaded the category — which by definition is a pot still-made whisky distilled at one distillery from malted barley. It’s a way to differentiate from the blended whisky category, a common practice in Scotland in which a producer makes whisky via their own distillate, as well as whatever is purchased from other distilleries, which are then blended (Johnny Walker, for example).
Today, single malts are made all over the globe, with the United States officially recognizing and adapting federal standards for the category a little more than a year ago with some extra stipulations: It can’t be distilled over 160 proof or put in a barrel at any higher than 125 proof, for instance. But creative, think-outside-the-bourbon-bottle spirits producers in the U.S. have been making them for decades, although Stabile was certainly an early (and talented) adapter.
Back in 2009, Stabile and his friend Mark Burford, co-founder of Blue Point Brewing, got creative with some spare suds. “They were producing a beer called the Old Howling Bastard and they had extra, so we said, ‘Let’s try distilling it, put it in a barrel and see what happens!’” Stabile says, noting that the name is a nod to Blue Point and Long Island Spirits’ locations at opposite ends of Long Island’s Pine Barrens forest. “It just came out amazing.”
So amazing, in fact, that Stabile began brewing a sweet-mash fermented starter beer at Long Island Spirits to keep it going in the years that followed. Consistently, the whisky (which Stabile chooses to spell the way the Scots do, without the “e”) offers up aromas and flavors of citrus, herbs and a little pine that blossoms into Christmas cake spices and melty caramel. It’s a special dram, for sure.
That beer-to-booze on a lark moment, however, turned out to hold a key component to the spirit’s unique and balanced character: the hops. “That concentrated flavor of the hops only gets enhanced during the distillation process — you don’t get all the hoppiness you would as if you were drinking an intense IPA because it mellows and balances it out,” Stabile says, “and gives it a distinctive character. Without that balancing element, it becomes almost like vanilla ice cream. Kind of boring!”
But as it turns out, a little vanilla ice cream doesn’t hurt matters at the table. “We’ve done whisky dinners and we usually finish with the Pine Barrens; it’s complemented well with a dessert like a hot apple cobbler,” Stabile notes. A la mode, please — and leave the bottle on the table.
