Willibald Farm Distillery Gin
Yellow is the brightest colour in the spectrum. It is also the signature of the Willibald Farm Distillery. And while yellow road signs and traffic lights warn drivers to slow down or prepare to stop, if you happen to be driving down Reidsville Road near Ayr, Ontario, and see a big yellow sign shouting ‘Willibald,’ you may want to step on the gas. Visiting this distillery is something you won’t want to delay.
Divine Madness
Yellow, it is said, is the colour of divinity and madness. Many people assumed those qualities had possessed the very young Cam Formica and brothers Jordan and Nolan van der Heyden when they opened a distillery with only an aged gin on the shelf and a bright yellow label to attract customer’s attention.
“The yellow came from our plan to build the Willibald brand as a reflection of who we are,” says Formica. When the distillery opened to the public in April 2017, the Willibald crew was fresh out of university – not the typical demographic to open a distillery. But with the energy, creativity and determination of youth, they converted the family farm into one anyway. Youth has other advantages too when it comes to lugging heavy sacks of grain around.
“We launched with an aged gin out of the gates because even though we got into this business to make whisky, you’re put in a position where you need to make gin first,” says Formica. “Our approach wasn’t to make gin the way everyone was, though. ‘Let’s make a gin that a whisky drinker would enjoy,’ we thought. Ageing was a priority very early on.”
“Those flavours are based on taking a core whisky element and combining it with gin. We didn’t really see anyone doing that. When we originally launched our gin, the aged gins on the market tasted very much like whisky or else like gin exclusively. Ours was an opportunity to make something truly in the middle, drawing characters from both.”
Tasting Willibald
That they certainly did. Willibald barrel-aged gin has a very complex nose with a punch of cardamon, sweet baking spices, bright floral notes, light earthy spiciness, fruits and lumber. All these flavours carry over to the palate along with tart accents and orange peel. The gin’s finish doesn’t slow down for a yellow light careening through with fresh oak notes to the next sip.
Making Willibald
Willibald uses three different mash bills for their whisky. One consists of 60% corn, 35% rye and 5% barley; a second uses 75% rye, 15% corn and 10% barley; while the third falls somewhere in the middle with 39% corn, 51% rye and 10% barley. The base spirit for their gin varies depending on what whisky they are making that week.
After 4 or 5 days of fermentation with a Norwegian boss kveik ale yeast that they grow themselves, they distil the fermented mash. Then they set some spirit aside for whisky and distil the rest into neutral spirits. Nolan macerates juniper, caraway, angelica root and coriander for 12 hours in this spirit, then redistils it through a gin basket holding grapefruit peel and cardamon. It’s their intention that many of these botanical flavours will reflect other tastes commonly associated with whisky.
As the team had decided their gin should be matured in new oak, and since they were using quarter casks, they had to take care that the intensity of the wood didn’t overwhelm the other flavours. They decided this demanded a big, robust botanical mix. They also restricted ageing time to 4 – 6 months, depending on the season. Managing new oak flavours remains a goal in the second generation of aged gin they now make using standard 53-gallon barrels.
Aged gin was quite popular in Canada throughout most of the 20th Century. Seagram’s distilled, aged and blended it in many of the distilleries in their global empire. This included the old Waterloo site of the original Seagram’s distillery, just 30 minutes down the road from Willibald’s. Seagram’s Waterloo distillery was also primarily intended for whisky. Is it more divine madness that for decades, Seagram’s gin has sported a yellow label?