Spirits

In 1968, something wonderful happened in Boulder—the city went “wet.” Before then you’d have to travel outside city limits to restaurants for a swig of scotch. This, in a post-prohibition America where liquor laws were so strict that you couldn’t booze up while flying through Kansas’s airspace. Boulder’s late bloom—the first liquor license was given to the catacombs beneath the Hotel Boulderado—must have made incentive for distillery startups that much harder. “How can you come close to all those generations of study and trials that’ve been done with [Kentucky whiskies],” Buz says. But local distilleries like Stranahan and 303 Vodka have upped the ante.

The whisky business comes with a barrage of fine-tuning: The varieties of copper stills. The types woods used in barrels. How coopers char them to release sugar and deepen the liquor’s color. When Stranahan’s began, they aged their first whiskies in smaller casks for a higher “liquid to wood ratio” to speed up the process. To keep even more, the Denver distillery humidified their warehouses. “But doing that takes away the beauty of the inconsistencies,” says Buz, “of places with natural humidity changing day-to-day,” which alters the whisky taste. Still, you have to give props to a company that met so much demand in 48 states that they had to localize their whisky to Colorado. (Residents can sign up online to bottle Stranahan’s and take one home afterwards.)

Further complexities are associated with scotch. For Buz, who represents Macallan and Highland Park, it’s the most artistic distilled spirit, given Scotland’s weather systems, and the different peat. “One is never trying to copy another.” Just be sure to roll scotch and whisky instead of fervently spinning it like wine. “I always say if you aggravate the whisky, the whisky will aggravate you.”