It’s been 100 years since the last legal drop of whiskey was made in the state of Alabama.
That changed this month when John Emerald Distilling Company released the first batch of John’s Alabama Single Malt Whiskey.
“If you had a bourbon here and a Scotch here, we’re kind of in-between,” said John Sharp earlier this week in his Opelika distillery. “It’s a style all of its own, and it’s a new style.”
John and his son Jimmy Sharp are co-owners of the distilling company named after John’s father.
“Because the future of our family was the reason for making the move on opening (the distillery) in the first place, we looked at the past of our family to name it,” Jimmy said. “John Emerald is the first and middle name of my grandfather.”
Jimmy said the distillery was something his father and him always wanted to do, but they got caught up in their previous business, a Venetian plaster, of which they were also co-owners. The Sharp’s previous company’s primary customer was Louis Vuitton, where they spent three weeks out of four on the road working on Louis Vuitton’s North and South American stores, according to Jimmy.
“When my daughter was born, that was sort of the catalyst to go ahead and say, ‘Let’s do this,’ because I didn’t want to be on the road so much anymore,” Jimmy said. “It’s as good a reason as any to open a distillery.”
Opening in August 2014, the Sharps started with a rum, the first rum made in Alabama, according to the Sharps, and expanded to gin.
The Sharps' new whiskey is what John calls an “Alabama whiskey.”
“We smoke a portion of our grain with peach and pecan wood, so it does have a little bit of a smoke flavor,” John said. “But in all honesty, it's more of a flavor binder, it’s not up front if you will.”
The whiskey is distilled like a traditional single-malt whiskey and placed in newly-charred oak barrels like a bourbon.
“American single-malt whiskeys are not very common,” Jimmy said. “It was a style that was more common pre-prohibition, but they were all small producers and have pretty much disappeared of the landscape of American whiskey. Which was one of the appeals of doing it, was to bring back an older style.”
Traditional whiskeys can take years to age, but the Sharps are using technology and small 5-gallon barrels to speed up the aging process.
“We’re using what you’d call a rapid maturation techniques,” Jimmy said. “We climate control our barrel room so that it heats and cools and simulates season changes. So each week it’s going through a year’s worth of temperature changes.”
The temperature changes cause the barrels to expand and contract, allowing the whiskey to pick up the flavor from the barrels, according to Jimmy.
John Emerald Distillery Company’s products can be purchased at 47 Alabama Beverage Control stores and a few package stores in Georgia.
John said the state has helped them get their company up and running.
“They support local products, Alabama products,” John said.
Along with a tasting room and weekly distillery tours, the Sharps host bottling parties to crowd source the bottling process. The bottling parties consist of free hors d’oeuvres and cocktails, and a specific task is given to each of the 10 or 12 people, who were first to respond on an email list, to help bottle the whiskey.
“It’s a good fellowship,” John said. “It’s a good time.”
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