Photo: ampersandyslexia

There’s a wonderful article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about Clear Creek Distillery in Portland, Oregon. I first discovered Clear Creek, and their fruit brandies, fifiteen years ago when I was the general manager of Marsee Baking, one of the first European-style bakeries in the Pacific Northwest. At the time, our bread baker, Nilos Nevertheless (she legally changed her name), was very much into combining traditional techniques with experimentation. One of those tests yielded a “Clear Creek Pear Struan.” As I recall, the bread was made with wild yeast collected in the Clear Creek fermentation room and some of the fermented eau-de-vie pear mash replacing water in the recipe. I can’t say it was a huge commercial success, in part because it wasn’t sweet as customers expected, but rather slightly sour and with an essence of pear…not unlike the sweetness dilemma described in the above WSJ article.

I’ve been enjoying Clear Creek products ever since and have also been tracking the recent growth of “micro-distilleries” here in the Pacific NW. A few other producers of note include:

• Rogue Spirits
  
• McMenamin’s Edgefield Distillery
• Victoria Gin

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