Denver's Leopold Bros. distillery gets mad props

A Flickr photo.

The Leopold Bros. distillery in Denver got a shout-out in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Columnist Eric Felten, author of the weekly column "How's Your Drink?", called its gin the best of the new, craft-distilled American gins trying to give well-established British gins a run for their money.

Here's an excerpt from Felten's column:

"But my favorite of the bunch came from the Leopold Bros. distillery, founded a decade ago in Ann Arbor, Mich., and recently transplanted to Denver. Leopold's American Small Batch Gin comes in a squat, clear apothecary bottle. The simple white labels with handwritten batch numbers contribute to the gin's lab-sample appearance. Yet Leopold's gin isn't the least bit medicinal. Distiller Todd Leopold has managed to get a true and robust juniper flavor without the hints of pine that many people find so off-putting about gin.

There is a trick to Mr. Leopold's process, one that requires a level of effort few competitors will be willing to make. The most common way to flavor gin is to add all the botanicals to the neutral distilled spirit, let them steep, and then do one final distillation. But Mr. Leopold distills each of the botanicals separately. By distilling the juniper alone, for example, he captures the sweet essence of the berry without the piney aftertaste. When he has distilled each botanical, he adds them all together with the neutral spirit and gives it all one final distillation."

Go, Denver!