Bottling whiskey at Stranahan’s

Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey, which owns the building where the Rackhouse Pub is due to open next week, bottles a unique product. The micro-distilled whiskey is made with locally grown barley and aged in charred white oak barrels. When a batch is ready–once or twice a month–the distillers put out a call to a list of volunteers and everyone gets together to bottle the whiskey by hand. It’s a labor-intensive process: labels have to be handwritten, corking requires strong arms and everything from the customized label to the signature cap has to be applied just so, or the bottle could be pulled from production.

The distiller recently teamed up with the Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails (LUPEC), a local group dedicated to raising money for issues affecting women. As the name of their organization states, the ladies also champion classic cocktails, so working with the whiskey was a perfect use of an afternoon. Together they packaged batch #46, which turned out more than 3,000 bottles. 

Check out the behind-the-scenes bottling action on our slideshow.  If it looks like your idea of a good time, you can contact the distillery at crew@stranahans.com and request to be put on the notification list. And if you’re selected to help out, your efforts aren’t completely uncompensated: Volunteers leave with a fresh bottle of Stranahan’s best.