liquid assets
MAKIN’ MOONSHINE
Jeff VanHee gets into the spirit at Lake Tahoe.
WRITTEN BY MELISSA SIIG
PHOTOS BY SHEA EVANS
You would never guess by looking at the small, nondescript warehouse in South Lake Tahoe’s industrial zone that it houses something unexpected and distinctive. But walk through its doors, past the oak barrels lying on their sides, past the rusty old Prohibition still originally from Kentucky that now serves as décor, and past shelves lined with clear bottles, all the way to the back, where a beautiful, old copper pot-style still stands majestically on a small riser.
This is Tahoe Moonshine Distillery, the first of its kind in Lake Tahoe, Reno, and north of wine country. Opened a year ago, the craft distillery makes rum, whiskey, vodka, and gin using Tahoe’s pure water and a mix of distinctive ingredients concocted by Owner and Master Distiller Jeff VanHee.
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Jeff VanHee of Tahoe Moonshine. Photo by Shea Evans. |
VanHee, 39, has a passion for mixing. A general contractor in South Lake Tahoe, he brewed beer for years, even winning Best Stout in 1996 from a local homebrew club. He then turned his attention to making ethanol. While in Costa Rica, VanHee noticed that the locals used molasses to keep the dust down on the roads. That got him thinking — why not make fuel out of the sticky stuff? But then an even bigger light bulb went off — why not turn molasses into an alcoholic beverage? VanHee built a still and mixed the syrup with passion fruit and bananas.
“It was delicious,” he says.
In 2007, VanHee decided to turn his love of distilling into a business. However, due to the complex laws surrounding the production of hard liquor, it took VanHee three years and a lawyer to get the proper permits from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a federal agency.
In December 2010, VanHee was finally ready to open Tahoe Moonshine Distillery. Everything is done on site, down to the bottling and labeling. The alcohol goes through a three-step process — fermenting, where yeast turns sugar into alcohol; distilling, where the alcohol is cooked off the water; and proofing, where water is added to the 180-proof alcohol to cut it down to 80 proof using a reverse osmosis system.
VanHee adds his special ingredients during the fermentation process — honey to the Snowflake Vodka and chamomile, ginger, cardamom, coriander, rose petals, juniper berries, and cucumber to the Jagged Peaks Gin. The Stormin’ Whiskey is aged with vanilla beans and crushed macadamia nuts in oak barrels for five months, as is the Jug Dealer Dark Rum. (VanHee also is aging some whiskey and rum for two to five years for a reserved stock.) The vodka and gin ferment for seven days and then sit for two more days to absorb the flavors.
The distillery produces 300 gallons of alcohol a month, which fills 2,000 bottles. VanHee recently ordered another still, so he hopes to soon double that number. The light spirits come in a medicinal bottle modeled after the ones used during Prohibition, while the dark spirits come in a moonshine jug perfect for sipping straight out of the bottle.
You can find Tahoe Moonshine at Campo in Reno (where VanHee did test runs of his peanut butter vodka) and Whole Foods Market in Reno, and most of the casinos on the South Shore. VanHee is working to get distribution to the California side of the lake, and eventually to the Bay Area.
“I love the booze I’m making,” says VanHee, who has plans to make Irish cream and absinthe. “It’s a lot of fun coming up with different concoctions.”
For details, visit www.Tahoemoonshine.com.
Melissa Siig is a Tahoe City, Calif.-based writer. Her favorite part of doing this story was sampling Tahoe Moonshine’s peanut butter vodka.
