On the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts, Cisco Brewers, Nantucket Vineyard and Triple Eight Distillery live in harmony and serve libations that can please any kind of drinker, any kind of taste.
Stand for just a moment with your back to the large white event tent and soak in the scene. Directly in front of you is the winery and its tasting room. To your left is the distillery, where aging barrels hold copper-colored liquid and other spirits. Across the stone plaza and to your right is the brewery itself and its pale ales, sour brews and one-off concoctions that delight the palate. All of this is in just one location on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts, in what CEO Jay Harman calls “Boozney Land.”
It’s where Nantucket Vineyard, Triple Eight Distillery and Cisco Brewers live in harmony and serve libations that can please any kind of drinker, any kind of taste. It’s a triple threat, a hat trick, and becoming more common around the United States.
The wine boom of the 1970s and 1980s led into the craft beer revolution that began in the decades after and continues today. Now artisanal distilleries are gaining momentum. Most beverage entrepreneurs have long been content with running one business, but there are a growing number of breweries—including Rogue Ales, Dogfish Head, Samuel Adams, New Holland and others—that are adding distilling to their operations. There are wineries linked to breweries, including Wagner Valley in New York, Old North State in North Carolina, Corcoran Vineyards in Virginia and Firestone Walker in California.
Only a handful of companies, however, try all three.
Pick Your Poison
“You have to be a little crazy,” says Bryan Siddle, director of operations at Missouri’s Crown Valley, when asked why he would chose to run a winery, brewery and distillery. All three play a part in a tourist destination crafted by Siddle, south of St. Louis in Ste. Genevieve. In addition to the libation-making facilities, there are lodging, a restaurant, cattle and buffalo farms, a golf course, soda-making facilities and—wait for it—a tiger sanctuary.
“The hardest part is that is different. I have three bottling lines for three different products. Then there is the marketability, the production and making sure each is made consistently,” Siddle says. “It’s not easy.”
So why do it? “Well, wine is out of style, craft beer is hotter than Hades, and craft distillers are getting hot,” he says. Siddle is trying to have something that appeals to everyone, to entice people to visit Crown Valley and then stick around for a while afterward. He hits all the demographics with what he offers, but admits there are people who come to the brewery who don’t visit the winery and vice versa.
“You get so many types of personalities that for us, with agritourism, it makes sense to have many different beverage operations,” he says. The winery was conceived in 2000 and opened two years later. Three years after that, he opened a sparkling wine facility. Noticing the trend (and because of his own fondness for beer—his grandfather was a brewer at Stag in Illinois), in 2007 he converted an old schoolhouse into a brewery. Then, for good measure, “I said, Why not just do some spirits?”
