Small batch · Cascade foothills · Washington
Aldergrovea distillery of slow things
Two copper pot stills, water off Church Mountain, and a warehouse we are in no hurry to empty. Whisky, gin, and one release a year that only happens when the orchard says so.
- Founded
- 2011
- Stills
- Two, copper
- Casks resting
- 1,842
- Elevation
- 412 m
From grain to glass,
in five slow moves
Four bottles. Nothing else.
We release what the warehouse is ready to give up. Three are permanent; the fourth changes with the season and is gone when it is gone.
The cask
programme
Warehouse Two is a cold, damp, unheated barn at 412 metres. It is a bad place to store almost anything and a very good place to store whisky. You can put your name on a cask, visit it, and take it home when it is ready — or when you can no longer wait.
Currently maturing
Private cask · from 2,900 USD
Buy the barrel, not the bottle.
A 53-litre first-fill oloroso butt, laid down under your name, sampled with Ivo each spring. Minimum four years. We will tell you honestly when it is done, including if that means waiting another two.
A farm road, two siblings,
one very stubborn river
Their grandfather ran cattle on this bench of land for forty-one years and never once thought about barley. In 2009 the herd went, the barn stayed, and Mara came home from a decade of chemistry in Portland with an idea she had not fully thought through.
We are not trying to make the best whisky in the world. We are trying to make the whisky that tastes like this particular cold, wet, alder-choked corner of it.
Mara Aldergrove · Distiller & co-founder
The founders
Mara Aldergrove
Distiller, co-founder
Analytical chemist by training, eleven years in flavour labs before she came back to the valley. Runs the mash bill, the cut points, and the argument about whether peat has any business here. It does not.
Ivo Aldergrove
Cellarmaster, co-founder
Spent his twenties coopering in Jerez and came back speaking better Spanish than English for about a year. Buys every cask himself, refuses roughly nine in ten, and keeps the warehouse ledger in pencil.
What we actually do
Barley from three farms inside forty miles, floor-malted at Lynden. Open-top fermentation for ninety-six hours — long, slow, and lactic, which is where the orchard fruit comes from. Two copper pot stills, a wide heart cut we could tighten and choose not to.
Then nothing. For years. Warehouse Two loses 2.4% a year to the air above the valley, which the neighbours have learned to smell on a warm October evening and have stopped complaining about.
- Barley farms
- 3
- Ferment
- 96 hrs
- Staff
- 9
Come up the hill
The still house tasting room seats fourteen. Tours run Thursday to Sunday and finish in Warehouse Two, which is colder than you are expecting. Wear a coat.
- Address
- 1140 Alder Bench Road
Deming, Washington 98244 - Thu – Fri
- 12:00 – 18:00 · tours at 14:00
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 19:00 · tours at 12:00, 15:00
- Sunday
- 11:00 – 16:00 · tour at 13:00
- Mon – Wed
- Closed — distilling
- Telephone
- +1 360 555 0148
- Post
- stillhouse@aldergrove.example
Book a tasting
Four seats per booking.
No walk-ins on tour days.
Request received.
Ivo reads these on Tuesday mornings with the ledger open. You will get a hand-typed reply confirming the slot, or an honest note about why that day will not work.