Everything You Need to Know About New World Distillery

Shane Osguthorpe: Well, welcome out to the Ogden Wire. Today we are joined by Chris Cross. And Chris and his wife Ashley, are the owners and founders of New World Distillery up in Eden, Utah, one of the premier beverage manufacturers in our lovely county here in Weber. Chris, we we want to just we see a bag full of goodies. We have a lot of questions. Let's just jump right in. Tell us a little about yourself and how this all started for you guys up there.

Chris Cross: It started out, well, we've been open over nine years. Now I just, I just figured it out today. It's nine years, two months in one day we opened December 10, 2016, so we've, we're in our 10th year right now, which is pretty big, pretty big year for us. We probably have a pretty big party here at the end of the year, when we get to December 10. And I started out as a tequila geek, or tequila enthusiasts, whatever you want to call that, and then that led to visiting Mexico and doing non traditional things, like visiting distilleries, as opposed to sitting by the pool like most people do. And I develop an interest in the process. So I had a custom still built for me many, many years ago, and I became a hobbyist distiller in my backyard, right here in Weber County, as a matter of fact. So home distiller, home distiller is how I got started. Yeah, all right, and that has now grown into some of the most amazing flavors and brands and distillery, distillery goodness that I've ever seen you. You're primarily known for. What would you say is your top one? It's going to be the agave spirits, right? Well, our number one seller is actually the gin, the UMA gin is number one, number one seller, I think just partly because it's on more shelves here in Utah than any other product we have. So more shelves is more sales in a lot of ways. But on site, believe it or not, we pretty much sell equal. Across the board, everything on site sells pretty equally.

Taylor Hartman: Can you talk a little bit about your gin making process, like, what makes your gin so special?

Chris Cross: Well, I mean, gin is infinite. There are no two gins in the world that are alike. That's one of the things I like about gin, is it is it is infinite. The only thing that has in common is it has to be predominantly flavored by juniper. So all gins have juniper. That's the one mandatory ingredient

Taylor Hartman: But they can be distilled from different types of you know, like some types of gin, it's more of vodka, like potato distilling and some. What do you guys do?

Chris Cross: Yeah, actually, about 99% of the gins in the world are made using neutral spirits to start. So 100% of the flavor actually comes from the botanicals, not from the Spirit. So in our case, we use neutral corn. But it's not about the flavor of the spirit. Not all gins are like that, but 99% of them are. So the vast majority of the gins in the world, the flavor comes predominantly from the botanicals, not from the actual spirit that it's made from. If you go to the home of gin, though the Netherlands where gin was invented, they have two styles of gin there the Youngs and the olds. And if you go to the Netherlands and drink a young Dutch gin, you'll get exactly what you're expecting. If you drink an old style Dutch gin, though it's very It's very surprising because it has a very flavorful base spirit as well, made from barley wine. Interesting. So drinking an old style Dutch gin is like drinking gin whiskey. In a lot of ways. It's an interesting thing, but the vast majority of gins are made using neutral spirits. All the flavor comes from the botanicals. Awesome.

Shane Osguthorpe: Well, I think Taylor and I have both had the opportunity to be up in your distillery and take your tour and your tasting and learn about you. Is it 11 botanicals? How many potatoes? Nine? Nine botanicals? But it's so the tasting in the tour is amazing, because you can basically sniff each of the botanicals and then take a little sample of the gin, and you can go, Yep, I can identify where it is in the profile on that one. And I, you know, that's one of the most fascinating parts to me. Was, was I never thought of myself as any kind of distilled liquor snob that understood any of that, until I took your tour, and I'm like, Oh, I see how this is done. I see where this sits in the pro what a profile is, and where this flavor sits in that profile, and where it is on the tongue. When it goes over your over your tongue, it's an amazing process.

Chris Cross: Yeah, once you know what's in it, you can definitely taste all nine botanicals for sure. So yeah, it is interesting. You know, some of them are fruity, some of them are earthy, so you can kind of determine where they come where you taste them in the profile. But yeah, the nine botanicals, I can go through all nine, dried lime peel, white peppercorn, the mandatory Juniper, coriander, cinnamon bark, sarsaparilla root, sage, angelica root and hibiscus flowers.

Shane Osguthorpe: Wow, that's amazing, yeah, and you're, you're pretty you source as many of those botanicals. You see, you source a lot of many unique ways as I recall, right? Some of them are local, some of them are not. Some are just standard. But walk us through some of that.

Chris Cross: Yeah, the super important thing is consistency with the botanicals. So we pay a premium price for the botanicals. You know, people are always coming to me and you like, say, Hey, I found this deal on juniper. And I'm like, No thanks, because we need consistency, you know, is the most important thing. So we use a very reputable supplier. They're actually out of California, but they get botanicals from all over the world, obviously, but most of our botanicals actually come from Mexico.

Shane Osguthorpe: Right on. And you spend a lot of time in Mexico as well. Just got back, in fact, and you were telling me you spend, you take four separate trips, usually throughout the year, to go down to Mexico, all seasons. And I know you're next. Keeping the distillery stuff, and you're looking at Mezcal and you're looking at tequilas and all kinds of these down there. How was this last trip? Anything new to reveal?

Chris Cross: There's always a new restaurant. It seems like always a new wine. To try the region that we go to in wanawato, we it's a we have a growing wine industry down there, so that's the really big industry down there. But next time we go down, Ashley's in a Spanish class down there. She goes to Spanish class on Mondays and Wednesdays when we're down there, and they it's called Social Spanish class, which means they take a lot of field trips. Oh yeah. So the next time we go down, we're actually taking a field trip out to a place that makes Mezcal. Oh, nice. So that'll be a great field trip for the class and and obviously a great field trip for me. Yeah, personally.

Taylor Hartman: Can you describe what New World Distillery is like, if a visitor is coming in, or they're thinking about going and visiting, what's it like up there? What do you have a shop? Do you have places where you distill? What's What's the back?

Chris Cross: It's a good question, because distilleries Do you know, range widely from A to Z some of them are just factories, you know, pumping out pallets booze to go to the retail stores or to the distributors, to the retail stores. We're actually what in the industry is what's known as a destination distillery. So we're something to do, as opposed to just coming in there to buy. You can certainly buy at our place. We are a package agency, so we sell bottles at our place for off premise consumption. We actually sell a lot through our store up in Eden, primarily because we get a lot of tourism up there in Eden, but we have a tasting room so you can come in. Everything that we have available at any given time will be available to taste so you can try before you buy. That is an experience in itself, and like Shane alluded to, we do tours on the weekends. The Schedule varies every weekend, whether we have events or private tours, but the schedule's updated on our website. If you go to our website, it'll have the current tours that are available, typically on Fridays, Saturday and Sundays, and we are open on Sundays, which is a relatively new thing. So our Sundays have been amazing the last three years. Quite often our Sundays beat our Saturdays in sales because we're quite literally the only place you can buy booze on a Sunday Utah are the manufacturers.

Taylor Hartman: It's a really good way to buy alcohol on Sundays in Utah.

Shane Osguthorpe: The only way. Yeah, and makes, make great souvenirs. Talk about taking a good thing home to remember your trip to Ogden. Okay, so we touched a little bit on the gin. I also know you're Agave spirits, and I know you're a serious distiller, because you don't, you don't call it tequila, because you're, you're a purist. You know what? The tequila has to come from a certain place, in a certain there's a certain whatever. But walk us through the agave spirits, because that's what you said brought you into the distilling world was,

Chris Cross: which is, I would say, definitely my It's definitely my thing. It's definitely my raw material of choice. And that's read the license plate on your car. It's even my license plate on my truck. I've had that last week for a long time, by the way. Yeah, Agave is definitely my raw material of choice. So we have a complete Agave lineup, blanco, a reposado and ingeniejo. The Inyo is limited. We don't have it very often, but we do have it right now. And then we have vodka distill from agave, which is really exotic for a vodka, there's only four in the world vodkas that are just still from agave. So you can obviously tell it's my thing. But it is a special vodka because of the raw the raw material. And then our cherry liqueur that we make, the Wasatch Blossom Tart Cherry Liqueur, it actually has Agave two ways. It has Agave as the base spirit, and Agave is the sweetener. Okay, so yeah, a lot of agave going on in our building for with those five products.

Taylor Hartman: Why do you like working with agave so much? Is it a flavor? Is it a an experience? Thing?

Chris Cross: I think all the above, it's, I think it's because I grew up on tequila, and that's where I, you know, as a young person, that's how I started drinking, right? I grew up in Phoenix. If you're from Phoenix, your closest beach is actually Mexico. You know, it's shorter to drive to the beach I'm in Mexico than it is to drive to the beach in California. So I spent a lot of time in my young years, a lot of, a lot of weekends in Mexico I'm at the beach. So that's what kind of I think, where I got started. So I developed a love for it. And then, you know, like Ashley says, I've been chasing tequila after that anytime we travel, you know, I'd always see what I could come home with that I couldn't get I'm here. I think that's kind of where it started, when I became a hobbyist distiller, like we just discussed earlier. I mean, that's what I did in my backyard, was agave. So it's definitely my raw material of choice, for sure. That's great.

Shane Osguthorpe: And then you guys also do some limited releases of other things throughout the year. And I know bourbon is one of is one of the big ones. I know that there's a waiting list, or there's a it sells out quickly. Walk us a little bit through the bourbon and and I know you've got a release coming up, so tell people how they can get involved in it and maybe get a crack at it.

Chris Cross: Sure. So we have a pretty wide lineup. It's almost too wide, but we have of the our lineup for their our products are available in the State liquor stores, our Ogden Valley Vodka, our Rabbit and Grass Blanco Agave Spirits, of course, our UMA Gin and then our Wasatch Blossom Tart Cherry Liqueur. Those are the four products that are available in the in the State liquor stores. Everything else you have to come to the distillery for, and that includes our brown spirits. We've already talked about two. Two, the reposado Agave Spirits, in the Inyo Agave Spirits. And right now, for example, we have the barrel rested version of our UMA Gin available, but you can only get the brown spirits at the distillery. So those are the the niejo and the barrel rested gin are the two we have right now, upcoming, we'll have a release number 12 of our Ogden Nine Rails Bourbon Whiskey. And of course, you can only get that at the distillery. And yes, it does sell out very quickly, and then pretty soon we will be have the release of our seasonal Apple O to V, which is an un aged apple brandy we do every winter, and then we'll have our release of the aged brandy in the summer. So yeah, those are some examples of things we do only available at the distillery.

Shane Osguthorpe: Okay, your your barrel room, I've had a chance. Is it getting pretty full at this point? Does it rotate pretty regularly? Is there anything old and like, you're just letting sit there in the corner to see how what you can do?

Chris Cross: I got a couple of those things sitting in the corner. But to answer the question, our barrel room never gets full because we take it out as fast as we put it in. So we're putting barrels in, obviously, but we're taking them out just as fast. So we really don't have, we have a pretty big capacity. We can pretty comfortably store 77 barrels in there, but we never get close to 77 barrels in there. It's always in the in the, you know, 10s, yeah, you know, pretty low, because we're taking it out as fast. We're putting it in there. Right on.

Taylor Hartman: As you approach your 10th year anniversary. That's always a good time to sit back and reflect what's changed over the 10 years, you know, how have you grown? How have you seen the community around you grow? Has the valley changed? You know, what do you think about that?

Chris Cross: Yeah, the valley has definitely changed since we've been up there in the valley. You know, we're long time Ogden residents, and then once we got our kids out of the house, we moved up to the valley. We in the in the Valley for 13 years now, and the distilleries for nine plus years. But the Valley has changed a lot, and that nine plus years there's been a lot, obviously, a lot more construction, a lot more growth up there. And then now we're actually our own city. Yeah, there. So that just happened this past January. We became our own city, so it's definitely changing. I think that's for the better for us. But yeah, there's been I'm pretty sick of the construction, like most valley residents are at this point, because you can have to stop three times between the House and the distillery, which is only a mile away.

Taylor Hartman: Right? Understandable. When it comes to visitors that visit the distillery. What are they usually doing up in the valley, I can imagine that they're here at certain seasons. Do you see more coming in?

Chris Cross: Yeah, we're slow in the spring and slow in the fall. We're busy in the summer and busy in the winter. And obviously, we really do live off the tourists in the winter, during ski season. You know, there's a there's a large number of people checking in every single week up there to vacation rentals, and in the wintertime, we typically see the vast majority the people that walk through our door are indeed tourists, not locals. So we rely on them, just like the ski resorts do, because the majority of people that walk through our door in the winter are tourists. In the summer, we see a lot of tourists too, but there are a lot of local tourists, a lot more locals, that are coming up there for a weekend getaway from down in Salt Lake or down in Provo or something come up to get away. But, yeah, we do rely on the tourists for sure. Lake visitors versus mountain visitors, exactly. Lake visitors, mountain bikers, all those kind of people. Yeah, a lot of mountain bikers too.

Shane Osguthorpe: So you're telling me that even distilleries check the snow report every day.

Chris Cross: We do. We notice it. If we have a low snow winter, a lot of people cancel their reservations, for sure. Yeah, we definitely notice it.

Shane Osguthorpe: I think we notice it too here at Visit Ogden.

Taylor Hartman: Do you partner with any people up in the valley? I know you may have, like, some relationships with some lodges up there, just kind of when it comes to cross promotion, yeah. What's it like to support each other in that economy?

Chris Cross: We'll do that. A lot of the vacation rentals will have a, you know, things to do, flyer in their in their condo or rental. And, you know, obviously they'll have our flyers in there as well. So we do get a lot of traffic from that. We also work. We've been working from day one with Simply Eden Bath Products up there in Utah. They make, they make several products for us, bath bombs, soaps and lip balm. So we have a lot of products that that Athena makes for us and that we carry in the store as well that are only available there at our store as well. But mostly it's the real estate and rental market that we cross promote with. For sure.

Shane Osguthorpe: I believe in downtown Ogden. We can also find you like Sonora Grill. A lot of their specialty cocktails and margaritas are made with your products as well.

Chris Cross: Yeah, Sonora was an early adopter, and that's been a really good thing for sure. Yeah, two by name margaritas on their menu. Use our Robin grass Blanco Agave Spirits. So the Sonora Margarita and the New World Margarita, use our Blanco so that is really good for us, and I know how much they go through because they recycle their bottles back through us. So nice. They've been obviously a great customer for us.

Shane Osguthorpe: That sounds like a very Steve Ballard thing and Sonora girl thing to do is recycle their bottles through you. That's good to hear.

Taylor Hartman: Yeah, we love seeing that. You know, local businesses helping each other. Sure. I really do believe that whole rising tide lifts all ships sort of stance with the community. So it's great to see everybody you know interweaving together.

Chris Cross: I like how Steve did it. He came up first by himself, and then he was he was sold, and then he brought his whole staff up to do the tour, and then they did a blind tasting. And the whole thing. It was fantastic. I really liked the way he did it, but they've been obviously a huge supporter of us from day one.

Taylor Hartman: That's fantastic. Well, what's what's in the we talked a little bit about the future, but, you know, just to repeat, like, what should we look out for, what's releasing soon, and how should, like, what can we get up there and do just some nuts and bolts hours operation.

Chris Cross: We're open. We're closed on Mondays, closed on Mondays, open six days a week. Now that we're open on Sundays, which is great, the hours are 11 to five Tuesday through Saturday, and then noon to five on Sunday and like I said, The tours are typically on Friday, Saturday and Sundays, and they change every week depending on what we got going on. But we have a calendar on our website.

Taylor Hartman: Go online and check, check out the website and definitely check out the gift shop.

Shane Osguthorpe: Yep, yeah. I know you guys have mixers and stuff as well. You have some of the what is, what are they called the, oh, I just lost the bidders, bitters. Yeah, I know you guys sell some great bitters and people I, I know somebody like around New Year's Eve, Mike Thornbruit was was looking for bitters, and he didn't know where to find them. Everything was closed. I said, You should go out and try New World Distillery.

Chris Cross: They'll have what you need. Yeah, we carry, we carry, Honest John now out of Salt Lake City, and she's great, Sarah's awesome, awesome business woman, and they have make a great product too. We do carry their lineup. They actually do one custom for us, to the rhubarb bitters. They only do for us. Wow. So yeah, you can come and find some things that are, that are one offs, that you can only find the distillery from them as well.

Taylor Hartman: For your mixologists, right? Yeah, home mixologist in Salt Lake City, or anywhere on the Wasatch Front. Sounds like going to New World's, the place to get all the all the materials.

Shane Osguthorpe: Absolutely. They can find you online at NewWorldDistillery.com. That's it. There we go.

Taylor Hartman: That's That's great. Well, thank you so much for coming in today. It's just you're such a fantastic partner in so many different ways. You and Ashley just support us so much at Visit Ogden, and we're really grateful for that. We were so happy to bring you in and highlight New World Distillery. Thanks for having me. Bye.