Snitching Lady Distillery ages spirits at whopping 11,800 feet

By Eric Peterson

Thomas Williams can look down at every other distillery in the United States. Literally. Located at 10,300 feet above sea level, his Snitching Lady Distillery in Fairplay “is the highest distillery in America right now,” he says. “I don’t claim it very much, because it’s not really a push for a sale, but when it comes to distilling, my boiling point for distilling is only 165 to 170 degrees.”

Snitching Lady’s whiskey ages at an even higher altitude: 11,800 feet above sea level on the slope of Mount Sherman. He currently has more than 300 barrels in shipping containers on his land on the mountainside.

Williams has moonshining in his blood: His great-grandfather passed the craft on to his grandfather, and his grandfather passed it on to Williams’ dad. “When I was a kid, I was always watching my father make whiskey,” says Williams of his first exposure to the family tradition growing up in North Carolina.

Snitching Lady Distillery is located at 500 Front St. in Fairplay.

“When I came to Colorado, I wanted to make my own hooch in the back,” he continues. “I ended up giving it a whirl, and trying my own recipes, and working with everything that I could, and then slowly asking my family about recipes that I could use.”

After moonshining on the sly for about a decade, Williams got a distilling license from the State of Colorado and went legit in 2017. “I make 100 percent of my own product, and all the aged stuff is one barrel at a time, so it’s all single-barrel, single-batch releases,” he says.

The name, Snitching Lady, owes its origins to Williams’ moonshining days, when his late fiancée, Rena Diane Aker, would alert his parents and friends to his backyard exploits. The distillery also makes an apple brandy from Western Slope fruit in her honor. “The apple brandy is dedicated to her,” says Williams. “That was her favorite type of fruit. When she did pass, that was the main push for me making apple brandy.

Distilling and aging at elevation is a little bit different than they are in the low country. “There’s more of an angel’s share,” Williams says, referring to the amount of spirit that evaporates from the barrel at 11,800 feet.

But it also has its benefits: “It helps age the product, I believe, a little faster. Some of my one-year products, people say it tastes like it’s been aged for a long set of years.”

Williams says high elevation imparts a richer flavor from the barrel. “It’s because of the fluctuation of heat and cold. I call it the lung effect,” he explains. “The hot obviously brings the alcohol into the wood, the cold brings it out of the wood. Even during the summer and during the winter, the sun blares on the shipping containers that I age all the whiskey in, and at nighttime, it gets nice and cold, so it’s just constantly breathing in and out of the wood. It’s nonstop work for it.”

The Snitching Lady catalog includes single barrel whiskeys, including a bourbon and an American single malt whiskey (Williams dubs the all-barley spirit as “an American version of a Scotch”), along with an outlier in Button’s Blue Corn Whiskey.

“The blue corn is all produced by the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe over there in Towaoc, Colorado,” says Williams of his sole supplier, Bow & Arrow Brand. “With yellow and white corn, it’s more acidic,” he notes. “The blue corn’s very buttery, it has a very strong oil note, and it ends up coming through with the spirit.”

Every holiday season, Snitching Lady bottles a batch of Temperance Wheat Whiskey, made with 100 percent hand-malted red wheat grown by Arnusch Farms north of Denver in Keenesburg, Colorado. Priced at $65 a bottle, the 2023 batch is slated for release on December 10.

“I get a pretty decent crowd for it,” says Williams. “I’m one of the only distilleries in the country that actually hand-malts my own grain. I actually sprout the grain. I spread it across a big concrete floor, and I shovel and rake it every couple hours for about two weeks until it’s completely dried out. Then I mill it and turn it into a mash.”

The end result? “It brings the richness out of the wheat and turns it into more sugar content for the fermentation.”

Williams plans to maintain the same level of production as he fills the third shipping container on Mount Sherman. “I want to keep the three copper pot stills that I made myself running constantly, and I really love the small production that I keep it at,” he says. “It’s all about quality instead of quantity. . . . I like to keep production small, because it won’t change the taste. Everything stays very consistent with how it’s made and all that.”

Eric Peterson is a freelance writer who covers travel, business, and real estate as well as Colorado’s craft beverage industry. In his spare time, he likes to create hard listening music, oddball art and psychedelic videos. Eric lives in Denver with his wife, Jamie, and their faithful mutts, Aoife and Ogma.

This article is in the September-October issue of our print magazine. Click here to read the full magazine online.