Tucked back on Forbes Street is an innocuous warehouse with a giant, covered vat. It’s the home of a beloved Tucson product, Whiskey del Bac.
Recently, volunteers and employees stood assembly-line fashion around a few stainless steel tables and a "cow," the machine that gets the whiskey from the barrels into the bottles. Neatly lined up in front of the workers were bottles with that all-important amber liquid. This was bottling day for one of the company’s products, the unsmoked American single-malt classic.
Although it’s made in the style of scotch, it cannot be called scotch.
“It’s American whiskey,” lead distiller Dustin Cox said. “It’s not a bourbon, it’s not a rye. It’s made with one grain — two-row barley. We can’t call it scotch because we’re not in Scotland.”
The distillers do not know when they’re bottling on any given day. The whiskey dictates that. For the last several weeks, however, they have been bottling weekly, said Mark Vierthaler, head distiller.
On average, he said, they bottle twice a month.
To get the word out about this fairly new product (at least in whiskey years) and onto the shelves of taverns and stores, the employees at Whiskey del Bac ask the public to help them prepare the product.
Volunteers are aplenty because the work is not strenuous, and the pay is good. At the end of a four-hour shift, volunteers take home a bottle of the product they helped package. However, to volunteer, people must be able to stand for four hours and lift 25 pounds.
The employees do the actual filling and that’s where Cox comes in with the “cow” to fill the bottles. Meanwhile, volunteers adhere labels to bottles. After that, a person puts shrink wrap around the cork, then hands the bottle off to the person running a heat apparatus to shrink wrap it.
An advertising tag is hung over the bottle’s neck and, finally, the bottle is put in a box with five others. When the box is full, it is placed on a pallet to be shipped. But for the actual filling of the bottles or handling of the whiskey, these jobs go to employees.
“We have the volunteers come in and they do certain tasks, cork the bottles or hang a neck tag on the bottle or pack boxes full of the bottles,” Cox said. “It’s an assembly line going from empty bottle to loaded pallet full of whiskey.”
According to Cox, one pallet holds 600 bottles, so about 2,000 gallons of whiskey.
Vierthaler said there are hundreds of people on the volunteer list. They try hard not to call people back for a second shift, preferring to get new people every time. Generally speaking, they use seven volunteers per bottling run. Still, this is why they are happy to receive more volunteers.
“We really do our best to try and get as many people who haven’t been through as possible,” Cox said.
After registering online, potential volunteers wait for an email with a time/day. From those who are available, seven are chosen.
If volunteering isn’t appealing, Whiskey del Bac hosts a Summer Sour series, when Nicole Lewis and lead distiller Abbey Fife teach a monthly, two-hour class in the art of mixing cocktails. Lewis knows her stuff, coming from Westward Whiskey in Portland, Oregon, where she taught cocktail classes but is a self-confessed fan girl of Whiskey del Bac.
“Cocktail classes are a really exciting way to get people involved,” she said.
The next class is 6 p.m. Thursday, June 27, at the Forbes Street facility, which has a tasting room. It’s a dark, moody place that’s as sophisticated as its cocktails. Students will learn about the cocktail culture history and then enjoy a hands-on experience.
“We just lead people through two different cocktails,” Lewis said. “We’ll be doing a sour that’s up, in a coupe glass, and then we’ll be doing an old fashioned. We’ll be showing people two different formats, shaken and stirred, and why you would need a shaken cocktail versus why you would choose to stir cocktails.”
Lewis hopes the class makes a $60 single malt whiskey more accessible to people. Cost for the class is $50 and reservations are required, but do not delay. The classes are popular and fill up quickly.
To volunteer, visit whiskeydelbac.com/visit-us/
To register for the class visit, rb.gy/hs21or
