It all began with a chance connection.
Jordan Ramey met realtor Ivan Cilic while house hunting back in 2012, and the two quickly connected over a common passion for small-batch brews and spirits.
Their conversations evolved into an idea, and eventually they brought Ivan's brother, Marko, into the fold to open a distillery that would dedicate itself to the art of craft distilling.
While many distilleries focus on producing whisky, which requires a time commitment of three years in the barrel, Burwood produces more vodka (theirs has been distilled 14 times), gins made with a unique blend of whole citrus fruits and botanicals, honey eau de vie and medica, a traditional Croatian honey spirit that Ivan and Marko grew up making with their family back home in Croatia.
"Every year, a mobile still would come to the village by horse-drawn wagon," says Marko, who moved to Calgary with his brother and the rest of their family in the 1990s to escape the war.
"Everyone, all the families and neighbours, would gather and socialize for a couple days and make the spirit. It was a celebration."
They would gather plums, grapes — whatever was left from the harvest — to ferment. With no electricity, they'd keep the wood fire burning and kids would take turns on the hand-cranked agitator for the two to three days it took to turn fruit into spirits.
"Now this is about bringing that old-school tradition to premium local ingredients and doing our own thing," he says.
The Burwood team has plans to launch a honey brandy in the fall.
"It looks like whisky, drinks like whisky, but isn't made from grain, so it's a brandy, not a whisky," says Ramey.
They're also playing around with other barrel-aged products, like honey liqueurs, which sip like a ready-to-drink premixed cocktail.
"We're doing some really fun things that don't have other competitors on the shelf," he says.
"We're trying to take what people in Europe have been doing for hundreds of years, but apply those technologies here in Alberta — lots of barley, lots of honey. We're the fifth largest honey exporter in the world, and we don't really have honey distilleries here."
They've produced some spirits from nuts and fruits from B.C. as well, when they're in season.
"Marko drove to B.C. last year and collected cherries and walnuts from different farms to bring back," says Ramey.
"He left on Friday and we were working with those ingredients on the weekend. That's the nice thing about spirits — you're taking something that's perishable and turning it into something that lasts, so we can make all sorts of things, and release them through the year."
Kitchen set to open June 16
Burwood is now the only full-production distillery within the city limits, they say. Last Best Brew Pub on 11th Avenue S.W. is distilling spirits onsite as well, but are mostly a brew pub.
Their tasting room — on a connector between Deerfoot and Edmonton Trail N.E. — has been quietly open as a cocktail tasting room for almost a year as they gear up production to a level where they're able to supply restaurants and retailers as well as their own customers.
The kitchen is set to open June 16 with chef Matthew Filson-Lau at the helm.
There are some Croatian street foods on the menu, and Filson-Lau has incorporated some of the same ingredients used in the spirits — as well as the spirits themselves — for casual lunches, small plates, tapas and big boards.
They'll also offer meats and sausages from butcher John Wildenborg of Master Meats, who has moved into a new location a couple doors down.
They refer to a cozy seating area upstairs — furnished with pieces they bought from a Fargo set sale — as the Fargo loft.
Ramey, who teaches in the brewery program at Olds College, originally trained as a microbiologist.
"My primary research focused on utilizing anthrax toxin as a cancer therapeutic," he says. "From there, I merged my love of microbiology from bio-terrorism defence and cancer research to alcoholic beverage production. Much lower stress now."
Working with local farmers, growers
They brought two other distillers on board. One comes from Village Brewery and the other spent nine years at Glenlivet Distillery in Scotland. And yes, they do have whisky tucked away in barrels, too.
"We have a core line of products that we'll always have, but we want to be playful with everything else," says Ramey.
"That's what gets people excited — that you're working with local farmers and growers to put a community product on the table."
Burwood Distillery is located at #15 4127 Sixth St. N.E.