Wendy Tilton and Jim Matz, owners of Wild Hare Distillery in Tempe, make a line of agave spirits under the DROVE label, all naturally flavored and without added sugar. They recently added whiskey to the lineup and their customers are delighted. The distillers are serious about their products, but approach their profession with obvious joy. Here’s a little slice:
How did you get started?
Wendy: I actually started moonshining with a friend who is retired. One of his bucket-list items was to make whiskey and his wife had no interest in making whiskey. I said, I can help you do that. I have an undergraduate in biology and chemistry and distillation was a pretty easy part of what I learned early in my academic career. That was about seven or eight years ago. We started Wild Hare three years ago in January 2019.
How did you choose which spirits to make?
Wendy: I’m a big vodka drinker and a whiskey drinker, however there’s a lot of vodka on the market and to try to compete in that market from a business perspective didn’t make a lot of sense. When we started looking around and reading the reports about what’s up and coming, agave spirits and gin were the two big things. Tequila is growing at over 200 percent a year even just the last couple of years. We thought it would be a great opportunity to bring something to market that’s similar, yet American-made. We can’t call it tequila because we don’t make it in Mexico, but we do use 100 percent blue weber agave sourced from the Jalisco area of Mexico. We add very little to our fermentation to keep it as natural and original as possible.
How did you pick the spirits’ names?
Jim: It’s pretty simple. We don’t have a very long background of making alcohol, but I wanted to incorporate something with Wendy and with my grandparents because they were pretty huge in my upbringing. Wendy really loves bunnies and my grandmother’s name was Bernice, but they called her Bunny. I’m thinking Bunny Bunny and Bunny Distillery just doesn’t sound right because if I say to my friends, let’s go out and drink some bunny whiskey, we might get our butts whooped or something. When I was a kid, I used to get in a little bit of trouble and my grandmother used to tell me “That wild hair up your ass is going to get you in trouble one day.” And a bunch of hares together is called a drove, so we tied it all together. Simple.
How long does it take to distill?
Wendy: The distilling time is not long. It’s about 10-12 hours and we only do 10 gallons in a batch. We’re truly small batch. If anything, we fall into the category of nano distilling because we’re so tiny. We have four 25-gallon pot stills.
Jim: 10 gallons makes about 45-55 bottles, but It takes two weeks to throw one batch together for the fermentation.
Do you sometimes make a batch that’s a complete failure?
Wendy: When we first opened, we had a lot of failures. When I moonshined, I did a rum and everybody loved my rum. We opened up the distillery and for the life of me I could not replicate that same recipe. It was disgusting. We had sugar cane farmers who were big rum drinkers come in and they said, “No, it can’t be that bad, Wendy. Everything here is so great.” And I said, I’m telling you, it’s really, really bad. They didn’t believe me and when they tasted it, they said, “Wow, this is really, really bad.”
What do you like most about distilling spirits?
Wendy: For me it’s the experimentation. I love trying things and then doing blind taste testing on consumers who volunteer to taste test. It’s so exciting to watch their faces, have them fill out the form and ask questions. I love the research and experimentation even when things fail. I try to find out what people like and didn’t like because palates are all unique and it’s personal. I love to guess what people will like.
Jim: I’m more the equipment guy . My background is pretty extensive working with machinery and equipment. I like running everything, but I also like doing the tours. I do smell tests. I let (the customers) smell the jars of good alcohol and bad alcohol. I really like to explain the simple process that we use so people will better understand what we do. I like talking with people about the process.
You can find Wild Hare products at wildharedistillery.com, some Valley Total Wine stores and various restaurants around the Valley.
