At 1 PM on Sunday afternoon, I am sitting alone at a four-top table in the middle of a large buffet room. Soccer is on the TV in front of me and soccer is also on the TV behind me. I don’t know who is playing, or what the score is. I don’t have my glasses on, so I can barely see the screen. The room is fairly packed and full of conversation, although not in English, so despite all the activity I sit alone with my thoughts. I have three plates of food. What I would consider to be the main plate, the one I have been digging into the most fervently, is a mixture of lo mein noodles, sweet and sour something or other, wontons, french fries, onion rings, chicken nuggets, garlic bread, steamed mussels, and ice cold jumbo shrimp. I also have a large plate of salad. The third plate is a pool of sauce, mostly ketchup.
As cliché as this might sound, I am not in Vegas, and unfortunately, not hungover. But I am running on no sleep and walking with a severe limp, having trekked a good sixty or so miles back and forth across a festival site over the previous few days carrying everything from amplifiers to old wooden tables to dollies of Red Bull and Blue Moon.
Such is life in the summer months - full of festivals and constant events, keeping the bills paid while slowly draining the sanity. For many of them, I am fortunate enough to be on the press side of things, where my main responsibilities are observing the action and conducting a couple interviews along the way while keeping a steady stream of booze flowing in, because I heard a rumor once that alcohol helps prevent your ears from being damaged by loud music. It acts as a protective layer between the blasting speakers and your ear drum. I’ve got to look out for my health in these situations.
If I remember correctly, the guy that told me that felt it necessary to scream it at me from right in front of the stage as he was plugging his right ear with an index finger and holding a can of Coors Light in the other hand.
I was far from the media this weekend, though. More like a grunt laborer. But hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, and I did manage to score a couple vouchers for the food trucks. In the end, it was probably worth a few days of schlepping gear in and out of a Ford Econoline.
That’s the problem with owning a van. People are always wanting you to use it. I could make a monthly payment if I had a dollar for every time I’ve had to come up with an impromptu lie like, ‘Oh, yeah man, I won’t be able to help you move today because my van is actually missing the engine right now. Must have gotten stolen overnight or something. Sorry.’
One can only be so much of a workhorse. Two, however, can be just as good as four or five, as I learned last week from a band called You Knew Me When at Jagged Mountain Brewery in Denver. I was finishing off a long work day with a pint and had the chance to talk to the group before they took the stage (in this case, the corner of the tasting room) for a happy hour set and get the lowdown on how they make a living booking tours based around breweries and distilleries and what their music is all about. This two-piece has the sound and style of a full band, and then some.
The husband and wife duo of Cie (pronounced ‘See’) and Karisa Hoover hail from Nashville, the home of country, but they wanted to do something a little different. Cie comes from a heavy metal background, Karisa is about as close to the definition of an indie girl as you can find, and while their sound is certainly far closer to indie than metal, good metal to me wears its heart on its sleeve the way punk became known for, and with a glance at Cie’s lyric sheets, you will find plenty of heart.
Their live performances are full of that same heart. Heart, and booze. You Knew Me When traverses the region hitting primarily breweries and distilleries, sharing their craft music with hordes of craft guzzlers night after night and doing a fair amount of ‘sampling’ along the way. “We have a limit of two drinks before we play,” Karisa says. “I’m drinking kombucha right now so that I can adhere to that rule.” I think back to the time I’ve spent on the road and wonder why the hell I never of thought of that. So many sloppy performances could have been marginalized.
The two met while attending Belmont University in Nashville, Cie learning up on PR and marketing and Karisa studying music education. Together with their musical prowess, and following a wedding and several years together, they felt they had the necessary skill set to uproot from the shackles of everyday life and become a full-time touring band. The two did not start playing music together right away, but over time began to feel that their artistic juices could create one heck of a punch.
“I think it was really the creative drive,” Cie says. They decided, after putting together the band, to take a one year sabbatical from work and see what they could make happen musically.
“Three years later, here we are,” says Karisa with a laugh.
Traveling with only two people, both Cie and Karisa hold multiple instrumental duties. Cie sings, plays guitar, and handles foot percussion, while Karisa holds down the piano, ukulele, glockenspiel, cymbals and, oh yeah, does some singing herself. “When we started touring, we decided to just do the touring thing with just the two of us, so it was like, how can we create more of a cool sound with just the two people so that’s when we added the kick drum and she added some cymbals. We added stuff to fill out the sound as a duo.”
You Knew Me When is approaching their 100th brewery, quite an accomplishment. I haven’t even drank at that many breweries, let alone gigged. I just met these guys, but I am proud of them. They also have a good amount of distilleries under their belt, with WildRye Distilling out of Bozeman, Montana being their favorite (also noted by the group is Willie’s Distillery in Ennis, Montana. Apparently, I need to head up north). They are doing it, and since I have no two drink rule on this particular night, I stop by State-38 Distilling on the way home to celebrate the band’s accomplishments.
To be honest, I have never tried locally made tequila here in Colorado, and I’ve been meaning to check these guys out for a while. Owner and Master Distiller Sean Smiley has built a solid reputation for his products- they are one of the few I’ve actually seen in the small, corner liquor store down the street from my house. Their tasting room boasts a wood-paneled bar and similar flooring, giving it a rustic finish that feels very Colorado appropriate.
“We’re a 100% agave distillery,” says lead distiller JT Tewinkle. They distill tequilas, obviously, but also a Blanco Agave Spirit and an agave-based vodka and a gin, both the world’s only. Add to that list North America’s only one-year aged Anejo and you’ve got yourself one of the most impressive menus in the country, let alone the 38th state which they call home.
It was during the aging process for the Anejo that Sean and JT came up with the concept and plans for their agave-based vodka and gin. “We started off with the Blanco and the Reposado, and then we were literally sitting on our heels for a year for the Anejo, so we had to start looking at other things we could do,” Tewinkle says. “There’s two rules with vodka - it has to be distilled at 190 proof or better, and it has to be filtered. So basically that means you can make vodka out of shoe leather if you (follow the rules).”
This is apparently the case with a lot of the mass-produced vodkas you see on the shelves at liquor stores and bars - when you read ‘distilled seven times,’ it often means that they started with garbage ingredients and had to distill it that many times just to get to 190 proof, meaning their bragging of a high number of distilling cycles is little more than a bad marketing ploy. “It’s a trick of the vodka industry,” Tewinkle informs me.
He and Smiley have known each other for twenty years. Smiley started the distillery and hired JT as his lead distiller almost immediately, confident in his knowledge of tequila and experience in the bar industry. “I’ve been a tequila guy my entire sixteen year career, so it was a very easy segue to learn how to make it. Plus, I have a chemical engineering background from college, so that didn’t hurt.”
I am lead into the distilling area behind the tasting room and poured a sample of the Reposado straight from the barrel. Their agave is 100% organic, right out of Jalisco, Mexico. All products are distilled and bottled in-house from agave to glass by the two themselves.
“I love distilling,” Tewinkle says. Smiley does as well, as I gathered from email correspondence, and it shows in their product line. I have yet to taste anything near what they are doing with their agave liquors. Back in the tasting room, I familiarize myself with a few more of their products. Not a bad cap to what has been a good day - nothing like a little craft agave to restore your sanity.
Tim Wenger is a Denver-based microshiner, journalist, musician, and avid snowboarder. Catch more of his work in Colorado Music Buzz, Snowboard Colorado, and his weekly talk show on worldviral.tv