Rising Sun Distillery sits in one of the few areas of Denver not yet completely overrun by gentrification. Their building is just on the other side of Colfax from the soon-to-be-renamed Sports Authority Field at Mile High, on Zuni St. just north of 13th Ave. For those more familiar with Denver’s craft breweries, Rising Sun is two doors down from Strange Brewing Company. Together, the two provide the perfect pre-Broncos game party spot for anyone not lucky enough to get into the lots at the stadium. Co-founders Dawn and Sol Richardson opened their doors in January 2015, after spending nearly a year reworking their space inside an old industrially-zoned building to meet code for making booze.
“Having more women around wasn’t intentional, but it’s been a great asset,” said founder and co-owner Dawn Richardson. “But we did brand our product to be a little more feminine. I didn’t want another cowboy label. I mean we’re in Colorado, everybody’s got a cowboy label, right? Everybody’s doing whiskey, every brewery and every distillery has corrugated tin and barn wood. At this point, it’s almost like it’s a franchise.”
“I hear you,” I said. “A lot of distilleries do look exactly the same.”
“We do end up getting more women in here than men,” Dawn said. “I wanted to do something that felt different.”
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| photo by www.centennialspecialtytours.com |
Luck played in her favor out. “When I graduated, I was looking for a distilling job at the exact same time that these guys were looking for their first distiller. I’m super proud of it because it is a unique position to be in,” Kim said. “I don’t think about it so much as being a woman; I think about how young I am. I’m only 23, and I’m taking things from grain to bottle and sending them out into the world, doing recipe development. It’s really exciting.”
Since forming Rising Sun in late 2014, Sol and Dawn have prioritized local and organic ingredients - often a daunting task. “I talked to the Colorado Department of Agriculture and they don’t know of any certified organic corn growers in Colorado, other than the Southern Ute Tribe,” Dawn said. “So our corn comes from western Kansas.”
“Western Kansas is probably closer to here,” I said, noting my time living in southwest Colorado a stone’s throw from the Southern Ute Reservation in La Plata County.
Making organic spirits in-house has been quite a process, fueled by a fire to be grain-to-glass and not one of the so-called faux-distillers. “When we first got in this we realized there are a lot of distillers who don’t make their own product,” Dawn said. “They buy bulk, put it in a bottle, put a pretty label on it. I’m like, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right. I grew up always making everything from scratch. My grandma was a rancher.”
Dawn and Sol personally drive to Pueblo to buy the chilies they use in their green chili-infused vodka. They buy their peaches directly from Colorado’s peach Mecca of Palisade. “We’ve met our farmers,” Dawn said. “Having these local agricultural products is way better than I thought it would be. It’s really trendy right now, but it’s awesome. It's a little life cycle that we’re all involved in.”
The labor of love pays off. Rising Sun’s Organic Vodka just took home the silver medal in the Denver International Spirits Competition this year. The corn-based mash makes for a vodka that is exceptionally smooth. I’m not normally one to sip straight vodka, but I maintained both conversation and a straight face drinking Rising Sun.
“Because everything in this business is so customized, we end up working with a lot of other independent small businesses,” Dawn said. “Since we’re a small business, we just feed each other.”
“How about getting going?” I asked. “How was the permitting process and getting approval to build your space? I work with a music venue in town that has been working with the city for permission to build a rooftop patio for almost three years now. It’s been a nightmare.”
“We wanted to open in Denver, but in hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have,” Dawn said. “They’re a pain in the butt to work with. It took us nine months to get our federal permit to manufacture liquor, but it took eleven months to get the city approval for the building permits. We signed our lease here in May of 2013, we got possession in November of 2014, then opened our doors in January of 2015. We don’t have any investors, it’s just been the two of us. It’s been a challenge.”
“Has the reward been worth the risk?” I asked. Dawn, behind the bar, poured me sample servings of each of their spirits. I gotta say, that organic vodka does the trick.
“We met all of our projections for our first year,” Dawn said. “We got picked up by a distributor locally, and we’re talking to a distributor in the Phoenix area. We think that they’ll pick us up. We’re not where we want to be, though. The goal is for distribution. We built (Rising Sun) with expansion in mind, so we have room to put in one, maybe two more, distilling tanks.
Rising Sun rents space to the Jun Key Co-op, a collective of members who produce the Kombucha-like drink Jun as well as other organics, to do their bottling. Jun, actually, is how I connected with Rising Sun in the first place - the distillery provided the stiff part of the drinks at a farmer’s market event near my home where the Jun Key Co-op sells their stuff. “I think you can tell in our product and our cocktails how we approach the business,” Dawn said. “It’s a slightly different focus, with the creative element and community networking stuff. There’s an art to it.”
Risingsundistillery.com
Tim Wenger is a Denver-based microshiner, journalist, musician, and avid snowboarder. Check in with him at @timwenger1 and catch more of his work at Colorado Music Buzz, Snowboard Colorado, and his weekly talk show on worldviral.tv