Todd Leopold’s Big Secret
Meet Todd Leopold, co-owner and distiller of Leopold Bros distillery in Denver, Colorado. You may think you know him and his products, but I assure you: you do not. While you may be aware of his family's many achievements and the incredible portfolio of spirits they've produced over the last two decades, I can promise you this: you have yet to really experience and appreciate just what Todd Leopold can do.
Sure, his father is a landscape architect who helped decorate one of the most pristine campuses in the industry. Yes, his mother is a textile expert who put together the distillery's stunning interior piece by piece. Of course, his brother Scott (co-owner of the brand) trained as an environmental engineer at Stanford and constructed one of the greenest, most eco-friendly distilleries in the country. This information is common knowledge to the many people who think they know the Leopolds and their business.
However, the products that will ultimately come to define the Leopolds and their distillery have yet to be released. They're either resting in steel or sitting in wood, racked in a dunnage style warehouse immediately next to the production facility, waiting for a future date. They are magnificent spirits, steeped in flavor, tradition, and an incredible amount of historical accuracy—painstakingly researched with a level of sophistication usually reserved only for savants.
What we think we know of the Leopolds is founded in the present. What we will come to know them for, however, has yet to be unveiled.
The Leopolds have moved around a great deal in their lives. Their father worked for the government when they were kids and was forced to relocate frequently, rendering the two brothers almost defacto best friends. Their work together has also migrated; the current incarnation of the Leopold Bros distillery is the third of its kind. The first was located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The second was also in Denver, just a few blocks down the road.
The latest facility (and hopefully final) has been operational for less than a decade and many of its best products have yet to hit the market. That’s an important point to consider when evaluating their previous work because the strides they’ve taken since then are unparalleled in the American whiskey scene. First off, Leopold Bros does everything from scratch. 100% of the grains used are floor malted by hand, meaning rye, wheat, and barley. With the exception of their grape-based absinthe and maraska cherry liqueur, all of their base spirits are made in house.
While chemistry normally forms the foundation of a distiller’s education, Todd Leopold’s background is in malting. From 1995 to 2008, he made beer for a living. He has studied and worked in Germany as well, including a stint at Würzberger Hofbräu, perfecting a number of hefeweizen and pilsner recipes before moving over to distillation. In fact, he's so good at malting that a number of breweries are now coming to him for their base malt. As he if he wasn't busy enough, contract malting has now become a side business for the company.
Properly malting one’s grains also involves drying them in a kiln. Just like at Port Ellen and many of the beloved Japanese distilleries, Leopold is adorned with a romantic pagoda roof through which the warm air is released during that finishing process. Todd does indeed make single malt whisky (still unreleased), but he uses a fan rather than peat smoke as as a heat source because once that smoky, peaty, campfire aroma gets in, there's no getting it out. Seeing that the grains for all his whiskies must pass through the kiln, peat is strictly forbidden.
I was curious as to why exactly Todd prefers old-fashioned floor malting to the more modern and efficient practices maltsers have developed over the years. Is it just for rusticity's sake, or is there indeed a better flavor that came from more antiquated methods? “A floor malt has its own unique environment," he said to me; "It's cooler than a malting house and it's inconsistent, which is the point."
Apparently the malting temperature can vary by two or three degrees throughout the floor, meaning different kernels malt to different levels. "It's inconsistent, but it's not imprecise; I'm monitoring it so there's just enough difference to add depth of flavor," he added. Those small differences create a variance that ultimately adds richness and complexity of flavor in the final spirit. "It's more hands on," he continued, "and a combination of technical science with hands on experience is important when making whiskey.”
One big secret that had everyone in the whiskey world drooling, from whiskey historians like David Wondrich and Mike Veach, to super nerds who pour over production details and spec sheets, is this girthy piece of equipment called the three chamber still. It was once used in a number of American distilleries around the turn of the 20th century and into the mid-1900s. Few people, however, seem to understand exactly how or why it was used.
Fortunately for us, Todd is a dedicated researcher and reader of old documents. He spends his free time digging out the recorded minutes from forgotten community farmer meetings, or various malting essays written by brewers in the 1920s. Even Vendome, the heralded American still company that made the equipment for him, doesn't really understand how the chamber still works—and that's exactly how Todd likes it. Like the intricate Swiss watchmakers Rolex or Breitling, the entire Leopold process is proprietary and cannot be replicated. Few other distillers, if any, possess the technical know-how.
Working from a design he located in an old diagram of Hiram Walker's former plant in Peoria, Illinois back in 1910, Todd helped to create this antiquity to recreate a style of whiskey not tasted in more than a century. You can watch Todd’s detailed video for all the nitty-gritty, but to give you a quick breakdown: mash is loaded into each of the three chambers and, as the liquid vaporizes, it passes through each chamber full of mash as it moves up through the still. Think of gin vapor moving through a botanical basket, but instead it's actual whiskey vapor moving the same flavorful whiskey mash from which it was originally boiled.
Todd has been distilling rye on this beast for the last few years and the result is pretty ungodly. Yet, despite three market releases thus far, I’m of the opinion that the first two didn’t quite do the liquid justice. It wasn’t until the most recent 2022 expression (the blue label) that the essence of the three chamber character really took hold in the bottle (I say that having tasted a number of barrel samples and varieties over the years). In my mind, we’ve still yet to really experience just what these whiskies can offer because we’re only a few years in. And Todd has been distilling far more than just rye whiskey in that still!
While the three chamber still (and its secretive distillates that are still unknown to the general public) may be the main attraction, Todd’s fermentation techniques also set Leopold Bros apart from many of its colleagues. For example, Todd chooses to ferment his whiskey mash at a much cooler temperature than most Kentucky distilleries. He also lets it go for more than 120 hours which is longer than I've heard of for any whiskey producer.
The result is a fruity and complex liquid that has more inherent flavor than just about any whiskey beer I've sampled in my distillery visiting days. It’s slow and low; just like Texas barbecue. Take into account the fact that Todd has purposely planted fruit trees outside the distillery wall so that, when the windows are opened, the wild and native yeasts from the fruit make their way into the building, embedding themselves in the wooden fermentation tanks. At this point, there's so much organic matter playing an active role in Todd's mash that it actually forms a layer of bacteriological flor!
I've never even heard of that happening at a whiskey distillery, but apparently it's common in the brewing of sour beers with all that lambic action.
Few people truly understand what Todd Leopold is up to right now; it’s what he’s already created and sold that most customers know him for:
Two world class gins made by distilling each botanical separately into its own spirit, then blending those resulting spirits into two completely different small batch products.
A ridiculously vast and delicious portfolio of liqueurs including three fruit-macerated whiskies that taste like heaven.
A Campari-like aperitivo.
A Maryland rye whiskey, a Bottled-in-Bond Bourbon, and—of course—the heralded Three Chamber Still rye.
However, it’s what’s sitting there in both tank and barrel that I believe will some day elevate Leopold Bros from a devoted boutique distillery into the upper echelon of serious American whiskey culture. It’s inside the dunnage warehouse—an exposed floor building with no electricity and all natural lighting—where the temperatures fluctuate greatly between the hot Colorado summers and frigid Denver winters, creating the perfect environment for whiskey maturation.
It’s there that you’ll find Leopold Bros single malt, corn whiskey, wheat whiskey, new expressions of Maryland style rye whiskey, older editions of the Bottled in Bond Bourbon, and the coveted Leopold Three Chamber rye still gaining complexity. When they’re ready, all of these whiskies will showcase more dynamism than anything Leopold has brought to the general market thus far (and most of them have never been tasted by the general public).
From the particular strain of the barley and rye, to the hands on specifics of floor malting, to the kilning and the milling of the grain, to the cultivation of yeast, to the time and temperature of fermentation, to the type of still, to the charring of the barrel, to the natural conditions of the warehouse, Todd Leopold has geeked out about the minute details of whiskey production to a level perhaps unseen in this business.
He’s not only the co-owner of his company; he’s the bonafide expert of every single process of its production from front to back. In the process, he’s become a beacon of American distillation knowledge; a veritable sponge of semantics. But does that maniacal level of dedication make the whiskey taste better, you ask? I don’t want to ruin the ending of such a great story so far in advance, but you’ll know over the next few years; right about the time the Leopold brothers take over the world.
What you should be most excited about is this: everything that American farmers, maltsters, brewers, and distillers have discarded and removed from whiskey production over the last century in the name of efficiency and economics has been painstakingly researched, rediscovered, and reinserted back into the process by Todd Leopold. As 2023 unfolds, you’re all going to discover the secret Todd has been hiding. You’re going to find that the Leopolds are making some of the most incredible spirits in the world, far beyond anything you thought you understood.
-David Driscoll