New distillery has deep roots in Longmont, Europe
LONGMONT — People who install and maintain sprinkler systems are on a mission to help lawns, trees and flowers grow. But the owner of one such company in Longmont is growing a distillery.
Craig Naylon’s Deep Roots Irrigation LLC has spawned Deep Roots Distillery, with gin and vodka that he and his partner Walter Bourque bottle and distribute themselves.
Bourque, originally from Dallas, was a research-and-development microbiologist, “but then the economy crashed in 2007, ‘08 and ‘09,” he said. “When times are good, people drink, and when times are bad, people drink — so I became a brewer.”
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Bourque moved to Oregon and brewed out there for a couple years, and then came to Colorado in 2013. His brewing career was sidetracked seven years later, however, when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer that metastasized into his liver. “Ten rounds of chemo and five surgeries later, I made it out,” Bourque said, “but I needed things like health insurance.”
Naylon’s career path had also taken some unexpected turns. He had a background in business logistics, systems, finance, operations and information technology.
“During COVID, I was working for Spyder, the ski-gear company, in Boulder, but they furloughed everybody including me, so I had nothing to do, just sitting around like everybody else,” Naylon said. “My buddy posted on Facebook he had a sprinkler problem, and I said, ‘Dude, I can fix it for you.’ So I went over there and fixed it, and he said, ‘Man, you’re really good at this. Can I refer you to somebody? One of my friends?’ And I said sure. Before I knew it I was booked out six to eight weeks, just sprinkler work. Now I gotta get insurance, I gotta get an LLC, I gotta do this the right way so that I don’t get myself in trouble. So that’s how the irrigation business was born.”
He also would go to Grossen Bart Brewing in Longmont and help Bourgue bottle some of the beers he was brewing.
“Coming from Illinois, the Midwest farm country, I have a work ethic that doesn’t stop,” Naylon said. “Between work ethic, experience and energy levels, and then knowing what Walter can do from a product side, because his beer at Grossen Bart was the best on the Front Range, we started talking. It was pretty obvious that he was the man who knew how to brew an amazing product, and when he showed interest in moving into the distillery world, I said, ‘Man, I’ll be a part of that 100%. I’ll take care of the business side, the finance side, the ops side, the organizational side. You take care of the product and get us a product that will sell and a product that’s good, and I’ll try to take care of the rest.”
Naylon pushed the idea of starting a distillery because while traveling internationally for Spyder he had met a man in Lucerne, Switzerland who “would take me to all these bars in Europe and say ‘Look at all this gin! Gin is everywhere here.’ So I said, ‘OK, what’s the flavor profile need to be for a Europe gin?’ And it was soft and sweet and mixes well for gin and tonic.
“So I started talking to Walter about it, and we kind of launched this whole thing,” Naylon said. “I had Deep Roots Irrigation, so we just moved it into Deep Roots Distillery.”
“We were talking and started putting together a game plan,” Bourque added. “Then we just kept lining up the dominoes until they were ready to fall.”
Playing on the European flavor, Naylon said. “we came up with the name Cismontane. It’s Swiss-German for ‘this side of the mountain.’ “
To achieve that soft and sweet taste, Bourque said, “my mentality of brewing has always been simplicity. Let’s not try to overcomplicate something with ‘oh, cool, our marketing shtick is that we have 100 different botanicals.’ No, it’s a simple botanical build to really just showcase unusual things. Everyone’s got juniper berry because you need to have it. We decided to add elderberry as one of our botanicals because it’s sweeter. We wanted a London dry gin because 90% of what people are going to drink are gin and tonics. But it’s also, let’s mix it into a cocktail and have fun with the uniqueness of the cocktail as well.”
Bourque and Naylon started producing their gin and vodka in May.
Whereas some distillers simply write “natural flavors” on their gin labels, Bourque said, “we just put it all out there”: Juniper, elderberry, orris root, coriander, bee balm, orange and grapefruit. “Some gins have 15 botanicals, ours have seven,” he said. “There’s no reason to hide ‘em.”
“We have a farmer that’s growing bee balm. We get juniper from up in the mountains,” Bourque said. “Sweet orange peel and grapefruit peel, we do have to outsource that.”
Clean and simple was the idea for the Cismontane vodka as well, Bourque said.
“Vodka is supposed to be neutral by definition, a neutral-grain spirit,” he said. “We weren’t trying to make it a unique red corn or anything like that. We just wanted it to be a simple, approachable, clean vodka. We get the NGS from Wyoming.”
To produce their gin and vodka, Naylon said, “we partnered up with Sandy Rothe, who owns Whistling Hare Distillery in Westminster. So he’s letting us come in and use his still, use his bottling equipment, and store our neutral-grain spirits there.
“So we ship everything to him, then we show up at his distillery, run the still, pump out the gin and vodka, do what we need to do to it, and then bottle it and take it back up to Longmont to distribute it.
“We get 21 cases of gin out of a still run. That’s 130 bottles of gin,” Naylon said. “We source all the raw materials from each individual person, we have them delivered to us, and then we set up a time with Sandy at Whistling Hare where we can meet there, run the still — ideally when he’s not there — bottle the gin, package it and get out of there so that he can use his facility for his own stuff.”
Naylon and Bourque do everything by hand. “We put the labels on, put the corks in, put the shrink wrap on, put it in the box, tape up the box, haul the box, deliver the box, everything,” Naylon said.
They’ve gotten their gin and vodka placed on the shelves at Wyatt’s Wet Goods and Fox Creek Liquors in Longmont and Red Barn Liquors in Johnstown, and served at Longmont venues including Pumphouse Brewery, Collision Brewing, Urban Field Pizza and Fox Hill Country Club.”
To get that placement, Naylon said, “we just walk in, shake hands, and say, ‘We’re the new kid on the block. We’ve got a good product, we want you to put it on your shelves. We’re the new local Longmont distillery; you should have us on your shelves.’ That and Instagram and Walter’s connections to the brewing world get us noticed.
“It’s very similar to the sprinkler business,” Naylon said. “When you say, ‘Hey, I do sprinkler work,’ people are like, ‘Oh, I need some sprinkler work.’ If you say you own a distillery, somebody knows somebody who owns a restaurant, somebody knows somebody who owns a catering company. All these contacts just keep coming if you’re friendly and run a good business and maintain a good network.”
What’s next for Deep Roots and Cismontane? Probably whiskey, Naylon said.
“But whiskey takes three years minimum, so the gin and vodka will take us to the whiskey.”
