Master Distiller Molly Troupe joined "Think Out Loud" to discuss her passion for crafting spirits like whiskey.
Elizabeth Castillo / OPB / OPB
We’re taking a deep dive into people’s work lives. We want to learn what it takes to do different jobs and how these professions change us.
For this installment of the series, we revisit a conversation we first aired in October 2023 about Freeland Spirits in Portland, which is owned and run by women. Master Distiller Molly Troupe crafts spirits, like gin and whiskey. She took us behind the scenes to share more about her work and the rye whiskey—grown and distilled in Oregon—that Freeland has since released.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, This is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We have the next installment today in our series about people’s jobs. We’ve been talking to folks about what they do and how they do it and why. Today we’re going to take you inside a distillery in Northwest Portland. It’s called Freeland Spirits. They make gin and whiskey and other drinks. They are one of the very few distilleries owned and run by women that includes their master distiller, Molly Troupe. We met up with Molly to get a tour of the production room and to get a sense for what it means to be a master distiller.
We started with her background. I asked Molly wanted to be when she was growing up.
Molly Troupe: So in seventh grade, I decided I wanted to be a forensic anthropologist. And so I wondered how to get down that pathway and how to ultimately become that. And I wanted to go to an in-state school for tuition reasons. And I happened to find a program at Southern Oregon University that was a chemistry degree with an emphasis in forensics and I decided to go to that school and pursue that degree and it wasn’t until my junior year when I was actually doing all the forensic pieces–I had done enough Gen Ed where I could do that part–where I realized I actually didn’t like that part of chemistry.
Miller: What didn’t you like about it?
Troupe: I did not like that. It was very analytical and that if you actually had a case and you did something wrong, someone could get off with a crime. And you have to do things by the book. There’s not a lot of creative license and I realized that I was actually a creative person at heart. And so I just knew I loved chemistry, but I didn’t like that application.
Miller: What do you like about chemistry?
Troupe: I like that you’re putting things together. It’s kind of like the harmonic feeling you have when you’re making a good meal, right? It’s very similar. You’re kind of working together, you have all these ingredients and you’re trying to make something beautiful and spirits is like that. Sometimes it’s more technical, sometimes it’s not, but it’s putting incredible ingredients together and getting an end result and you’re encouraged to drink it, which is what you’re not encouraged to do in normal chemistry labs.
Miller: Do you remember the first time that you thought distilling was a potential career for you?
Troupe: Yeah, I actually remember the moment where I had a drink in hand. I was stressing out. I was like, what am I going to do?
Miller: You were in college at this point?
Troupe: I was in college and of course you’re getting this degree, you’re spending money and you’re like, well, is this all for nothing? And I had that point where I was drinking a glass of whiskey. And I had the thought that maybe what I had in my hand was actually something I could do. And then I realized I had a friend who was doing the UC Davis Brewing program and it had never really occurred to me before that there was like an avenue to get down that route of making spirits, making beer. So I talked with this friend, I talked with some brewery owners and I looked at the UC-Davis Brewing Program and I realized at that time that they had a two-year waitlist. And I knew enough about myself to know that if I left school, I probably wouldn’t go back. So I looked into other programs and I found a program in Scotland for a master’s degree in brewing and distilling. I applied and within a month, I learned that I got in.
Miller: Can you take us to the heart of the factory here, the heart of the distillery?
Troupe: Yeah, we’re going to make our way to Hell Bitch.
Miller: Hell Bitch?
Troupe: Hell Bitch.
Miller: That’s the name of the still?
Troupe: That is.
Miller: How did it get that name?
Troupe: Hell Bitch made her journey all the way from Germany. And we brought her on to the floor in 2018. I actually brought her into the building myself, which was a lot of fun, although very stressful. And when she arrived, we got her installed and we were looking at her and just kind of dreaming and wondering who we are and what her name was. And Jill, who’s a freelance founder and CEO, she’s from Texas and she sent this to her brothers. All of them grew up in Texas reading “Lonesome Dove” and as soon as she sent this to one of them, he immediately responded with Hell Bitch. And when Jill told me this, I was like, that sounds nice. Sure, why not? And she’s like, well, that’s actually named after an untamable horse. That’s Hell Bitch in the book. And I’m like, well, maybe let’s not name a dangerous piece of equipment after something untamable. That seems a little, maybe not good juju. And then she told me that there was a character in there that could tame Hell Bitch, which was Cowboy Hal. So now the person who’s running the still for the day is Cowboy Hal.
Miller: Which is you sometimes?
Troupe: Sometimes me, sometimes we have another distiller as well.
Miller: Are all stills this pretty?
Troupe: Not all of them. Not all stills can be as fortunate as Hell Bitch.
Miller: Can you describe what it looks like? Excuse me, her? You keep saying to her?
Troupe: It’s like ships. They generally have a kind of a feminine nature to them. I’m not exactly sure why, but when you do look at Hell Bitch, I think it’s a she.
Miller: She’s curvy.
Troupe: She’s curvy.
Miller: So it’s not just because this is a business run by women that you say she? This is just an industry-wide thing?
Troupe: I wouldn’t be surprised if it was pretty industrywide. Every still I’ve worked on it has been referred to as a she.
Miller: How much liquid can you put in her?
Troupe: So Hell Bitch is a 500-gallon or 2000-liter still, again, a Kothe still all the way from Germany and she’s a pot column still, which you can see the middle portion of her here is the pot part; it’s a very curvy shape at the top. That’s called an onion bull shape. On the left is her column and at the column part, there are seven different plates.
Miller: They look almost like portholes on the side of a ship.
Troupe: Yeah. So when the column is engaged, we have bubble caps at each stage and when you turn a bubble cap, you can actually contain water at that plate. And when vapor is forced through there, it’s actually losing energy, not a vapor anymore, it’s liquid again. It has to regain energy to become a vapor. And each time it does that, it becomes a little bit more pure alcohol, a little bit less flavor or congener heavy spirit. And it’s really beautiful when it’s actually turned on and doing that because it’s just like this spritz is going up.
Miller: Can you correct me if I’m wrong about this? My super layman’s understanding of distilling is that it’s all based on the fact that different liquids turn into steam at different temperatures.
Troupe: Totally, yeah.
Miller: And your job is to capture the good tasting ones or the not deadly ones at the right time?
Troupe: Yeah.
Miller: Is that more or less what happens? But what’s the fuller version? And what are the names of what you’re going for and what you really want to avoid?
Troupe: Right. The basics of this is just simple chemistry - when you are distilling, you’re separating two things based on boiling points. The beautiful thing about alcohol and the other thing that you’re separating, which is water, is that they don’t really like to separate. If they did the alcohol industry would be very, very different. We’d have no option but to drink something very similar to vodka all the time. But because of the relationship between alcohol and water, we actually also get flavor coming through. They don’t like to leave each other, but they also bring flavor along for the ride. So when we’re distilling something, alcohol has a lower boiling point than water and it starts to become a vapor or gain energy before water does. So it rises up through the still and basically, it’ll go up as a vapor until it interacts with the condenser, which is the stainless piece of equipment right here. That stainless condenser is circulating cold water. And when the vapor comes in contact with it, it becomes a liquid and collectible again and then it’ll run through this parrot into a collectible vessel. We’ll heat up [and] apply our steam to the system. It’s indirect. It’ll heat up and about an hour and a half later, we’ll start having alcohol flowing and it’ll flow for about 10 hours. So it’s a really long day.
Over the course of that day, it’s a whole spectrum of flavor. So you’re not actually just getting the same thing throughout the whole day. Everything’s kind of segmented out. The first of it is what we call heads. There’s three parts: heads, hearts and tails. And heads is what we don’t want in our alcohol–flavor, for one, but that’s the least important part of it. The other part is that there’s dangerous components that come through when you’re distilling something. And a lot of it comes from the fermentation process and it’s very natural to have it in there. Even beer and quantities will have these components in there, but they’re not high enough to do any kind of damage. But when you’re distilling, you’re concentrating so they can become a little bit more problematic. And what we want to do is take those heads, it’s full of acetone, methanol and flavor compounds that we don’t like and we’re going to discard it.
Miller: Stuff that might smell like nail polish remover?
Troupe: Exactly. It often does. And it’s very easy to note because it smells like nail polish remover.
Miller: So I wouldn’t need to be a trained distiller to know that.
Troupe: Not completely. When there’s that transitional period, that’s where the importance of training comes because you want to make sure that you’re getting rid of all of the heady parts, but you also want to not waste a bunch of good spirit. You want to make it adequate, but you don’t want to overcompensate.
Miller: And is that your nose? How do you know it’s time to actually start collecting the good stuff?
Troupe: It’s a lot of nose and there are also differences in the alcohol content as a distillation runs because at the very beginning, we’re getting more alcohol than water, but that relationship changes over the course of running to be more water than alcohol.
At the beginning, there is kind of a noticeable blip in alcohol content. And when that shifts, you can see that there is a difference between the heads that you have discarded versus the hearts, which you want to keep.
Miller: And then what’s after the hearts?
Troupe: After the heart, which is everything you want your spirit to taste like, you get to the tails. And that’s where the art of distillation comes in because the tails don’t necessarily have a bad flavor. It’s just a flavor you don’t want to incorporate into your final product. It can be bad, especially the longer you run it, but oftentimes, with a gin in particular, it gets to like more of a flatter note. And so we want to cut it before it gets there.
Miller: Now, I jumped straight into this still, but there’s a lot of work that goes into your work way before you get to this point, right?
Troupe: Totally.
Miller. What are you putting inside this?
Troupe: So it depends on what product we’re making. We do a lot of gin here and we start with a grain neutral spirit. So we have that brought in from a different distillery and we’re taking that high proof. It’s about 190-proof or 95% alcohol. And we’re doing what’s called maceration, taking botanicals and combining it with alcohol. We let it sit and those extractions from the botanicals happen in about 24 to 48 hours. And then once that happens, we’re able to add water to bring it to a safe proof for distillation and then distill it.
When we’re making whiskey, especially the rye that we’re bottling today, we’re taking grain, we’re combining it with water, we’re mashing it and doing all of that on hand. Mashing is basically where you’re taking starches, you’re breaking them down into bite-sized sugars and then you are taking those sugars you made available suddenly and pitching yeast to consume those sugars. And thankfully, those yeast will take the sugar and make alcohol. We can take that alcohol from those ferments and concentrate it using distillation.
Miller: One of the lines I heard years ago which really stuck with me is that for any creative person, most creative people, they start by being fans of the stuff they want to make and there’s a gulf between their taste - whatever they’re doing, like their understanding of what’s good - and what they’re actually able to make. And it takes a while to get good enough to actually make the kind of a quality of stuff that got you interested in the thing in the first place. It’s a long winded way of asking you if you remember when you first distilled, made something that you actually really liked?
Troupe: Thankfully, I’ve had a lot of good distillates, but there was definitely stuff earlier in my career. If I look back at it now, like I can’t, because not a lot of it exists. But if I could and I mentally picture that, too, I’m like, oh, I would have done this differently and I would have looked at this flavor exploration a little bit differently and it just comes with time and experience. I wouldn’t say second guess yourself, but you come to have more knowledge and you learn maybe different or better ways and accomplish things even more efficiently.
Miller: So is the first time that you actually distilled things was when you were in school in Scotland?
Troupe: Yes.
Miller: Do you remember what it was like the first time you did it? Because it seems like a little bit of a magic trick. I mean, it’s not magic. This is very clear, very understandable chemistry for people like you who have studied it, but it also seems sort of like magic.
Troupe: Oh, yeah. I think I was very nervous for one. equipment is scary to operate and it should be, you should have respect for the fact that you have to treat it nicely. So I remember being afraid of watching equipment and making sure that nothing went wrong. And then the other part was, I wasn’t super concerned about making something that was flavorful, I just wanted to be technically good. And the longer you kind of explore this, the more you kind of get the balance between technically good and interesting and there is a balance with both of those things.
Miller: What’s interesting to you these days?
Troupe: That’s a great question. What’s interesting to me these days is very delicate flavors that are hard to do. We just released this new product called a Forest Gin and it’s with forage ingredients from a forest and working with ingredients like that are super challenging because they’re seasonal and you want to capture them at their peak. The other thing is that they are hard to completely translate in the way that you want them to. So when we started this, I was having an anticipation of the flavor we could produce and I thought it would go in a direction and I’m usually pretty right with these things. I have a lot of background in flavor chemistry. I knew what I thought was going to happen. And then with using these ingredients which don’t have a lot of research behind them and how their flavor develops and all those things that I usually kind of lean into when I’m making a product. So there were some wild cards in there and those wild cards were shocking in the best way where their flavor was more than I could imagine. And it ended up creating this product that is kind of like walking through a forest.
That’s a hard thing to achieve a product that kind of gives you a complete time and place. And it’s what we were aiming for and like the green notes that we were able to do with those ingredients, it just translated in a more beautiful way than I could anticipate.
Miller: What are some of those ingredients? What are the actual components?
Troupe: So we ended up foraging for mostly like five ingredients. We’ve worked with both spruce and Doug fir tips, Chanterelle mushrooms, nettle, salal berries and oxalis, which is the backbone, and then we have two kinds of other ingredients that we’re also doing this cold distillation. That’s kind of the key for keeping these fresh ingredients easily to translate into a distillate form. And we’re using wild Bergamot, which is not a citrus, surprisingly, I thought it was.
Miller: It’s a flavor of Earl gray tea.
Troupe: Bergamot is. Wild Bergamot is a flower and I did not know that when I started this, but we were looking at a vendor list and I happened to spot that and I just took me down the rabbit trail of what is this, what is this ingredient? And it’s also called bee balm. It’s a flower, it has these really beautiful and potent leaves that have a lot of like peppery notes and greenness to them. And then fresh elderflower, too, which we probably have the taste of elderflower, especially with a lot of sugar behind it, but by itself, it’s a very different flavor. And so all these ingredients kind of worked really well together just to create a product that I always hoped I could create but didn’t know if I could.
Miller: You snuck in one thing there that is, to me, most surprising, which is Chanterelle mushrooms. I guess I wouldn’t have thought of that in a gin. What does it do?
Troupe: So, Chanterelle mushrooms was another one where I thought it was going to go one way and it really didn’t in a beautiful way. So I thought it was going to be kind of like a forest floor. That’s what you think of when you think of mushrooms. And it ended up being this really beautiful vanilla note. It’s kind of got this like light vanilla honey. It’s very much more on the sweet side than you think. And it’s just this really nice backbone or I like to call them bridge flavors. That kind of makes a recipe cohesive.
Miller: Is a part of you always thinking about flavor now for new creations?
Troupe: Always. Yeah. It’s hard to turn off your brain and I don’t mind it because it’s kind of who I am. I just explore things and you never know when inspiration is going to hit. When we were in the spring, we released a new product, a cherry blossom liqueur, and that thought for that came to me in the shower. It’s just like, oh yeah, this seems like such a synonymous thing with spring and how beautiful. And I think we have this really cool opportunity with our cold distillation set up to capture that, how I would like it to be captured. And that ended up being a lot of fun.
So I just always kind of think of things. It’s perfect. You go to a grocery store and you smell things and you get inspired by the world around you. There’s a whole wide world out there that brings inspiration to me and to Freeland.
Miller: As we’re talking, I’m just realizing that there are these big sort of storage-size containers that say cinnamon Sumac, lemon verbena, peppercorns and cloves and hazelnuts and on and on and on. And these are all the things that you can throw in either for existing recipes or for new ones.
Troupe: Exactly. Yeah. So we have a lot of different things that we pull from. Of course, we make a lot of gin so juniper is one of the biggest ingredients that we use. Our flagship Blue Bottle has 19 different botanicals so it’s very botanical heavy. Sometimes we end up using dried ingredients. All these are dried and easy to store and then we also use fresh ingredients, too.
Miller: Have you worked for a business, a distillery, that was like this one run by women, owned by women?
Troupe: No. So when we first started in 2017, about 1% of the world’s distilleries were owned by women and I had not had the opportunity to really work for another woman. I hadn’t had a woman manager. I had really worked mostly with men and it’s just a different experience working with women and also being pointed in the fact that we’re women owned and operated. That’s been something we wanted to highlight is that women can be in this industry and do a really great job of it.
Miller: Has that changed that 1% that was six years ago?
Troupe: Yes, I think it has. And the last time I looked it was 3%. So it’s actually a lot of growth when you think about it, but more should be done and more is happening.
Miller: Have you run into situations over the years where people come here and they assume that you’re not the master distiller?
Troupe: Thankfully, not here.
Miller: Because people coming here, they know?
Troupe: They know. It has happened to me at other places where the first tour I ever did, someone was like, oh, you work in production? I was like, yeah, of course. And I think I’d been there for about three months. They said, you don’t look like you work in production. I was like, oh, what do you mean? They’re like, well, you are a young woman and I’m like, well, let me tell you about [inaudible]. So we had a lot of fun with that tour and we went very technical and they actually ended up enjoying it. It was fun for all. And yeah, I definitely had those experiences where someone just doesn’t believe you are who you are.
Miller: You opened in 2018. And then two years later the pandemic happened. What did that mean for everything you do?
Troupe: Well, we have not just production, but we also have a tasting room and in 2020 going into COVID, we had a full bar, fully staffed, we had a food cart as well. And of course, when we got the notice we had to shut down, we ended up losing a lot of people as well. We went down to a much smaller team and we also got the call from the city of Portland to make hand sanitizer. And we ended up making a lot of hand sanitizer, which kept us very busy. It was not just production, all hands on deck, but we had a lot of help from everyone who was still there. And so we ended up having the first three months of COVID as just basically a flash because we were so busy trying to keep up with the demand for hand sanitizer and thankfully, we were able to help.
Then it kind of shifted. We started going back to our normal production. Things went to what was kind of what was the normal at that time. And we were also thankful that we could do cocktail pickups for people, people could come here and pick up cocktails to go and ultimately, it felt like starting three new businesses rapid fire, kind of everything happening at once. So it was a very interesting time. We feel very lucky because we made it through and we feel like we’re on the other side, kind of, knock on wood. Who’s to say?
Miller: Knock on wood for all of us. My hands are full right now so you do it for both of us. [Laughter]
I imagine that making hand sanitizer for the city, as you said, seems like a lifeline. Was it also boring? If you’re interested in very carefully crafted flavors…this is just like, is it going to kill the virus?
Troupe: That was basically my daily mantra: I’m doing some good right now. And that was kind of what kept us in it is that we feel like we’re doing some good and we’re helping, but it was still soul soul crushing from a creative aspect. But the highlight of it is that we had a lot of time. We didn’t allow anyone into the building other than us and our partners. So we figured we’re already exposed. So it was just us and we’d come in here, we’d bottle together and we had our ability to kind of decompress with that. So we kind of had our silver lining and then also when you’re bottling, it’s kind of monotonous work. Your mind can wander a little bit. And one of the things that our mind wandered to was new products. That ended up leading to the creation of two new products for us, which is one of them is our clear bottle dry gin and the other was our French 75 which has a canned cocktail. So there’s multiple silver linings that come from it.
Miller: As we’re talking, every now and then there’s a ding, a ding, a ding and then people cheer. What is happening?
Troupe: So it’s actually a very special day. Since 2018, we have been putting barrels of whiskey down. We’ve been putting rye whiskey away. We’ve been working with a local farmer getting this grain. It’s stone milled. It’s a very special whiskey and today is the first day we’re putting it into a bottle.
Miller: You mean it’s been in barrels for five years now?
Troupe: Almost five years. Yes. So the last of it is almost five, the stuff that just became mature at four years old. So it’s a bottle and bond. It has to be at least four years old. So there’s a little bit of four and a half to four year old whiskey in there.
Miller: And each time it goes into a bottle, people cheer?
Troupe: Actually, Dana, who’s basically running the bottling line right now, found a really good morale boost for bottling, which is if you do a perfect label, you get to ring the cowbell.
Miller: What’s a perfect label?
Troupe: Our bottle has its very unique shape. It’s actually difficult to land a label where all things line up. You can see right now, Dana is inspecting a label. When that happens, they get to ring the bell.
Miller: I’m looking at her to see what she has. She’s looking over her glasses.
Troupe: Yes.
Miller: She’s touching stuff. She’s looking at the label.
Troupe: She’s looking at the label. She’s looking at the bottle. We inspect everything by hand.
Miller: I’m very invested in this right now.
Troupe: It’s a very hands-on process. Every bit, a person is doing it. You can see in the back, there’s someone who’s rinsing bottles. Daniel’s filling bottles. We have someone corking, we have labelers sitting down.
Miller: She doesn’t look like she found that it was completely perfect or at least there’s been no bell ringing.
Troupe: She has a very high standard.
Miller: I mean, it’s great to me. [laughter]
Troupe: We’ll go over and there’s some examples of good glass. Sometimes glass has a little bit of an imperfection. We generally reject those and then we’ll recycle that glass in the long run. It’s exciting to get to share all this hard work. We worked with a farmer who does a lot of heritage grains, Camas Country Mills out of Junction City. They also work with a lot of bakeries in town. They work with Pizza Thief across the street for the sourdough pizza and they work for the sourdough new bakery, the Brewer’s Bread. And they are just kind of legendary for producing great grain. They also have this amazing stone mill. And so they not only grow the grain, they stone mill it for us, it gets brought in 25 lbs. bags, we heft it up or mash tun, mix it in with water and start the whole process. And then once it’s gone through fermentation, it’s distilled twice and it’s laid to rust in a New American oak barrel. And it’s been about an average of four and a four and a quarter years that this batch in particular will have been in that barrel. There’s a really amazing bottle and bond expression, which means that everything was done here on site. That’s a minimum of four years old and then it’s a minimum of 100 proof and bottle as well.
So it’s a really good indication that this whiskey was made 100% here with love. And it is a lot of hard work to work with these kinds of grains, these heritage grains. They don’t necessarily have as much yield as commodity, but they produce such a more flavorful spirit because of that, that it’s well worth it.
Miller: It also seems so scary. I think about my job where every day we have an hour of radio and we hope for the best. But tomorrow there’s a new show. You worked on and then put it in barrels four years ago and then you just have to hope that your work is going to pay off and that it’ll be infused the way you want it and it’ll turn out the way you hope.
Troupe: Exactly. There’s a lot of hope that goes into it. A lot of time, a lot of resources and our whiskey program is always going to be small because we are a small distillery and we don’t have millions of dollars laying around. I wish. But we’ve been crafty instead and producing whiskey in very small quantities, very passionately. And it is a risk, but it so far has paid off, thankfully. We’ll see the reception.
Miller: You have barrels right now that are on year three or year two.
Troupe: We’ve been putting barrels down every year, including this year. We’re averaging about the same. So it’s always going to be an allotted spirit. If tomorrow it wanted to go international, it’d be like a bottle for every country. It’s not going to be a lot to go around, but that’s what also makes it pretty special.
Miller: Thank you.
Troupe: Of course. Yeah.
Miller: Molly Troupe is the master distiller at Freeland Spirits in NW Portland. The rye whiskey that was being bottled when we visited is now for sale.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.