Our Exclusive Partnership with Dread River Distilling Co.

In November of 2020, when Chefs Tyler and Jennifer Lyne were still exploring the culinary landscape of their new Birmingham home, they attended a tour and tasting at Dread River Distilling Company. If you’ve ever entered this historic downtown building, then you know that the gorgeous interiors—the sumptuous jewel-toned color palette, gilded accents, and cozy low-lit lounges flanking the sprawling central bar-in-the-round—can’t help but make the first impression. So it’s easy to order a cocktail and happily settle into this Gatsby-esque glamour. But, true to their epicurean pedigree, Tyler and Jen were focused on the spirits that lie beyond the front-of-house elegance. And what they discovered through taste and tour in the back of house did not disappoint.

“We loved all of their spirits,” says Chef Tyler Lyne, “Each one has very unique flavor profiles, and we really enjoy the vodka. I can’t believe they are just getting started.”

The Kothe pot still, an exquisite German pot still, is the incredibly versatile piece of equipment that allows Dread River to create their diverse line of high-quality spirits.

The central bar at Dread River features an expansive and sleek modern chandelier in its soaring ceiling.

A Skyrocketing Start

Dread River’s success has been meteoric. In October 2020, at a mere eight months old, the distillery was named 5th Best Distillery in America in USA Today’s 10 Best Craft Distilleries in which a panel of American spirits experts nominated the country’s top 20—the Reader’s Choice vote solidified the winners. Other accolades followed with Dread River Rum winning the Gold Medal Award at New York’s Annual Fifty Best rum competition; and their whiskey, vodka, and gin each won silver at different competitions. They are excited to submit their recently perfected blue agave in upcoming competitions and are markedly anticipating the release of the first bourbon that’s been made in Birmingham in nearly 100 years, coming this June.

Dread River’s cavernous—and very popular—event space vies against the brand’s award-winning spirits for the limelight like two overachieving siblings. But Dread River Distilling Company’s founder, Jeff Dugas, is clear on what drives the business.

Dread River spirits: Rum, Blue Agave, Vodka, Whiskey, and Gin—with a Bourbon to debut this June! Image: Jenny Nicholson of Eating Alabama

“This is a distillery with an event space—not an event space with a distillery. So the part of this business that really has to stand on its own and be at the forefront is the backspace. If you haven't done the tour and the tasting, you really need to do that to see and learn why, how, and what we're doing. Otherwise you won't understand why what you taste in that glass is as good as it is. And you'll just think this is a cool bar with good cocktails—it’s way more than that. And to get to that point is an art and a science,“ says Jeff, who, by day, doubles as an Orthopaedic Surgeon, Sports Medicine Specialist, and Managing Partner at Andrews Sports Medicine, the elite Birmingham practice known to treat top athletes and celebrities. Even though Dread River began and remains a side hustle of sorts for him, Jeff wasn’t going to commit to the endeavor unless the drink could compete with his own standards—he was determined to dig deeper than just a catchy name, trendy label design, and a well-coiffed, mustachioed crew to serve the product up with distractingly clever garnishes.

Jeff Dugas visits with guests in one of the distillery’s chic and cozy lounge rooms.

Great Lengths

“I like to tell people, we bought a Ferrari and we hired a professional to drive it,” he says of the incredible piece of machinery at the heart of the operation: a unique, extremely high-quality German pot still made by a company called Kothe. “It has a 5,000-liter pot still with essentially two distillation columns totaling 17 distillation condensation plates. So effectively, each one of those plates is a mini version of the pot still. And the way we modified this still makes it possible for us to make rum, vodka, gin, blue agave, whiskey, bourbon—you name it—we can do the whole thing on one piece of equipment; it just depends on how we set it up that day.”

Not only is the pot still and its distilling team next-level, they source the highest quality raw materials. And with a current lineup of five spirits recipes, finding ‘the best’ ingredients takes time. “There’s a saying: Know Thy Farmer. You gotta know thy farmer in this industry, because you gotta taste their products, know their practices, and understand what efforts are taken to make sure that the quality is consistent from week to week, month to month, harvest to harvest,” says Jeff. “So we had to do a lot of due-diligence on all the raw materials that we use each time we picked one, so that we knew we could sustain the demand as well as the quality.”

Furthermore, in the distillation process, there are three elements: the heads, the hearts, and the tails. The heads are not for consumption. As Jeff explains it, “They’re poison, basically; The heads are why the old moonshiners went blind and died.” The hearts are the good stuff. And the tails, well, in Jeff’s very effective words: “smell like something that somebody wrung out of their sock after they wore it for a month ... And so we don't put any heads or tails in our products, we are heart-cut only.” Although this is costlier and very few distilleries adopt this practice (most keep the tails), this is another measure that gives Dread River’s products that next-level taste.

Heart-cut-only liquors have purer ethanol, lessening the likelihood or effects of a hangover.

Great Minds

And this next level taste is what Tyler and Jen recognized immediately. The day the Tasting TBL Chefs tasted the spirits, they decided to form an exclusive partnership with Dread River.

Jeff was taken aback. “For somebody of their level of quality to look to us and say, ‘I'm going to use your stuff, because it is so good, I can do things with this.’ That's amazing to me. I wanted it to be that good, but I didn't know it was that good. So that has been a little bit of confirmation for us,” says Jeff, adding, “Tyler and Jen are so creative, in terms of what they can do. Some of the cocktails they’ve made using deconstruction methods and centrifuges, I mean, it’s just been off the chain, in terms of what they’ve done.”

Tyler and Jen make Tasting TBL’s tinctures, bitters, and liqueurs using Dread River spirits. “We love milk clarification and making milk punches—both ancient preservation techniques,” says Tyler. “They found bottles of milk punch in Thomas Jefferson’s wine cellar that were decades old and still drinkable.” This clarified milk appears in Tasting TBL’s Negroni Clarified, a crystal-clear Negroni, that includes housemade wormwood tincture, Cocchi di Torino Vermouth, and orange liqueur made from grapefruit, Aperol, Dread River vodka, and clarified milk—all poured over Dread River Gin.

Pastry Chef Jennifer Lyne serves as barkeep at the March 14, 2021, Industry Dinner, co-hosted by Tasting TBL and Dread River. Here, she whisks a cocktail in liquid nitrogen. Image: Jenny Nicholson of Eating Alabama

“We also like to infuse the spirits with flavor. For example, we blend bananas with Dread River whiskey and then put it through a centrifuge to spin the whiskey back out to bring back its clarity but the banana flavor stays behind. It tastes like a bananas Foster whiskey without all the sugar,” says Tyler, noting that this technique works well with their rum too—as demonstrated in Tasting TBL’s Rum Milk Punch, which incorporates this banana-infused Dread River Rum with touches of fresh yuzu, lemon, and pineapple.

Then there’s the Bazooka cocktail, a sweet, fruity cocktail featuring bubble-gum-infused vodka. Or consider the wizardry Tyler and Jen worked with pumpkin-pie mix and Dread River whiskey at the Friendsgiving-themed dinner in 2020: Pumpkin-pie mix was blended with whiskey to form a thick magma, which was processed in a centrifuge to emerge clear yet pumpkin-pie flavored for use in the evening’s cocktail. Jen then took the solid, whiskey-infused mix and incorporated it into a pumpkin-pie dessert, giving the treat a complex whiskey flavor.

The Frozen Poblano & Cucumber Margarita with poblano-salt rim | Image: Jenny Nicholson of Eating Alabama

The Lynes and Jeff have since hosted an industry dinner together, and the collaborative partnership will no doubt yield other exciting cocktails and events. “We can’t say enough good things about Jeff and his generosity,” says Tyler. “Everyone at Dread River is amazing to work with. Their hospitality is legendary in my eyes!”

And it’s a Mutual Admiration Society of sorts: Jeff explains that he and his wife Tracy have lived in Italy as well as New York City, and they continue to travel all over the world, seeking out exquisite culinary experiences as an integral part of their travels. He can name a laundry list of the country’s best restaurants they’ve had the pleasure of enjoying, but he strikes a different tune when it comes to the Lynes in-home supper-club experience. “I mean, all you have to do is taste the first course, and you know you're seeing and tasting something different. Every course, everything they do, is so coordinated at a level that is Michelin quality—the presentation, how it looks, how it tastes, how it’s served—the whole thing. It’s exceptional.”

Assuming both parties in this culinary-spirits partnership continue to push the limits of what they can achieve, it should prove to be a deliciously exciting, fascinating, and fun journey ahead.

All images courtesy Dread River Distillery Co. unless otherwise noted.