The website and social media and insurance and everything else. “The paperwork is astounding,” he said, something I hear all of the time from people who make adult beverages of any kind. He did not grasp the myriad challenges of running a business.
#LIQUID ALCHEMIST BLOOD ORANGE HOW TO#
He understood how to make a bar profitable. Years of running bars gave him business smarts, but on a micro-scale. At some point towards the end of his advanced education he decided hospitality was his field, rather than working as a psychologist or finding a job in a corporation. Riemer grew up in rural northern Wisconsin, and worked in bars to pay his way through undergraduate and graduate school, where he studied psychology. More rapid routes towards growth normally involve investors. It’s a tricky balance, as Boulder’s many startups, especially in the natural foods space understand. But they also place their own demands on the founder’s business. Many other beverage startups - from breweries to distilleries to kombucha companies - lean hard on investors to get the operation off the ground and to fuel it through early, lean years. “I saved my money to start this, and sole ownership is important to me. I don’t need income from Grove Street,” said Riemer. “I get to do this on my own terms, because I’m also employed. Riemer’s day job is beverage director at 24 Carrot Bistro in Erie, a charming, ambitious spot with a killer bar program. Alchemy is just one part of the cocktail. I imagined him spending days in the distillery messing with whatever catches his fancy - chiles, cardamom, rose petals, lavender, smoke. Riemer’s whole project - capturing essences in liquid - seemed idyllic to me.
This was essence of roasted green chile, in a glass. And then it compelled me to take another sip. Riemer’s chile liqueur first made me hiccup - spicy food does that to me. I find most chile-spiked beverages disappointing, especially chile beer. Chiles, rather than citrus, sluiced through my veins for years. I’m a former resident of the Land of Enchantment. While hanging out with Riemer at the distillery, he offered me samples of the Hatch liqueur. And he’s working on a smoked coffee liqueur, and one based on Hatch chiles. His Meyer lemon, fennel and gentian root liqueur is on shelves now. After a year of fiddling with recipes and techniques, Longmont’s D.J. Longmont spots like La Vita Bella, The Roost, Still Cellars, Jefe’s and West Side Tavern also use Riemer’s concoctions. Restaurants like Santo, McDevitt Taco Supply, The Bitter Bar and River and Woods in Boulder use the liqueurs in drinks, most notably as a replacement for other orange liqueurs in margaritas. Riemer’s orange liqueur is available in many Boulder County and Front Range liquor stores. Now he polishes off 10 cases in about the same period of time. Those first batches required two hours of stroking a zester back and forth across oranges to get through a case of fruit. He controls the speed with a foot pedal, applies the zester to the rotating orange, and collects mounds of zest in short order. Now, more than a year into fiddling with recipes and techniques, Riemer is crafting heady orange liqueur: perfumed, smooth, balanced, haunted by whispers of spice he adds to the process.Īnd his mechanical engineer girlfriend has relieved him of the toughest part of the process, the hand-zesting. Once satisfactorily orangey, he amended the liquid with water to lower the proof, and sweetened it with organic cane sugar. He used the citrus dust to infuse high-alcohol, neutral spirits. He zested oranges with a handheld zester. But still, Riemer thought something was missing. The market already supported sprawling groves of orange liqueurs, from elite Grand Marnier to cheap fluorescent stuff harvesting dust on the bottom shelf. Riemer bleeds orange, although not blood orange.Īfter nearly more than a decade of crafting drinks in his native Wisconsin, Minnesota and Washington state, he started thinking about orange liqueurs. And oranges, the fruit responsible for some measure of the gorgeousness of a well-crafted Old Fashioned.Īt this point, I think it’s fair to suspect that barman and Old Fashioned-lover D.J. Citrus flows through the veins of bar pros.
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