Alberta distillery wins best new spirit award at World Whiskeys Awards Achi-News

A young Alberta distillery has just won a huge title at the World Whiskey Awards in London, England, beating submissions from Scotland, Ireland, Japan and the United States.

Anohka Distillery won “Best New Distillery and World’s Best Young Spirit” for its very peaty “This is Not Whisky” single malt spirit.

“This year’s competition was very interesting because there were very famous distillers,” said Gurpreet Ranu, owner and distiller of Anohka. “There was a group from Scotland which is now run by four whiskey legends. They opened a new distillery called The Borders. We beat them. Clonakilty in Ireland, they present their new creation. We beat them. The same Japanese distillery had come in again this year and … we beat them.”

To qualify for the world awards, spirits must win their national competition. This is the second year that Anohka has been nominated at the World Whiskey Awards.

“They called all the nominees up to the stage and I looked around and I saw who I was up against, and these are veterans in the industry… titans in the industry. I look around and … I don’t really feel like I belong on this stage but if we win, I think, amazing,” he said.

“It was really cool to be in that room and go up against these heavyweights,” Ranu said. “I’m just this guy from Parkland County. Nobody has heard of me and I show up and I win the best in the world. It was pretty crazy.”

Ranu is a physicist turned lawyer turned distiller who started Anohka Distillery on a farm in Parkland County, about 40 kilometers west of Edmonton, in December 2021. The operation is growing its own barley and has its own peat bog.

“Alberta grows more barley than any country in the western hemisphere and we happen to have the best barley growing conditions in the world,” says Ranu. “The fact that we weren’t adding value to it and turning it into this amazing product, it just didn’t make any sense to me.”

Its distillers use a combination of modern, sustainable technology and traditional techniques, including stills in copper pots.

“The most ridiculous thing we do is after we get our fermentation and create our wash to distill it, we basically have a 1,000-litre Molotov cocktail and we light a huge fire underneath it to be heated. And that is essentially a silly thing,” said Ranu with a smile.

“It adds flavor,” he explained. “Anyone who has ever cooked any food knows that if you cook with steam, which is what everyone else is doing – or the industry standard – your results are different than when you use fire to cook. If you grill your vegetables versus steaming them, they taste very different. So we knew that the fire would contribute some chemical reactions and flavor compounds. He actually brings in a whole bunch that we didn’t even anticipate and that has been a happy surprise for us.”

After taking risks, the international honor is validating, says Ranu.

“We did a lot of crazy things that no one else is really doing and every thing we thought would contribute just a little bit to make the spirit a little more special. As you do it, you have no idea if it really matters. And then taking an award like this, it kind of validates all the decisions we’ve made over the last few years, all the crazy things we’ve done… people telling us there’s no way this is go to work and then prove everyone wrong.

“The decisions we have been making are the right decisions and knowing that is very important and gives us a lot of confidence,” said Ranu.

The winning spirit is described by the creators as deep and rich in texture, with “a backbone of sweet pastry, honey supporting waves of ripe strawberry, tropical fruit and melon wrapped in notes of smoke, leather and peat complicated.”

He came by his name honestly, Ganu explained.

“In Canada, you can’t legally market whiskey as whiskey until it’s been aged for three years, so I said, ‘OK. This isn’t whiskey, I guess.’ But it’s whiskey but it’s not ‘whiskey.'”

Anohka Distillery also produces two award winning gins. Tempest Gin and Timeless Gin are available in liquor stores across Alberta. The distillery is launching an online store to sell its spirits, including the award-winning not-a-whisky.

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