American Single Malts: Cedar Ridge Winery and Distillery

Editor’s note: If you’re interested in American Single Malts check out our primer to the category Why is American Single Malt Becoming the Newest United States Official Whiskey Designation? Then check out some of our other profiles in the series, including Westland Distillery, Virginia Distillery Company, and Balcones Distilling. 

Cedar Ridge Winery and Distillery

Like many good American distillery stories, Iowa’s Cedar Ridge’s story begins with a dream, and a garage: “We were a literal garage distillery; literally a distillery and winery inside of our garage,” says Murphy Quint, head distiller and Director of Operations of Cedar Ridge. “Both my parents were working normal jobs when they started in 2005, trying to make this dream of a winery and distillery combination come true.” 

The decision to open both a winery and a distillery was one that was rooted in the Quint family’s agricultural background. “My family has been in agriculture for as far back as we can possibly trace on a family tree,” says Quint. “Producing things that originate in the land that's been in my family's blood.” In 2009, when Cedar Ridge had grown beyond the capabilities of a garage, a larger property was sourced around the site of where the family had been growing grape vines for the winery part of the business, “When we opened up, we were actually going to be a winery that differentiates by also having a small distillery,” says Quint.

Iowa Corn and the Whiskey Business

It was the whiskey business, however, that ended up getting the lion’s share of the family’s efforts before long, due to the very nature of the state of Iowa itself. “My dad had a lightbulb moment. Iowa is the corn capital of our country. Bourbon is made from corn…why isn't anyone here producing bourbon on a large scale?” Quint recalls. “So once we started to wrap our heads around that, we really went all in on it, and started producing Iowa bourbon at a rapid pace.” The effort paid off, and in 2020 Cedar Ridge’s Iowa Straight Bourbon Whiskey became the bestselling bourbon in the state of Iowa. “We were the first craft distillery to become the number one selling bourbon in any state,” says Quint.

The winery is still a part of the company profile, but to put it in perspective, “we distribute whiskey to about 30 states and 5 countries. We distribute wine to just a few counties in the state of Iowa,” says Quint. Experimentation and small batch projects were always also part of the family’s business, which eventually led to their participation in the emerging American Single Malt category. “Early on, we were producing a little bit of everything,” says Quint. “We weren't producing things to distribute on a national scale or anything, it was an idea that when people come to our tasting room, it'd be nice to have a little rum. It would be nice to have a little gin, a little single malt.” 

Finishing Casks and Iowa Single Malt

Quint recognized, however, that there’s a downside to having too broad a portfolio. “You can't really just produce a little bit of this, a little bit of that and expect to be around long term,” he says. “You have to produce a decent amount of stuff, brand it, develop a following, distribute it, and bring in revenue that way.”

In the case of Single Malt, however, what began as producing a little “just for fun,” turned quickly into a passion project, especially after Quint had spent a few years away from the family business, working with Colorado-based producer, Stranahan’s, one of the pioneers of the American Single Malt category. “We knew that we wanted to start producing single malt on a much larger scale, not because it necessarily makes sense like Iowa corn does to Bourbon,” says Quint, “but just because (myself and my dad) are two people with a passion for single malts.”

The fact that Cedar Ridge had always been making wine and other products came in handy then when it came to the very permissive regulations of the American Single Malt category, and how it leaves room for experimentation and for distilleries to produce unique expressions using a variety of finishing casks. Cedar Ridge’s American Single Malt expression, The QuintEssential, spends an average of 3 years in Cedar Ridge’s own ex-bourbon barrels, and then, “we have our own red wine and white wine casks, brandy, rum, you name it,” says Quint. “It's as diverse of a setup of finishing casks as we possibly can.”

One of the most interesting things about the emerging American Single Malt category is that unlike most other Single Malt expressions worldwide, the geographic boundaries of American Single Malt are huge, and have a massive range of climatic conditions among the distilleries who make it. Like the other distilleries we have profiled so far in our American Single Malt series, Cedar Ridge is also committed to letting mother nature have its way with the barrels, putting another distinctly Iowan stamp on its personality. Of the distilleries we’ve profiled, Iowa arguably has the largest yearly temperature flux. “We age everything in non-climate controlled barrel aging facilities,” says Quint, “so when it's minus 10 degrees outside the middle of winter, our barrels are minus 10, and when it's 95 degrees and extremely humid in July, the barrels are 95 degrees, and they're exposed to a lot of humidity. But that fingerprint that mother nature puts on the barrel, it's a fair trade off to us.”

The QuintEssential American Single Malt

Both the diversity of barrel aging options and the variance that mother nature puts on the aging facility results in one of The QuintEssential’s most salient selling points: it is actually assembled on a continuous basis via a solera system, blending individual barrels with wildly different characteristics.

“We have a 1100 gallon vat we call our solera vat that has our QuintEssential single malt in it already,” says Quint. “That will have been bottled back halfway down, and our goal is to fill it back up with these barrels of unique finishing casks. So the flavor profile is always evolving because I'm not necessarily adding the same cask to it every time. So it's naturally going to evolve batch by batch. There is a little bit of a peat element to it as some of the barley that we utilize has been peated, but the goal of this whiskey is for that peat element to be more of a supporting character than the headliner.”

As to whether Quint had waited his whole life to call something he crafted The QuintEssential? “Matter of fact, when that name was presented to us, my dad and I just absolutely hated it at first,” he says. “However, it really started to make sense. It's this passion project that really speaks to what Cedar Ridge is, with the winery/distillery combination, and this particular product is involving both those segments of our business. And now it is an essential product to our portfolio.”