Moonshine Masters
Still Fired Distilleries moves beyond the Valley
BY LOLA AUGUSTINE BROWN
PHOTOS MICHELLE DOUCETTE
Starting a moonshine distillery will always offer a few challenges, especially if you choose to do this somewhere that’s been legally dry for a century. So, how do you convince locals to vote for overturning prohibition-era liquor laws in small-town Nova Scotia? By sitting down with them and saying yes to a lot of tea and cookies, says Andrew Cameron, who started Still Fired Distilleries in Annapolis Royal with his longtime friend Owen Ritchie.
At the time, the pair were working as commercial divers, and when they needed to have that law overturned, Ritchie worked in Northern Labrador. “So it was up to me, and Owen's mother, Mary, to create this cute little brochure, and I went door to door in the community to ask them to vote to overturn the law,” Cameron explains, “I've never drunk so much tea in my life. Everyone here is a gracious host and was like, “let me make you a snack. Let me make you a meal. You have to have some cookies. I was stuffed to the gills.”
The charm offensive worked, and 90 percent of the community voted to overturn the law so that Cameron and Ritchie could build a distillery in the Lequillle Country Store, which Ritchie’s family has owned for generations (Cameron is originally from Ontario).
IT STARTED WITH GIN AND TONICS
Cameron and Ritchie became friends when working for the same commercial diving company in Halifax. In their downtime, they often hung out in hotels and hotel bars when the weather was too bad to work on underwater construction projects, and they discovered a mutual love of gin. “Our industry is more of a hard alcohol crowd, and then here we are having our gin and tonics and the rest of the crew were laughing at us,” Cameron says, “We discussed the botanicals we’d use if we made our own gin, just spitballing, but that turned into pinpointing how it was made, and then we bought our first still.”
That first still was a T500, a readily available distillation unit you can pick up at make-your-own wine stores. “We bought all the gear and we started fermenting mash in Owen's bathroom in his high-rise apartment in Halifax. One thing led to another and our passion for this hobby just kept growing,” explains Cameron. Not that they were good at making hard liquor right off the bat. “The first few batches were probably as awful as you could imagine but because we loved everything about it so much we started buying a ton of books and doing a bunch of research.” They also went “full-on nerdy” and harnessed as many scientific tools as possible to make a perfect product.
Their first success was an apple pie moonshine that is still one of their best-selling spirits today. Back then, Cameron and Ritchie were super into the TV show Justified, in which a US Marshall had repeated run-ins with a character—Old Mags—who served guests and occasionally poisoned them with her apple pie moonshine. “Because we are hilarious and slightly twisted, we thought that sounded great and made our own apple pie moonshine,” Cameron says. Plenty of people get the Justified reference. “Way more than I ever expected, and now we have a 1930s moonshine wagon parked in front of our distillery that we’ve called Old Mags,” he says.
Owen asked his grandma for her apple pie recipe to perfect the flavour profile of their apple pie moonshine. “She’s 93 years old now but she used to do a lot of baking and would enter apple pie competitions in Annapolis Royal and at local farmers’ markets and whatnot,” Cameron says, “she was happy to give us her recipe thinking that Owen was going to carry on the tradition of pie baking. Instead, we liquefied it. We started giving it out to friends and family in a mason jar with a cinnamon stick and it started taking off. It got to the point where at 3:30 in the morning people were showing up at our door asking for moonshine and thought of it at that point, we started doing some research and realized it was a viable business idea.”
In June 2015, Nova Scotia had few other distillers, save Ironworks in Lunenburg and Glenora in Mabou. There were a few “gray areas” in the Liquor Act of Canada that the pair stumbled across as they started their business, and a lot of red tape to cut through, but they figured it out and collected a group of friends to help them get things going. One of those friends was Daniel MacSparron, a welder with serious artistic vision and skills that helped them build the two stills they use to distill all their liquors. “They're the first legal stills built in Nova Scotia, which is a fun little claim to fame,” says Cameron.
GROWING A PRODUCT LINE
The apple pie moonshine might have kicked things off, but they quickly got down to business making other spirits. When they made their first gin batch, Ritchie insisted they include dulse in their botanicals basket. “I thought this was ludicrous,” says Cameron, “Not being from here, to me, dulse just smells like rotten mud flats.” Cameron figured he’d have to plug his nose when tasting the gin but found the dulse didn’t punch through like he thought it would. “It just accentuated everything else. And I was like, ok, wow, this is wicked.”
From there, their product line expanded to include vodka, rum, and moonshine in a range of flavour profiles: spiced, coffee, molasses, strawberry rhubarb, cinnamon, honey, and as a mocha cream that’s delicious added to coffee or poured over ice.
For the first three months, Cameron and Ritchie kept their lucrative jobs in commercial diving but soon hit the point where they were burning out, and it was time to go all in with the distillery. Cameron and Ritchie opted not to sell through the NSLC, instead concentrating on selling directly to consumers through their Annapolis Royal tasting room, independent retailers, and farmers’ markets across the province. Their business was a success from the start and has grown in ways they could never have expected—especially when it comes to their Fundy Gin.
BIG IN BROOKLYN
Kristin Rose Pike was born and raised in Nova Scotia but lives in Brooklyn (New York, not Nova Scotia), where she runs her export business, Northern Rose Spirits, taking Canadian brands south of the border. A few years after their gin launched, Pike was heading home to Brooklyn after visiting here and grabbed a bottle of Fundy Gin at Liquid Assets at the airport because she loved the label. She reached out to Still Fired and told them it was the best gin she’d ever tasted, and she wanted to take it to bars in Brooklyn. “At that time, we didn’t want to get into the export game and felt like we didn’t have the production capability, so we said no,” Cameron says, “a year later, she showed up at our door and said, I’m not leaving here without your product.”
By 2019, Fundy Gin was stocked in bars across Brooklyn and getting written up in the likes of Esquire magazine as one of the top trending gins to drink in the US, and there was a feature on Still Fired in the Wall Street Journal. “We were like, oh goodness, what are we doing here?” Cameron says.
As a promotion, Still Fired hosted a gin cocktail competition in Brooklyn. The guys were overwhelmed by the number of people that came out to participate. “We had head bartenders of all these like high-end Brooklyn restaurants coming out and competing. The cocktails they came out with were phenomenal, very strange and weird and cool. People were sous viding ingredients and putting this into cocktails. The one that ended up winning the entire competition was a dessert-based gin cocktail using clarified milk that tasted like a dairy treat,” Cameron says. “The grand prize was an all-expenses paid trip to Nova Scotia for a weekend to hang out with us and we showed them a good time with a big lobster feed.”
Owen Ritchie + Andrew Cameron
STILL GROWING
Cameron and Ritchie had no clue that their distillery would take off like this, but because they are “kind of snobs” and make a product they want to drink, they knew from the start that they were doing something exceptional. “When we offer free samples at a trade show or a farmers’ market, and we see people’s eyes roll back as they're like, “Oh my God, this is the best thing I've ever tasted,” or people go through like a large alcohol sampling trade show, and they come back to us every time and say yours is by far the best, give me a case of it, that just feels so satisfying,” Cameron says.
This year, Still Fired has moved into canning with their Lequille Iced Tea—made with their in-house vodka, a signature tea blend from the Annapolis Tea Company, wildflower honey from Nova Nectar, and fresh lemon juice. They canned their first batch in March, soon had to do a second batch, and now they are (in April) having to double the size of the next batch. “This product is exploding, and we’re a little scared,” Cameron says, not sounding scared but just really happy about it. They are co-packing with the Annapolis Brewing Company, which is located close by and has all the equipment they need.
They are also expanding into other US markets with some support from government grants and Tourism Nova Scotia. “We recently just got into a place where we can now ship to 42 states across, uh, the US,” Cameron says. “Things are going to get a lot busier for us.”
Cameron and Ritchie have done incredibly well in the craft spirit business for two friends who loved gin. “We are very humbled by it and love coming to work every day,” Cameron says. “We know we made the right call, and the fact that we get to do it here, in this historic place, it’s so fun to be a part of all this.”
