Trail Forge is building trails by the bottle

Buena Vista brewery and distillery collab is also an outdoorsy fundraiser

By Eric Peterson

In 2018, Eddyline Brewery in Buena Vista had too much of a good thing: thousands of surplus cans of its Crank Yanker IPA.

Instead of letting all of that beer go to waste, Eddyline turned to Deerhammer Distillery across town to put it to good use. As the saying goes: When life gives you lemons, er, surplus IPA, distill it, bottle it, and sell it to raise money to build trails.

That was the basic line of thinking of Lenny Eckstein, Deerhammer’s founder and head distiller.

Deerhammer had the capacity to distill the beer, 10,000 gallons in all, but there was a big logistical hurdle. The Crank Yanker was already canned, meaning the project required a team of volunteers to hand-pour the beer into the stills. “That went on for weeks,” says Eckstein.

After a double-pot distillation, the spirit aged in oak barrels that Deerhammer had already used for other whiskeys. Only the final product, dubbed Trail Forge, isn’t technically whiskey, it’s bierschnapps. Bierschnapps, the traditional term for spirits distilled from beer, shares a lot of characteristics with whiskey. But Eckstein isn’t too hung up on labels.

“I love IPA and I love whiskey -- and I loved the idea,” he says. “Let’s see what happens, let’s let it go. From day one, our thought was: Let’s do something with this where we’ll make a unique collaborative, co-branded kind of product, put it out there, and any revenue we make from sales, we can throw back at our trail advocacy group to build more fun trails in our town.”

Eckstein says Trail Forge defies expectations in a good way. “We get to jump in and push the constraints within the rules of what makes a certain product,” he explains. “We can push it into left field a bit and challenge those sensibilities and come up with different flavors.”

“When you distill, you’re just culminating the essence of what you started with,” continues Eckstein. “In this case, we’re culminating the essence of an IPA.”

That also makes for a great entry point to spirits for a beer drinker. “It’s up there in proof, but it’s such big flavor,” says Eckstein. “The hops come through, and there’s crazy fruit notes and herbal notes. It’s definitely not going to be confused by anyone who’s a bourbon enthusiast for a bourbon or rye. It’s nothing like that. It’s totally its own thing.”

Five years into the project, Deerhammer has bottled four out of 10 barrels for three releases; all but one have been single-barrel affairs. Eckstein says he expects to bottle the fifth barrel for the fourth release in fall 2023.

The effort has raised about $30,000 to date for the Buena Vista Singletrack Coalition (BVSC) to build and maintain trails in the area, including work on the new, 2.1-mile Crank n’ Hammer Trail. Eckstein says the Trail Forge could account for $75,000 in donations to BVSC for trail work when all is said and done.

“Trail-building is crazy expensive,” says Eckstein. “They get a lot of volunteers, but they also hire trail-building companies that bring in machines to build trails.”

While he moved to Buena Vista for the whitewater, he’s gotten into mountain biking and loves the loop that Crank n’ Hammer completes, replacing a stretch of roadway that was shared with cars. “It’s a connector trail that opens up a lot of options. It means people don’t have to ride up as high to get across.”

Trail Forge is available exclusively at Deerhammer Distillery and Eddyline  Brewing in Buena Vista for $85 per 750-mL bottle.

Eric Peterson is a freelance writer based in Denver. His website is rambleguides.com.