How a Flat Beer and a Barn Fire Sparked a Colorado Whiskey Empire

Even though Hunter S. Thompson passed away more than 20 years ago, you can still feel his presence at the Woody Creek Tavern, which is a few miles northwest of Aspen. The notorious raconteur and firebrand was a regular at the watering hole and locals will happily regale you with a range of colorful stories about him.

On a recent afternoon, the tourists gathered in the bar looking for signs of Thompson didn't notice another local celebrity slipping into the side bar. But the staff immediately recognized Jess Graber when he walked in and they gave him a nod and a little extra room. It's the kind of subtle respect reserved for someone who's been part of the area for decades and played a key role in putting Colorado whiskey on the map.

"People thought I was crazy," he said, while settling onto a barstool. "They said I'd drink up all my profits."

Graber plainly tells the story of how he got into the liquor business but his journey is truly impressive-from running a moonshine still to founding Stranahan's, Colorado's first legal whiskey distillery since Prohibition. It is also now the largest American single malt brand in the country.

He grew up in the midwest and first came west as a kid on camping trips with his father. After college he made a beeline for Colorado and eventually landed in Nederland - a tiny, wind‑whipped town above Boulder where a guy known only as Larry the Missouri River Rat gave him a still for making alcohol.

"We'd boil up some corn… cook it off, and everybody'd be your friend," Graber says. "Nobody died, so I consider that my first successful distillation."

His early setups were improvised and jury rigged. Graber used flour‑and‑water paste to seal the cap of the still and built a gravity‑fed condenser with a plumber friend. He then filtered the alcohol through a clean sock holding charcoal. "I thought I was a genius," he says. "A freakin' genius." He made liquor because it was fun and handed out jars as Christmas presents. Colorado in the 1970s, he says, "was more about hippie lettuce than moonshine," but people liked what he made.

The turning point in his career and life happened in 1998, when the barn of George Stranahan caught fire. Stranahan was the founder of the acclaimed Flying Dog Brewery and a longtime Woody Creek fixture. Graber, who served as a volunteer firefighter at the time, helped put out the blaze. Stranahan offered him space in an unused room on the property to run a batch of his "hobby whiskey." One day, Graber discovered a couple kegs of Flying Dog Beer that had gone flat. "I dumped those into the still and immediately the cartoon light bulb went off," he said. The resulting spirit "was a lot smoother. A lot cleaner." It reminded him of how Cognac and brandy makers distill wine rather than grape juice. "A refined whiskey mash," he says. "Now, I've got it."

While all whiskey is made from unhopped beer, by letting Flying Dog make the so-called wash produced a softer, more polished spirit, which was something Graber couldn't replicate in his own makeshift setup.

When the brewery later moved its operations from Aspen to Denver, Graber proposed building a whiskey distillery next door, so he could keep using their beer as his base. "I beat on him for about a year," Graber says. Eventually he made a promise: "I'll name that whiskey Stranahan's." They struck a deal and Graber decided to make a single malt whiskey from mash of barley and aged in charred new American oak barrels. "Nobody had ever built that mousetrap before," he says.

Getting the distillery open was another matter. Denver's bureaucracy fought him for two years. "They tortured me," he says. "They thought I was going to burn the world down." Keeping the project alive took everything he had. Over the years he mortgaged his house - twice - to keep the distillery moving forward.

Related: Meet the Man Building the Next Era of American Single Malt Whiskey

After going through all of that, Graber didn't have the money to buy a fancy and automated bottling line, so for years local volunteers hand‑filled and hand‑labeled every bottle. "Bring your friends," Graber told his crew. "We'll pay them with a bottle of whiskey." Not only did it solve his bottling problem but created an immediate connection with the community. Soon the company had a waiting list of thousands of people who wanted to attend a bottling party. It was an inadvertent and incredibly successful marketing campaign.

Selling the whiskey meant driving across the entire state with cases in his truck. "I was literally Johnny Appleseed," he remembers. Then Republic National Distributing brought all its reps to tour the distillery. The next day they ordered 13 pallets - nearly a year's worth of production. "We better start bottling again," Graber remembers thinking.

What made Stranahan's resonate wasn't marketing; it was identity. "Colorado needed a whiskey," Graber says. "Our forebears - the cowboys, the miners - they wanted a strong spirit at the end of the day." He talks about the Westerns he grew up on - the ones where a man walked into a saloon, dust on his boots, and ordered something that didn't need explaining.

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But for all the whiskey tough guy talk, barley gave the whiskey a softer profile than corn, and people noticed. Drinkers who didn't usually reach for whiskey found themselves responding to it - the roundness, the clarity, the lack of burn. "It tasted familiar, but different," Graber says. That difference helped Stranahan's stand out long before American single malt had a formal definition and the category gained momentum.

Graber also learned lessons from Kentucky's biggest brands. He spent time with the old guard, absorbing the way they thought about barrels, proof, and patience. "Those guys have forgotten more than I'll ever know," he says. Among the mentors he learned from was Jimmy Russell - the legendary master distiller at Wild Turkey, a man whose career spans more than seventy years. "Jimmy Russell said, ‘hey, you did good, man,'" Graber says. Coming from Russell, that meant something.

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Stranahan's grew far beyond the little Denver distillery where it started. It's now part of Proximo Spirits (which is owned by Jose Cuervo), and production has expanded dramatically - from volunteer bottling parties (they do still have some) to a modern operation that ships nationwide and anchors Colorado's reputation in American single malt. The distillery's current Head Blender, Justin Aden, is pushing the whiskey into its next era with a level of precision Graber never had access to in the early days: controlled fermentation, targeted barrel selection, and a deeper exploration of what Colorado's altitude and climate can do to a spirit. The portfolio has also grown from just one single malt expression to a whole portfolio of sought-after whiskies, including the annual limited-edition Diamond Peek, which is aged in different types of barrels. Graber likes seeing that evolution. "They're doing things we couldn't have imagined," he says. "And it's still Colorado whiskey."

This story was originally published by Men's Journal on Jul 8, 2026, where it first appeared in the Drink section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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This story was originally published July 8, 2026 at 8:21 AM.