Dean Browne of Rowhouse Spirits on distilling liquors, including 'Irish moonshine'

Even though we're a far cry from Prohibition, state regulations governing hard-liquor distillation make it a costly and difficult-to-practice endeavor.

Dean Browne with the hybrid batch still he uses at his distillery in East Kensington.
Hillary Petrozziello

Even though we're a far cry from Prohibition, state regulations governing hard-liquor distillation make it a costly and difficult-to-practice endeavor. Despite this, ex-brewer Dean Browne, 49, launched Rowhouse Spirits to great acclaim in August. City Paper caught up with him at Rowhouse's cozy home (a small red warehouse on Frankford Avenue in East Kensington) to talk about distilling versus brewing, why he chose to make the liquor he makes and where he sees his enterprise going.

City Paper: How did the idea for a craft distillery come together?
Dean Browne: I'd been doing amateur and professional beer brewing off-and-on since the '80s. Around 2003, I decided that brewing was becoming old-hat and I wanted to see what it would take to be a distiller. I started investigating that with a weeklong workshop, where I visited three distilling companies in New England to learn about the technology. I self-studied over the last 10 years while I was working at IBM as a product manager. After they laid me off in 2013, I just decided to move forward with this.

CP: How do distilling processes compare to brewing ones?
DB: A lot of the technology is the same, it's just the additional step of distilling and aging. So, you have to make beer or wine in order to make any alcohol — whiskey, brandy, vodka, etc. — and then distilling is essentially the process of separating ethanol and water and the other materials by boiling them and collecting them at different times. The art is in the way you collect those materials.

CP: So these are similar processes, but does distilling have any hidden challenges?
DB: Yeah, capital cost is a lot higher and it's hard to get experience. It's illegal for anybody who doesn't have a license to produce even a drop of hard alcohol for home use. It ends up in a $10,000 fine and five years in federal prison. You can do home-brewing for decades on your own and there are tons of resources out there to support it, but very little to support distilling.

CP: Is getting that license difficult?
DB: It can be, depending on what state you're in. One of the reasons I didn't try to do this earlier is because the license I have — which regulates smaller distilleries like this — was only created in 2012. Before that, you had to pay $10,000 to be a distillery and the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board [PLCB] really frowned on issuing those licenses anyway, and you couldn't sell direct to customers, only through the PLCB. ... This new license allows me to sell direct to customers, bars and PLCB-owned stores.

CP: Describe the three liquors that you make.
DB: There's the Poitín [pronounced pau-CHEEN], a white whiskey. "Poitín" is a Gaelic word, which means "small pots" — it's what the Irish called their moonshine. Also, the gin [we make] is very full-flavored, has a lot of botanicals and a little bit over-proof. It's very smooth, goes great with cocktails. And the last one is the Bear Trap, which is an herbal liqueur, a digestive, to sip after a meal. It's good in a hot toddy or some other hot drink.

CP: Did you choose these three products for any specific reason?
DB: Yeah, I need to make money! (laughs) Because if I age something — like most popular liquors — then I need to sit around for years for them to be ready, and I didn't have the capital to do that starting out. I wanted to get high-quality products on the market that I could turn around in a couple of weeks to sell. But I shouldn't discount it — I really love the cultural aspects of what I make. For instance, the Poitín ... in Ireland, it was traditionally used as medicine, and called "holy water" (laughs). So there are a lot of cultural ties there.

CP: So where do you see things going?
DB: I'm experimenting with a few things, like a barrel-aged gin and a malt whiskey. My first partnership release is with Earth Bread + Brewery in Mt. Airy — we'll be making a rum. And this year, I piloted a fruit brandy made from pawpaw fruit, unique to the Mid-Atlantic that was harvested wild in Fairmount Park. I'm also working with the PLCB [Pennsylvania Liquor Contol Board] to get the gin into stores around the area.