craft district: A destination for drinks, with a side of education, at Tumwater’s new craft district

June 4, 2021
By Kristine Sherred

With the opening of Heritage Distilling Company’s tasting room and bar, the South Sound has a stunning new craft beverage destination that, by next year, will add an eater’s paradise and an amphitheater.

The Gig Harbor-based spirits producer officially opens Friday, June 4 at the Tumwater Craft District, a multi-faceted project — five years in the making — on Capitol Boulevard, with a tree-lined view of the old Olympia Brewing facility.

Heritage shares the building with South Puget Sound Community College, whose two-year Craft Brewing and Distilling associate degree program will offer highly specialized, hands-on training for the next generation of brewers, distillers, wine and cider makers.

“The site will be very active, very lively, and should be a cornerstone for activity,” said Heritage CEO Justin Stiefel.

Over 11,000 square feet and three floors, the Tumwater distillery experience offers three distinct spaces for the public to enjoy an array of gins, whiskeys, flavored vodkas, aquavit and more. However, Heritage will retain its 67,000 square feet of warehouse and offices, as well as its waterfront tasting room, in Gig Harbor. The company also has a large production facility in Eugene, Oregon, plus tasting rooms in Roslyn and Seattle.

Enter through the Tumwater retail hub, stocked with mixers, bottled cocktails and Heritage’s famous wall of Spirits Growlers — a proprietary draft system that lets guests fill growlers with housemade spirits, straight from the tap.

To your left, kick back with a cocktail or a spirit flight in the bar area — with a full view, through floor-to-ceiling glass, of the soon-to-be-working distillery below.

To your right, step into another seating area with a wall of windows that opens up to a terrace overlooking the forthcoming amphitheater, expected to seat 1,500 to 2,000 ticketed guests, according to Stiefel.

“We think this is gonna be one of the prime, A-1 locations for those concerts,” he said.

Head down to the second floor for a more intimate experience, also with views of the distillery.

The walls lined with miniature barrels, the “cask library” will add another 560 spots to Heritage’s popular Cask Club, said chief marketing officer Hannah Hanley. Since launching in 2012, the program has grown to 1,200 members: Choose a bottle, age and fill bottles (at an additional but discounted cost) as desired, or enjoy on-site.

For now, this room will remain open to everyone.

A common hallway joins Heritage to the community college, equipped with a state-of-the-art facility for brewing, wine and cidermaking, and distilling — in sustainable fashion, too, with equipment that saves up to 33 percent more water than typical and that captures carbon dioxide, naturally emitted during grain fermentation.

Led by program director Frank Addeo, the Craft District site is the only one of its kind in the country, according to college president Timothy Stokes.

In addition to hands-on production, students will have access to a “quiet room” for sensory studying, tasting and blending and a full yeast library.

Stokes is particularly thrilled to house the Northwest’s only quality assurance facility for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the agency responsible for approving alcoholic beverage recipes and labels. Currently, producers in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana are likely to send applications to California.

“This will give us the specialization,” said Stokes. “We’re pretty excited about that lab.”

Stiefel pointed to the collaboration as unique because after students get to know the small-batch equipment on the college side, they can spend time with bigger equipment on the Heritage side. Then, he added, they can drive 20 minutes south to Talking Cedar, a joint distillery, brewery and restaurant with the Chehalis Tribe that opened in June 2020.

In Tumwater, the city has invested in the now-open Craft District. Other buildings planned for the site just off Exit 103 on Interstate 5 will begin construction later this year. Ninkasi Brewing, based in Eugene, Oregon, will open a brewery and taproom by next spring, while a “maker’s market” will include a coffee shop and bakery by Olympia’s Left Bank Pastry.

HERITAGE DISTILLING AT TUMWATER CRAFT DISTRICT

▪ 4200 Capitol Blvd. SE, Tumwater, tumwatercraftdistrict.com

▪ Heritage Distilling Co. tasting room open daily noon to 7 p.m., heritagedistilling.com

▪ Grand opening celebration at 2:30 p.m. Friday, June 4, with ribbon-cutting ceremony, bagpipers and a blessing of the building

This article originally appeared in the Tacoma News Tribune.