Founder and
master distiller
The person who walks the hills with the basket.
Our master distiller, Ryan Max Riley, makes the gins and rums by hand, with exceptional and uncompromising care.
He grew up in the mountains of Colorado, spent years as a skier on the U.S. Ski Team, and forages many of the botanicals that go into Forager gins and rums himself, in the mountains of the Berkshires.
A decade on snow
Moguls, on the World Cup tour — a discipline of small corrections made at speed. In a roundabout way, that's where the rums began.
They were built for the drinks you want at the end of a day on the ski slopes: hot buttered rum, toddies, eggnog. The spiced rum starts with black peppercorn rather than finishing with it, then cinnamon and clove — people tell us, without being asked, that it smells like Christmas. The silver rum is made with a dark, rich sugar that smells like the woods: earthy, deep with brown sugar, a note of banana behind it. Rum as it tasted in the distant past, rather than the light, sweet style the category settled into.
Why we gather
The other half of a life spent outdoors. Years in the mountains in every season teach you what grows where, and when — and from there it's a short step to wondering what a spirit made from it would taste like.
Most of what makes our gin distinctive is picked within a few miles of the distillery, by hand, in the few weeks each year when it's worth picking. Ground ivy in April. Elderflower in late summer. Wild strawberries in July, which take many days to gather enough of. Rose hip and blackberry through the autumn; spruce tips and black birch at the cold end of winter.
The seasonal gins aren't a marketing structure. They're what happens when you distill what's actually available — and the reason the gin tastes different in April than it does in November.
Come and say hello
Ryan is usually at the distillery when we're open, and glad to talk about any of it — the still, the foraging, what's in the glass.
