Heather Shade
Heather Lynn Shade was born in September of 1978. She came to whiskey from a background far removed from Kentucky rickhouses and copper stills. Before becoming an Alaska distillery owner, Shade earned a Master's degree in natural resource management from the University of Idaho, then a degree in Forest Management from Northern Arizona University.
After college, she worked for the Colorado Outward Bound School, then she was a biologist with the National Park Service. Those jobs involved work that included spending weeks at a time in the backcountry. Enjoying the relative peace and isolation, Shade eventually made Alaska her home. It was there that she met carpenter Sean Copeland in a tiny Alaska hamlet called Haines. Before long, the two became husband and wife, and then business partners. Both wanted to remain in Haines, and they shared an interest in owning a business, while Shade had developed a particular interest in craft beverages.
In 2012, Shade and Copeland founded Port Chilkoot Distillery, establishing what became Alaska's first whiskey distillery. They chose a location at Haines' historic Fort William H. Seward, where they restored the former fort bakery, a building dating to 1904. Their planning was methodical. Shade and Copeland worked with the Alaska Small Business Development Center on a business plan and financial projections, secured assistance for restoration of the historic building and arranged financing for distilling equipment. Their application for an Alaska distillery license was before the Haines Borough in 2012, and by 2013 Port Chilkoot was producing spirits commercially. Whiskey was part of the plan from the beginning, but the distillery also produced gin and vodka.
The arrangement between the founders made use of two markedly different backgrounds. Copeland brought professional carpentry and construction experience to a business that required the rehabilitation of an old building and the installation of specialized production equipment. Shade brought her scientific training to fermentation, distillation and product development while increasingly assuming a prominent role in the business side of the operation. The distillery milled its own organic grain and developed a production system suited to small-batch spirits in an isolated coastal community. In whiskey production, Port Chilkoot fermented and distilled its bourbon through a copper pot still and matured the spirit in new charred American oak.
One of Shade's most consequential early contributions occurred outside the stillhouse. Alaska law initially prevented craft distilleries from selling their spirits directly to customers at their production sites, a serious disadvantage for a small distillery located in a tourism-dependent town. Shade helped organize Alaska's small group of distillers, tourism organizations and chambers of commerce behind legislation allowing distillery tasting rooms. She testified before the Alaska Legislature in support of House Bill 309 in April 2014, arguing that direct interaction with visitors was important to the growth of small specialty distilleries. The legislation changed the operating environment, and Port Chilkoot opened its tasting room later that year. Shade also became the founding president of the Distillers Guild of Alaska, serving as its president from 2014 through 2017.
The timing was important for Port Chilkoot's whiskey. During the tasting room's first year, the distillery expanded beyond its initial spirits and introduced two whiskeys; its small-batch bourbon was commercially available by 2015. The bourbon was made in Haines from grain through distillation and barrel aging, and its quality quickly received outside recognition. Port Chilkoot Bourbon earned a bronze medal at the American Distilling Institute competition in 2016. For a young distillery operating more than two thousand miles from the traditional center of American bourbon production, the award gave Shade and Copeland independent confirmation that their whiskey program could compete beyond Alaska.
Shade continued to strengthen the business side of the distillery as production grew. Port Chilkoot was selected as a 2014 winner of Southeast Alaska's Path to Prosperity business competition, receiving a $40,000 award for technical assistance and consulting. Shade later attended the University of Washington's Michael G. Foster School of Business, completing its Minority Business Executive Program in 2016. The additional business training complemented the scientific approach she had brought from biology and natural-resource work. It also came as Port Chilkoot was moving beyond the difficulties of simply establishing a remote craft distillery and confronting the problems of expanding production, distribution and tourism. At the same time, whiskey production expanded beyond bourbon. Port Chilkoot developed Wrack Line Rye with a mash bill containing 70 percent rye grain. The whiskey begins with small-batch grain-to-barrel distillations in Haines and matures there for at least three years before those barrels are combined with straight rye whiskey produced in Indiana. Wrack Line earned a silver medal from the American Distilling Institute in 2018 and a bronze medal at the American Craft Spirits Awards in 2020. The distillery likewise evolved its bourbon into Boatwright Bourbon, combining its own grain-to-barrel Alaska straight bourbon with straight bourbon made in Kentucky. The decision preserved Port Chilkoot's own distilling as part of the whiskey while giving the finished blend another component from America's established bourbon region.
Making that Alaska component is an exercise in both traditional bourbon production and remote logistics. Port Chilkoot sources organic, certified non-GMO corn that travels north by barge through the Inside Passage. The distillers cook and openly ferment the mash, distill on the grain and employ batch double distillation. After distillation, the bourbon is reduced to barrel strength with water from the glacier-fed mountains surrounding Haines and matured in the distillery's own barrel house. Southeast Alaska's weather and substantial changes in barometric pressure give Shade a maturation environment distinctly different from the familiar warehouses in any other state.
The growth of Shade’s and Copeland’s distillery soon required more room. By 2019, Port Chilkoot was moving ahead with construction of a new 3,300-square-foot production and warehouse building while planning to devote its original building more fully to the tasting room, offices and storage. The expansion increased the physical separation between manufacturing and hospitality and provided greater capacity for a business that had grown well beyond its startup scale. By 2022, Port Chilkoot was producing about 18,000 bottles annually and was working to double production while expanding its tasting room and reaching markets outside Alaska.
Port Chilkoot Distillery has consequently changed considerably from the small distillery they established in 2012. Boatwright Bourbon now represents both sides of Port Chilkoot's whiskey identity: bourbon made from grain to barrel in Southeast Alaska blended with Kentucky straight bourbon, while Wrack Line Rye follows a similar philosophy built around Port Chilkoot's own aged rye. The company has even extended the life of its bourbon barrels by using emptied Boatwright barrels to mature other spirits, while a limited Old School Whiskey is aged for three years in used Boatwright barrels. Through all of those changes, whiskey production has remained rooted in Haines, where Shade transformed scientific training, business education and more than a decade of distilling experience into one of Alaska's longest-established craft spirits businesses.
Sources
Port Chilkoot Distillery official website, portchilkootdistillery.com
Alaska Small Business Development Center, “Port Chilkoot Distillery,” November 4, 2013, aksbdc.org
Alaska State Legislature, “House Bill 309, Senate Labor and Commerce Committee Meeting,” April 16, 2014, akleg.gov
Alaska Public Media, “Haines Distillery Finds Its Niche with Tasting Room, Bang-Up Cocktails,” Jillian Rogers, November 16, 2015, alaskapublic.org
KHNS Radio, “Port Chilkoot Distillery Wins National Awards,” Emily Files, April 13, 2016, khns.org
Spruce Root, “Port Chilkoot Distillery”, spruceroot.org
University of Washington Michael G. Foster School of Business, “Foster Business Magazine,” 2020, foster.uw.edu
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee
