Booze, Farm Animals, and Radiology Intersect at This Canadian Craft Distillery
Photos by Johnny CY Lam.

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Booze, Farm Animals, and Radiology Intersect at This Canadian Craft Distillery

We hung out with radiologist and distillery owner Peter Stroz at his 66 Gilead distillery in Prince Edward County and drank a lot of Canadian shochu.

The intersection of hard liquor and modern medicine is rarely a good place to be.

It's the kind of overlap that usually conjures up images of an emergency room on Saint Patrick's Day, an X-ray of your liver, or the latest headline about the ills of alcohol.

But at 66 Gilead Distillery in Prince Edward County, Ontario, these worlds collide in a far more harmonious way. Chickens and other farm animals run freely, while whiskey, rum, vodka, gin, brandy, and shochu boil away in towering copper stills.

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All photos by Johnny CY Lam.

"I would treat my patients the same way I treat this business—it's all attention to detail and trying to do the absolute best wherever you can," says radiologist and owner Peter Stroz, who, sensing a growing demand for spirits, bought an 80-acre farm and opened 66 Gilead with his wife Sophia, also a radiologist.

"I'm a city boy. I grew up in Toronto, and we purchased the farm here about ten years ago. We saw a big wave of craft distilleries in the US, and we saw that wave coming to Canada. We wanted to be the first to bring it to Ontario, which was drearily lacking in spirits."

Gilead 66 owner Peter Stroz.

Stroz and Pantazi still work full-time as doctors in Toronto, but on weekends they put on their booze-making hats and head for the country, which can be a welcome break not only from city life, but also from the medical practice.

"People come in with illness and sickness. They're in pain and you're trying to alleviate that pain," Stroz confesses. "Then when you come here to the farm, people are buying alcohol and want to party and have a good time and celebrate. So it's a nice balance between those two things. I get a lot of satisfaction from treating people and making them better, but they're generally not coming to me because they're well."

That's not to say that these two occupations are unrelated. If anything, Stroz says, approaching spirits with the same rigour and discipline with which he approaches radiology was a huge advantage.

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"Having a science background was critical. Understanding all of the science about the mash, the fermentation process, sterilizing, and keeping things clean are all crucial to the process. Even the science of the barrel, from the woods, to temperature. As a scientist, there are always things that you can learn and fine tune."

Part of that spirit of experimentation (pardon the pun) can be found in products like their Black and White Dragon shochus.

"A lot of shochus that you get here are a little rough. We do ours in a Japanese style, as opposed to Korean, which is a little more elegant and balanced. We definitely see a market it for it, it's something that we thought was missing, and can supply for our own purposes. My wife and I enjoy Asian cuisine a great deal and it pairs quite nicely with it. We definitely have to like the product before we start producing it on a larger scale."

It's not always easy for businesses to integrate into Prince Edward County, a community that is just getting used to a huge influx of wine-drinking tourists from Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. But Stroz and Pantazi have integrated with local vineyards, barrel-makers, sugar shacks, and farmers.

"66 Gilead is about respecting the history of who was here before, but also the planet in general. We maintain sustainability by not wasting anything. We try to use County grains wherever we can and we use the limestone filtered water here, which is perfect for our product. And with the leftover grains we give them to a cattle farmer nearby who feeds his livestock."

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Another way of giving props to the County's is by paying homage to its rich, and occasionally dark, history.

Gilead's Loyalist Gin is a reference to the United Empire Loyalists who settled in the area after the American Revolution and were each given upward of 200 acres of land on the King's soil, in exchange for their loyalty to the Monarchy. "We thought, 'What would a loyalist have found in this area to make a gin?' So we foraged around the area to find the botanicals that went into this gin, as a way of paying homage to the ancestors of the County."

Prince Edward County for Vice Magazine

A second tip of the hat to the County's storied past is 66 Gilead's Duck Island rum. It's named after the nearby island through which bootleggers would move boatloads of rum and whiskey to the US under the cover of darkness.

"The most notorious rum runners during Prohibition had their headquarters on Duck Island, which is just off the coast of Prince Edward County," Stroz recounts. "It's only about 13 miles from that island to the US border. We've had relatives of these rum runners visit here, they were all over the County. It's part of the history of this area, they used to load up boats with rum and race them across the US border, because we're so close."

The County's Prohibition-era shenanigans might evoke images of Roaring Twenties prosperity and laissez-faire, but nothing could be further from the reality facing current-day distillers—the province of Ontario's Alcohol and Gaming Commission has been notoriously reluctant in letting craft spirit makers flourish.

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"We're not treated equally," Stroz says. "Spirits are treated as the lost cousin and have the highest taxation and the most regulations of any alcohol. We're not allowed to sell directly to restaurants, and our products have to go through the [state-owned liquor monopoly] LCBO. It really inhibits you from doing your business."

But one thing that hasn't changed since the Prohibition, according to Stroz, is the quality of Canadian whiskey.

"Canada produced the finest whiskey in the world—everybody wanted Crown Royal and Canadian Club. Unfortunately, our Canadian whiskey makers aren't owned by Canadians anymore, they were all sold to multinationals. But we Canadians have the best stuff; the greatest water, these massive forests, and the greatest grains. We—not the Scottish guys—make the greatest whiskey in the world, so let us go and do it!"

Still, Stroz's weekday job as a diagnostic and therapeutic radiologist allows him to stay focused on the bigger picture.

"I see so many people—and it sort of wears on you—that say, 'I wish I'd done this,' or 'I wish I'd had the opportunity to do that.' We're only here for a short period of time. This is definitely hard work, but it depends on your outlook, you have to embrace it. Enjoy every minute. You really have to."