Author: Erin

Last night, Founding Spirits was mixing it up and toasting to another great DC restaurant year with the DMVs best and most festive foodies at the annual RAMMY Awards Gala.

Our team was on site serving our Cucumber Delight, a light and refreshing mix of our award winning Founding Spirits Vodka and Domaine de Canton, cucumber, cantaloupe, and lemon. As one of our most famous Founding Farmers cocktails, also available at Farmers & Distillers, Cucumber Delight has quite a fan club, and last night was no different.

What was different about last night, however, was the interest and excitement around an effort our parent company, Farmers Restaurant Group, is leading: Our Last Straw.

A coalition of restaurants, bars, cafes, and hotels, Our Last Straw is working to eliminate plastic straws in the DMV and reduce our reliance on all single-use plastics. As leaders in this effort, we brought our team, including our mascot – Eddy, the Turtle – to the RAMMYS to bring awareness to this issue and encourage other partnerships across DC’s hospitality industry.

President & CEO of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, Kathy Hollinger, welcomed the efforts of Farmers Restaurant Group and Our Last Straw announcing that everyone in the industry needs to work together to 86 plastic straws, starting at last night’s gala – where no plastic straws were served – to which the crowd, in excess of 2,400 people, applauded.

Yesterday afternoon, Founding Spirits welcomed the latest addition to our Farmers Restaurant Group family: our 18-wheeler, owned and operated by our co-owners at the North Dakota Farmers Union. Our truck will be used to deliver family-farmed ingredients directly to our restaurants.

The largest commodity of yesterday’s delivery was the wheat we use to distill our award-winning Founding Spirits Vodka. Known as the aristocrat of wheat, this Hard Red Spring Wheat is harvested right on the family farm of Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union.

Watne was there to receive the truck, along with Co-Owner Dan Simons and our Distillery Manager, Bob VanLancker. A few other friends helped us meet the truck as well, including Roger Johnson from the National Farmers Union and members of the Keany Produce & Gourmet family and team who help us distribute to all of our restaurants.

Everyone said a few words, and then we celebrated the big day with tasty treats at the Farmers & Distillers bar overlooking our still.

Founding Spirits was simultaneously hosting a tasting of our spirits, which now have earned four prestigious international awards. If you are interested in trying our craft spirits, Farmers & Distillers is hosting tastings every week, Monday thru Thursday, from 4-6pm.

Founding Spirits brought home another major award last week. Our Founding Spirits American Amaro received a SILVER medal from the 2018 San Francisco World Spirits Competition.

San Francisco’s highly competitive event, which launched such spirits as Tito’s Handmade Vodka, brought together distillers from all over the world. More than 2,200 spirits were judged, the largest number of entries in their 18-year history.

Our Amaro apparently stole the show, making for another sweet stop on Jon Arroyo’s journey to change the intimidating and bitter reputation of traditional Amaro. In fact, it is an essential ingredient in many of our favorite craft cocktails.

Farmers & Distillers is currently serving up delicious amaro cocktails, and many enjoy our amaro straight up over ice. All of our sibling restaurants, Founding Farmers and Farmers Fishers Bakers, also serve amaro in their drink specialties.

We invite you to stop by any of our restaurants for a taste of this Silver, Gold, and Best of 2018 award winner. Or buy a bottle to enjoy at home. Founding Spirits can be purchased at Farmers & Distillers and at multiple local retailers. Our craft spirits can also be ordered online.

The city’s Best New American Restaurant joined Taste of Shaw at the Howard Theater last week with one of our favorite craft cocktails featuring Founding Spirits. The Farmers & Distillers crew was in the house mixing our American Whiskey Buck, a smooth blend of Founding Spirits American Whiskey, lemon, ginger, and cane syrup.

This Shaw neighborhood annual celebration brings together a who’s who of DC’s thriving dining scene. Guests enjoyed unlimited sips and noshes throughout the evening from over 20 local restaurants and bars, plus dancing to live music by internationally-renowned Ethiopian artist Yehunie Belay and his band.

It was a very festive night to celebrate the amazing Shaw neighborhood, which won the 2016 Great American Main Street Award, the country’s Oscar for community leadership in renewing traditional downtown areas across the U.S. Proceeds from the event support the continued economic revitalization and preservation of Shaw Main Streets, which has helped bring about the transformation of this historic DC neighborhood since 2003.

Founding Spirits joins our company wins as DC’s Best.

Founding Farmers Bloody Mary was named DC’s Best. Made with our Founding Spirits award-winning craft vodka, we have to agree it is the Best Bloody Mary in town.

In addition, the home of our distillery, Farmers & Distillers, won Best New American Restaurant and Founding Farmers DC won Best Downtown Lunch spot.

These are three pretty awesome bests for Farmers Restaurant Group. Founding Spirits is delighted to have contributed. It means a lot to us that Washington City Paper readers themselves are the ones voting for us as their favorites.

Thanks to our neighbors across DC. We will keep distilling, mixing, and serving you our best.

On April 9^th, Founding Spirits joined 80 DC-area restaurants at Taste of the Nation.

Founding Spirits was featured in the VIP Lounge. Our expert mixologists were mixing and serving our Suffering Candidate, a smoky, yet refreshing craft cocktail made with our Founding Farmers Rye Whisky. Farmers & Distillers was also there, serving one of our guest favorites, our delicious Crunchy Ahi Tuna Bites.

Taste of the Nation, held at the National Building Museum in downtown DC, is the culinary event organized by Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign that highlights the nation’s finest talent in the food and drink industry, all united under one roof for one cause: ending childhood hunger.

In the U.S., one in six children struggle with hunger. No Kid Hungry unites teachers, chefs, community leaders, parents, lawmakers, and CEOs to help solve childhood hunger. They work to connect kids in need with nutritious food, including teaching families to learn how to cook healthy, affordable meals.

No Kid Hungry has fed 775 million meals to children, a remarkable milestone made possible from fundraising events like Taste of the Nation.

For those interested, they always welcome individual donations too.

We have big news for our baby distillery. Founding Spirits received three major international distilling awards at the American Distilling Institute’s (ADI) 2018 Craft Spirits Conference: a GOLD medal for our Founding Spirits American Amaro, a BRONZE medal for our Founding Spirits Vodka, and ADI’s Best of 2018 win in the Certified Craft Blended Spirit category.

To guests in our restaurants – Founding Farmers, Farmers & Distillers, Farmers Fishers Bakers – our spirits have a become well-known and beloved by many on our drinks menu. Our craft vodka is a favorite in many of our handmade cocktails. We are all thrilled to be recognized beyond our walls for how we have taken our company’s scratch-made mission and craft cocktail wizardry into distilling some very tasty and apparently award-winning spirits. We think this is a pretty big deal for our barely-a-year-old distillery.

Known as The Voice of Craft Distilling, every year the American Distilling Institute (ADI) hosts a Judging of Craft Spirits, which includes U.S. and international entries in a range of categories. In addition to being named ADI’s Best of 2018, our Founding Spirits American Amaro won GOLD in the Certified Craft Blended Spirit category for an herbal/botanical/spice liqueur; and our Founding Spirits Vodka won BRONZE in the Certified Distilled Spirit vodka category.

Our Founding Spirits team was excited to venture west to Portland, OR to receive these prestigious awards. They had the opportunity to meet and share distilling tales with craft distillers from across the globe. This included a lot of discussions about the latest and greatest in distilling, and of course, a bit of sipping and sampling too.   

The American Distilling Institute is dedicated to running rigorous and professional spirit judging that strives to promote craft distillers and blenders that are producing the finest quality, artisan spirits and to give participating producers valuable, unbiased, third-party feedback on the quality and process of their spirits. Their annual judging program accepts entries in all classes and categories of craft spirits from small, independently owned distillers, blenders, bitters makers, and producers of aperitif and fortified wines. U.S. and international entries are tasted blind and evaluated by expert panels of judges made up of distillers, journalists, bar owners, bartenders, retailers, wholesalers, distributors, and importers. All spirits entered receive written tasting notes and are considered for awards both for the spirit itself and the packaging.