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Chef Angus McIntosh leads
a cooking demonstration
at the Cheyenne Club.Brush Creek’s herd of Wagyu cattle,
humanely raised to supply the kitchen.mountain climate with a short growing season.
The reason is the 20,000-square-foot trio of
greenhouses run by Serge Boon, a man whose
excitement for raising vegetables I found
comparable to most people’s excitement at the
birth of a second or third child. Happily leading
us around his passion project, Boon showed
off its hydroponic system by pulling up a head
of lettuce. Its roots were dripping, having been
watered by the pipes that run through the
operation. They reduced water usage by 90
percent, he explained, by recirculating it instead
of just spraying it on the plants.
Between meals and tastings, Sherry and I
tried to sneak back to our cabin as much as
possible. (We stayed at the Lodge & Spa, a T+L
World’s Best Award winner, which is one of three
properties in the Brush Creek Luxury Ranch
Collection; the adults-only Magee Homestead,
which occupies a cluster of early-20th-century
log cabins, and the French Creek Sportsmen’s
Club, which focuses on hunting and fishing, are
short drives away.) Our windows offered aJust as accessible is the team behind the
beverages—and there are many beverages
to try. Wine director Gretchen Allen guided
us through a tasting tour of the cellar, which
houses one of America’s largest collections
of Bordeaux wines. In the Spirit Vault, bar
manager Matthew Sandoval encouraged us
to sniff Macallan 25 from a distance, since,
as he explained, putting your nose in a glass
of whiskey risks burning out your nostrils.
Back upstairs, I asked head distiller Stephen
Julander why we were using what appeared to
be a nozzle from a gas pump to transport newly
fermented rum from the vat into an oak barrel.
“It just seemed like a good way to get it into
the barrel,” he said.
Julander, who mixes recipes for bourbon,
rye, and rum beneath a towering copper
still, suggested we hold our palms over a vat of
fermenting corn. (Julander named the still
Esther, after Esther Hobart Morris, America’s
first female justice of the peace, who served in
Wyoming.) He explained that the heat we felt
was the CO 2 bubbling off the yeast. Then he
pried open a barrel of partially distilled whiskey
to show us how it was doing, three months into
a multiyear process. It tasted sharper and less
forgiving than the finished product, and had a
surprisingly lighter color. I left the distillery
excited to have hours’ worth of trivia with
which to exasperate my friends the next time
we cracked open a bottle of bourbon.
Most of the produce at the Farm is grown on
site, year-round, despite its being located in aThe Spirit
Vault stocks
more than
100 whiskeys
from around
the world.TAL0620_E_BrushCreek.indd 49 FINAL 4/21/20 7:03 PM