A Bottle Worth Buying: Copperworks, Farmsmith, and Spokane’s Fire Relief Fund

I don’t usually turn a product release into a blog post. But Copperworks Distilling has earned an exception, in part because of how the company keeps showing up when a community needs something.

Copperworks’ newest release in its Farmsmith single malt series is a study in provenance. The whiskey is distilled from barley grown at Coulee Hite Farms in Reardan, a hot, dry stretch of country about twenty miles west of Spokane, then malted just up the road by LINC Malt in Spokane itself. It is, in other words, a whiskey that can name its own field. Steinbeck wrote about California’s Salinas Valley as a place where the land and the people who worked it were inseparable; the same could be said of Eastern Washington’s barley country, where a single farm, a single growing year, and a single malt house can still be traced from grain to glass.

That traceability matters more than usual with this release, because $20 from every bottle sold goes to Spokane’s H.O.M.E. Starts Here Fire Relief Fund. The City of Spokane activated the fund, ordinarily used to support people experiencing homelessness, to help residents recovering from this year’s wildfires. It is a modest ask as fundraising goes: buy a bottle you might have bought anyway, and twenty dollars of it goes somewhere useful. You can also donate to the fund directly, whether or not whiskey is your thing.

Small businesses do not have unlimited goodwill to spend, and Copperworks has been selective about where it spends its own. Watching a Seattle distillery route part of its most acclaimed product line toward relief for a community three hundred miles away, one it has no obvious business reason to support, is the kind of thing worth a moment’s notice and, I’d argue, a bottle.

Where to buy, and where to give directly:

• H.O.M.E. Starts Here Fire Relief Fund — City of Spokane
• Donate directly
• Copperworks Farmsmith release