“Probably Not the Best Location for a Craft Distillery”
Two of the most interesting brandies in the country are coming from a small town in Nebraska
The chokecherry comes by its name honestly. “You get lots of tannins, lots of acid there,” says Ryan Hanzlick, master distiller at Long Dogs Distilling in Arapahoe, Nebraska. “That’s why it’s called a chokecherry, because if you eat one by itself, it might choke you.” Plus, the native berry is mostly pit.
Still, it’s a nostalgic flavor for many people on the Plains. It’s been part of Native American diets for millennia, and European-American settlers adapted it for their palates by adding heaps of granulated sugar, using it in jams, jellies, syrups, and wines.
In south-central Nebraska, roughly halfway between Omaha and Denver, Hanzlick is practicing a different kind of chokecherry alchemy: He’s making brandy.
Hanzlick came to Arapahoe in 2020, after he and his wife, Victoria, bought the Shady Rest Motel, which shares a parking lot with the distillery. The distillery opened in 2021. “It’s a small farming town,” he says. “It’s probably not the best location for a craft distillery.”
But it’s the right place to be when he needs 4,000 pounds of wild-harvested chokecherries. “I put the word out on Facebook that I’m buying wild fruit while it’s in season,” Hanzlick says. “People bring buckets full, trash bags full, whatever.” Last year, after an early freeze decimated the chokecherry crop around Arapahoe, an amateur picker from the state’s Panhandle region happened to drive by and see the distillery’s “Wild Chokecherry Brandy” banner. He brought Hanzlick a literal truckload—2,800 pounds in a pickup bed, which he and his family had harvested in a weekend.
Hanzlick and his partners in Long Dogs, named for the owners’ greyhounds and dachshunds, make a range of Nebraska-sourced spirits, including vodka, whiskeys, and different fruit brandies.
The distillery’s other native fruit brandy is a Plains slivovitz, made from another 4,000 pounds of tart American plums. In Willa Cather country, an hour west of the real-life farmsteads that inspired “My Ántonia,” the convergence of Bohemian tradition and wild Nebraska fruit has historical and cultural resonance.
Fruit that grows wild on the dry, windy Plains has more character than if it were coddled in an orchard, Hanzlick says. “If you use orchard fruit, you get a bigger fruit, and more juice. There’s more sugar in it, which means there’s more alcohol, and more bottles, but the flavor gets diluted. It’s the same principle you see in winemaking: If your grapes are coming from a dry area, a rocky hillside, they have less juice and more flavor.” 4,000 pounds of small native chokecherries or plums make just 150 375-milliliter bottles of full-flavored “Yote Yip” brandy each, retailing for $150.
These brandies aren’t for everyone. For one thing, yes, they’re expensive, because hand-picked wild fruit is expensive. (Do the math, assuming that the fruit costs a few bucks per pound and the distillery needs to make a profit, and the price, while still eye-popping, makes sense.) For another, there’s only so much demand for fruit brandy, anyway—especially in a small farming town. There are fewer than 1,000 people in Arapahoe, otherwise known for its Trump Shop.
“The majority of what we sell locally is the sweeter flavored whiskey,” Hanzlick says. “But most of the stuff we do, I can ship, and people who care enough will travel to try it.” Many of his customers are detouring from I-80 and I-70, he says, even though the interstates are thirty minutes and an hour and a half away, respectively. They’re finding him on Google and coming to Arapahoe to try something they can’t find anywhere else.
“It’s hard to compete with the big boys in the liquor industry, so you might as well concentrate on making a local product that’s unique,” Hanzlick says. “Maybe you can’t compete at the liquor store down the street, but there are people out there who will appreciate it. Besides, if you’re pumping out 10,000 bottles a month of anything, pretty soon, that’s just another job. Making interesting stuff that actually tastes really good—there’s some pride in that.”