There used to be six dairy farms on Bridgman Hill Road in Hardwick. Now there’s one — and a former one that’s turned into a distillery.
The scene looks much as it did when North Hardwick Dairy was racking up awards for the highest-quality milk in the state for 10 years in a row. Fields of grass and grain sway in the midsummer breeze, which spins the farm’s hilltop wind turbine. A John Deere 3300 combine sits under a white bunker, just past a shiny silver grain bin. An old St. Albans Co-op sign still hangs above the door.
But inside the red barn, in what was the milking parlor until 2019, brothers Nick and Taylor Meyer are transforming their organic farm-grown grains into small-batch spirits. High Drive Distillery‘s first release, a floral American gin with a striking blue label emblazoned with a red clover, launched in December 2024 and is now available in select 802 Spirits stores for $36.99. This summer, the first cut of their bourbon made purely from Wapsie Valley heirloom corn will hit shelves, with rye whiskey to follow in a couple of months.
The gin’s label says “farmer distilled” in bold letters, because Nick, 48, and Taylor, 50, consider themselves “farmers first, then distillers,” Taylor said.
As Vermont dairy stories go, the Meyer family’s is a pretty typical one. Steve and Patty started milking cows on the farm in 1978. In 2003, they transitioned to organic production and built the current barn, and two of their four sons, Nick and Taylor, took over. They got a robot to milk the cows in 2013.
“We had to flip a coin to see who was going to tell our father and mother that we sold the cows and bought a still.” Taylor Meyer
Despite the state and national accolades they received for their milk quality, the growth in organic mega-farms out West made it hard to compete, and “we were losing a little bit of money every day,” Nick said. They sold the dairy herd and milking equipment in 2019.
“We had to flip a coin to see who was going to tell our father and mother that we sold the cows and bought a still,” Taylor said.
High Drive Distillery isn’t the first new venture the brothers have tried, hoping to keep their family’s 300-plus hilltop acres open and in production. They bought that combine — from the late organic farming legend Jack Lazor when he upgraded to a 6620 — to grow sunflowers for biofuel. That crop was tough, Taylor said, because the birds loved it, and so did people who’d stop to take a photo and leave with an unauthorized bouquet.
Their organic beef enterprise has gone better. They still raise roughly 70 head of cattle on 90 acres of pasture across the road, selling the meat under the North Hardwick Farm name at the farm store and local farmers markets.
Why open a distillery? Their thinking, Nick explained, was that they already knew how to grow grain and they had the farm equipment. Around 250 acres of the farm were suitable for growing organic corn, rye, oats and barley, and they’d sold some of their first barley crop to the Caledonia Spirits team for their Phyllis Rye Whiskey project.
Nick had dabbled in home brewing, he said, including making all the beer for his wedding — an oatmeal stout and a Canadian ale. From that experience, he knew how to mash and ferment, “but the distilling was foreign.”
The brothers learned that part from Ian Smiley, a master distiller who consults with startup craft distilleries. They bought their hybrid still from him, and he spent a week on the farm with them in July 2023. The growing community of grain farmers, as well as other distillers in Vermont, have been supportive, Nick said, including Todd Hardie, who founded Caledonia Spirits down the road in Hardwick and is currently developing the Champlain Valley Grain Center in Ferrisburgh.
High Drive’s 250-liter hybrid setup lets the brothers produce gin and whiskey on the same equipment, combining a pot still with a column still.
It only takes one pass, Nick said, which preserves flavor. The most recent grain to go through the still was last year’s Bloody Butcher corn — a variety that takes 75 days to mature and is harvested in the fall and dried all winter and spring in a specialized dryer bin. It took them three months to distill it all.
The brothers grow the aptly named deep-crimson cobs for their flavor and slightly shorter growing season, not for quantity, Nick said.
“We’d never touch No. 2 dent corn,” he added, scoffing at the high-yield, mass-produced variety that dominates American cornfields.
When it’s go time, they mill the corn in the back of the barn using a granite mill from New American Stone Mills in Morrisville, which preserves that flavor and the grain’s nutrients, Nick said.
“Every step is flavor,” he noted.
That Bloody Butcher run will go into a charred new American oak barrel and head to the distillery’s adjacent barrel room, joining barrels labeled “1/31/24, 100% High Mowing Org. Rye, Batch #1, Crop Year 2021” and “1/24/25, Oat Whiskey, 100% Oats Sour Mash, Batch #1, Crop Year 2024.”
Whiskey in 53-gallon barrels will age for three or four years; smaller 15-gallon batches age more quickly, in 14 to 18 months. High Drive’s first whiskey releases will be a “100 percent series,” rather than blends. Eventually, the Meyers hope to release a four-grain bourbon and a four-grain rye, showcasing all they’re growing.
“This is one place, one moment in time,” Taylor said. “We’re going to know the day, what the weather was like when we harvested it — and every year’s going to be a little bit different.”
High Drive’s whiskey bottles will be marked with the crop year, and the distillery will produce only as much whiskey as its grain harvest allows, without buying grain from elsewhere. The past two years have been mediocre for rye, but the year before that was “unbelievable,” Nick said. Corn was great last year. Not to jinx it, but this year’s looking good.
The brothers can produce a total of 500 liters per day, twice a week. But they took this month off from distilling — too much other stuff to do, between haying and getting ready to start this year’s harvest cycle.
“It’s the same two guys that plant the seed, pick the stones [in the fields], combine it, mill it, clean it, mash it, distill it and bottle it,” Taylor said.
They get to sleep in until 7 a.m. some days, he joked. And they still have to find time to fit in all the other aspects of running a distillery, such as navigating the complex rules of the state Department of Liquor and Lottery and deciding on label colors. They also sell beef and booze direct to consumer at the Hardwick and Greensboro farmers markets and take samples to restaurants around the state.
“When we were milking, all we had to do was put the milk in the tank, and the check came twice a month,” Nick said with a chuckle. “There’s less wear and tear on the body now, though.”
By next year, they plan to turn the front of the milking parlor into a tasting room, where they’ll pour their spirits for customers right in view of the still and the barley out back. They’re only about 15 minutes from Hill Farmstead Brewery, a popular stop for tourists looking for quality beverages, Taylor pointed out.
Like most startup distilleries, the brothers began with gin to get High Drive products out there while the whiskeys age. The 10 organic botanicals they use in their gin took some tweaking. Nick won’t give away the whole lineup, but he said they extended the spirit’s finish by adding lemon verbena, dandelion root and red clover — the Vermont state flower, which grows in fields all around the farm and was a favorite snack for the dairy cows.
“Everything is farm related — that we put in the bottle or do,” Nick said.
Kate Wise is an early adopter of High Drive’s gin. The bar manager at Juniper Bar & Restaurant in Burlington’s Hotel Vermont got her hands on a bottle at the beginning of May and quickly came up with an “ultimate boat sipper” of a cocktail for the summer menu. Called Crimson and Clover as a nod to High Drive’s homegrown botanicals, it’s a daiquiri variation that combines the gin with Green Valley coconut water, lime, sugar and bitters.
High Drive’s gin is “incredibly smooth and doesn’t drink hot,” Wise said, referring to the boozy bite of some spirits. “It’s balanced and floral and works perfectly with the silkiness of the coconut water.”
As she shook one up, Wise brainstormed other ways she’d use the local spirit. Her list was a greatest hits of gin drinks: a martini, a Last Word, a Corpse Reviver No. 2 and a Negroni — all the classic equal-parters. “Anywhere the herbal profile is strong,” she said, before landing on the most appropriate option.
“Ooh, a Clover Club!” Wise exclaimed. For her version, she would mix High Drive gin with her homemade raspberry syrup and whey left over from the restaurant’s housemade ricotta instead of an egg white.
Nick keeps his own cocktails simple. He likes to mix High Drive’s gin with Newman’s Own Orange Mango Tango and a splash of cranberry. The rye, he said, goes great with ginger ale. Both are pretty refreshing after a long day on the combine, harvesting grain on land that’s found a new purpose.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Grain Expectations | High Drive Distillery stewards the land with farm-grown spirits”
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.
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