A decade ago, in 2014, Connie Baker and Carey Shanks ditched laudable if not lucrative conventional careers (she as a pharmaceutical industry marketing consultant, he as a specialist in sustainable new business development) with the goal of building the nation’s first “net-zero” craft distillery. They started by demolishing an old farmhouse that once stood on a vacant lot Baker owned at the east end of Carbondale’s Main Street.

“This is the only thing we were able to salvage,” says Baker, gesturing at a wall of brick—locally fired in Aspen in the 1900s—behind a 13-ton stone slab quarried in Marble that serves as their distillery’s tasting room bar. “Everything else just turned into a pile of dust. This block was the only one on Main Street that was really not developed at all and we were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re probably going to be the catalyst to change the block.’ Ten years later, not one thing has changed on this block.”

But Marble Distilling is challenging, with the goal of changing, an entire industry.
“We put it in writing that we’re the most sustainable distillery on the planet,” Shanks explains. “We see ourselves as the Patagonia of spirits, just doing it the right way, being involved with the community, not trashing the planet. My goal is to get everybody to see what we’re doing here and share it. It’s all open source.”

The process begins in a 500-gallon mash tun where Palisade grain is combined with yeast, Colorado beet sugar, and water to jump-start fermentation. Separated from the spent mash (which gets recycled as cattle feed at a Carbondale’s Nieslanik Beef) in another giant stainless steel vat known as a strip still, liquid is heated and then chilled to separate alcohol from water before being sent to Hazel, a three-story-tall copper vendome still handmade in Kentucky that towers like a work of sculpture in an atrium visible from the street and the tasting room.

All this requires enormous amounts of water and energy that at almost every other distillery ends up as waste, flushed into the sewer or vented into the environment. The distillery’s Water Energy Thermal System (two giant insulated tanks outside that mimic a manmade geothermal loop) each year recaptures 2 billion BTUs—enough energy to power 27 homes —and recycles over 5 million gallons of water, enough to fill 20 Olympic swimming pools. 

“We’re using the same water over and over and over again and then we’re capturing all the energy from the distilling process to heat and cool the building,” says Baker, who notes that her distillery uses just a single bottle of water to make a single bottle of spirits, unlike mainstream distilleries that might use 100 bottles of water for every bottle produced. “With the waste we saw in the distilling world, this town is so green, they probably would not allow us to use that much water.”

But she says there’s more to it than that.

“Carey and I, we live on the Crystal River up in Marble, so we’re very sensitive about how much water we use, not putting anything down the drain and recycling whatever we can. What’s the West’s biggest problem? Water. I mean, look at Lake Powell and all the fires. Hello? Wake up and smell the coffee.”
Or, in the case of Marble Distilling, the Moonlight Expresso, a liqueur made with beans roasted at Carbondale’s Bonfire Coffee, one of five spirits sampled from snifters in a marble tasting platter, paired with charcuterie and locally sourced gourmet fare from a newly revamped menu. 

Also Try: The Distillery Inn

A night at the Distillery Inn allows bourbon aficionados to “Sleep with the Stills” in one of five king-size suites (with views of Mount Sopris). From $280.