CASPER, Wyo. — A big birthday deserves a big celebration, and Backwards Distilling Company has planned just that for its 10th anniversary.
The celebration started this week on Wednesday with the launch of two new limited-edition whiskey releases. It continues on Thursday with an all-day Happy Hour, and on Friday with a “throwback” theme featuring fan-favorite cocktails from the past, along with music from the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s.
Weekend celebrations include “Sample Saturday,” with 10% off discounts on many new products, and will wrap up on Sunday with two events: Happy Hour Yoga at the company’s Mills production facility and donut flights paired with cocktails at the tasting room that afternoon.
A rundown on events — along with times and tickets for yoga — can be found at the company’s Facebook events page.
Chad and Amber Pollock pose upstairs at the Backwards Distilling Co. downtown tasting room in Casper in 2019. (Dan Cepeda, Oil City News File)
The small family-owned distillery opened its doors a decade ago this week. However, the planning process started at least a couple of years before that, when siblings Amber and Chad Pollock decided to start a craft distillery along with their parents.
The concept was to create fine spirits and use them in creative craft cocktails they’d serve in their tasting room. The first tasting room was in the same Mills building where they do production. They eventually moved the tasting room to its current downtown location in 2019, while production has remained in Mills.
Their initial focus was on clear spirits, with their Ringleader Vodka being the first and only spirit available when they initially opened to the public.
“During those first few months in the old tasting room, our menu was only vodka cocktails,” said co-owner Amber Pollock. It was intended to be a jumping-off point.
“We did plan to launch a lot of products even before we opened,” she said. “We had conceptualized the four character spirits — the Ringleader, the Sword Swallower, the Strongman, and the Contortionist,” she said. Those are all vodka, rum and gin spirits.
Head distiller Chad Pollock and his father Bill Pollock dump the first barrel of whiskey into a vat at Backwards Distilling Company in Mills in 2017. (Dan Cepeda, Oil City News File)
They were also planning to produce whiskey products, and began aging barrels from launch. “We didn’t know what the final form would be necessarily, but we knew we wanted to do that,” she said.
They also dreamed up moonshine products, eventually launching their huckleberry lemonade and cinnamon varieties, while an apple pie idea never materialized.
Over the years, they’ve produced numerous limited=edition whiskeys, various canned cocktails available at retail stores, an absinthe line, and just this year their first liqueur in collaboration with the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra.
Amber said they have launched at least 30 products since opening, with more ideas and concepts in the pipeline. She remembers the rum launch at their old tasting room in Mills as a signal that their ideas were really taking off.
“That was the first time we did a proper launch party, and it was absolutely bananas,” she said. “We had a line out the door the whole time, and that was not something we were accustomed to back then.”
Local band Pleasure People films its newest music video at Backwards Distilling Company in March 2023. (Submitted Photo)
It was so busy that customers were voluntarily pitching in to bus tables, she said. Another highlight was an eclipse party in 2017 they held at the distillery.
The tasting room’s move to downtown happened in 2019, while production has remained in their Mills facility, which they own. “We had thought about it a long time, looking for the right spot and contemplating moving everything including production downtown,” she said. “We weighed a lot of options before deciding on the space that we have now and making that transition, and that was really important in our trajectory, giving us so much more traffic and visibility.”
“It was really good for our brand,” she added. It also helped them survive the COVID-19 pandemic, during which they were able to offer to-go cocktails and bottles before public gatherings were phased back.
Special events like their tiki pop-up concepts and Christmas cocktails continue to be extremely popular, and summer brings in tourists from all around the country specifically looking for Backwards, she said.
“It’s hard to imagine that it has actually been 10 years,” she said, “but we’ve got the old pictures to prove it of us sitting in an empty space and just trying to make a thing.”
The Backwards Distilling Company tasting room is located downtown at 214 S. Wolcott St. A list of anniversary events with times and information can be found here.
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