Before Bentley Gillman was an award-winning distiller, he was just a kid in the woods. Now, he’s the distillery manager at River Falls’ award-winning Tattersall Distilling. Gillman grew up between La Pointe, on Madeline Island, and Wausau, where he spent much of his time exploring local fields and forests, picking wild fruit, grains, mushrooms, and medicinal herbs.
This month, Gillman is bringing his passions together with the release of Cocktails in Bloom: A Tattersall Foraged Cocktail Book. “Over the years, I’ve tinkered and tasted my way through so many experiments with wild foods and flavors,” says Gillman. “Cocktails in Bloom is a selection of favorites that are easy to execute and involve common and easily identifiable botanicals.”
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While foraging is now a common practice in restaurant kitchens, it remains a rarity in bars, but Gillman feels that incorporating foraged ingredients into our cocktails not only opens up new possibilities for flavor but also provides a valuable connection to the natural world. “This book is really an invitation to come and try new flavors, to come and experience the world, to start to cultivate a relationship with nature,” he says.
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To that end, Cocktails in Bloom offers both inspiration and practical info to anyone looking to give their cocktails a taste of the wild. The book profiles 14 ingredients that can be found throughout the state — not just in rural areas, but also in urban environs, such as dandelions and burdock root. And in keeping with Tattersall’s commitment to sustainability — the distillery is 100% solar-powered, according to Gillman — most of the ingredients the book covers are invasive or non-native flora. “There are tons of invasive species that are perfectly edible and really interesting for the palate,” says Gillman, “and you removing them from the environment is actually a net positive for the ecosystem.”
After giving pointers on where to find and how to identify each plant, Cocktails in Bloom shares recipes for turning them into syrups, wines, and more than three-dozen cocktails, both traditional and nonalcoholic. These range from Pine Island Iced Tea, which incorporates birch cola syrup and pineapple weed syrup, to a nonalcoholic Robinia Lemonade, which uses the sweet pea and vanilla notes of robinia to complement the tartness of the summertime favorite.
For anyone new to foraging, Gillman recommends starting with ground ivy (also known as creeping charlie), an invasive plant that’s easy to find in Milwaukee and has a lovely honey-sage scent. “It’s so simple, you can’t mess it up,” he says. “Everyone knows what creeping charlie is, because everybody’s heard somebody complain about it. Or maybe been the one to complain about it!”
Cocktails in Bloom: A Tattersall Foraged Cocktail Book ($25) is currently available for preorder on Tattersall Distilling’s website and is scheduled to be available through Amazon and other retailers later this month.
