The night David Butler became a cat owner, he did not have much say in the matter. A small female stray he had been feeding at his flat in the Middle East showed up during a cat fight and made five trips through his front door, moving her kittens one by one into his bedroom closet. He eventually brought all six cats back to East Vancouver, and when he opened his Squamish distillery last week, naming it was easy.
Six Cats Distillery, which opened last week in Squamish, is the product of a career change Butler began turning over in his mind during the COVID lockdown, when he was still posted in the Middle East.
“It was in my mind, and then I thought, I’d probably get arrested if I’m still here,” he said. “Maybe I should go home.”
He spent years experimenting with small stills in other countries before committing to the real thing. After a year and a half of searching for suitable space in Vancouver, he expanded his search and landed in Squamish.
The buildout involved federal and provincial licensing, nine months for provisional approval alone, engineering drawings, and a construction period running from February to October of last year. He was not legally permitted to turn it on until January.
“I had bought the still back in 2022. You can see the date etched on the glass. But I wasn’t allowed legally to turn it on until 2025,” he said. “So I was hoping it made good stuff.”
It did. Six Cats currently produces an apple brandy and a gin, both named after the cats. The apple juice comes from BC orchards in the Okanagan, pressed in Chilliwack and delivered in large one-thousand litre totes that bubble audibly with active fermentation on the distillery floor. For the brandy, Butler uses oak chips in the bottle to accelerate aging that would otherwise take years in a barrel. The gin can be bottled and sold much closer to when it comes off the still.
But the service Butler is most eager to offer will not make him much money. Printed on the back of every label is an invitation for people to bring in their own BC apples or fruit so he can turn it into a personalized gin or brandy for them. About fifty kilos of apples will yield roughly four bottles. “That’s not going to make me any money,” he said. “That’s supposed to make me known, just by word of mouth.”
He points out that backyard apple trees across his neighbourhood in East Vancouver go unharvested every year. He would like to change that, and hopes the service will run almost daily by summer.
For now, Butler is commuting daily from East Vancouver, a drive that can stretch to two hours depending on bridge traffic. He is open Tuesday through Sunday and focused on building inventory before the season picks up. A year from now, he hopes to have a small team in place and a local place to stay.
Six Cats Distillery is open Tuesday through Sunday.
