West of tradition
Produced by the same team who created the PBS documentary The Water of Life – A Whisky Film and Independent Spirits, West of Tradition uses Seattle’s Westland Distillery as the narrative spine of a much larger American whiskey story. It was directed by Greg Swartz and produced by Trevor Jones, Nate Barlow, and Joe Vulopas.
“Whisky has always been a story of place,” says Swartz. “What interested me was what happens when you take an old idea like single malt and put it in completely different hands and completely different places. American distillers weren’t handed hundreds of years of tradition telling them exactly how this had to be done. They had to figure it out for themselves — and that uncertainty, ambition and creativity is where the story of this film really lives.”