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Eagle River Whiskey will soon change its name to Minturn Whiskey Company and has a plan to become a permanent fixture of the town by providing a much-needed community service: snowmelt.

The business is located at the intersection of Nelson and Main Streets and has a temporary shed in the location where the owners, locals Stef and Spence Neubauer, hope to build a distillery in the coming years.

Nelson Street is known for its hill, which is notorious in town for getting icy — and staying icy — throughout the winter. It’s a major safety hazard in town as the hill terminates at an intersection with Williams Street, causing near misses for vehicles sliding down the Nelson Street hill into that intersection. Even on the sunniest of days, the Nelson Street hill remains shaded and frozen.

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“Continually, we have heard concerns from residents about the safety of this hill,” Town Manager Michelle Metteer told the town council in November. “So we have started taking a look at how we can improve safety in this area.”

One of the town’s ideas was to approach the whiskey company’s owners and see what they might have had planned for the excess heat that the distilling process will create.

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“We would like to take that extra heat, and use it to heat the roads, instead of electrifying the roads,” Metteer said.

As it turns out, the Neubauers had also been looking at Nelson Street and wondering the same thing.

“In Scotland, they use their heated water to heat swimming pools and things like that, and I had always wanted to do something similar in Minturn,” Stef Neubauer said.

She had considered a laundromat and a few other ideas, “but what I really wanted to do is snowmelt,” she said. “However, our engineers told me it’s too cost-prohibitive because you have to tear up the roads.”

Nelson Street, however, is starting to look pretty torn up as it is. Metteer said it needs to be repaved, and while that process is happening, it could be a good time to go a bit further with the reconstruction of the road and install the snowmelt system.

“We anticipate there’s an initial up-front cost that will be higher, but the long-term opportunity to capture some of our net zero goals might be realized,” Metteer said.

Neubauer said the heat from the boiling system could easily be transferred to a closed series of pipes that could be run underneath the hill on Nelson Street, and possibly even Williams Street and the distillery’s parking lot, as well.

Neubauer says there are plenty of other communities which have found ways to reuse excess heat from other operations to heat streets, pointing to Holland, Michigan, as probably the largest such operation in the country. In that city, and into a large tubing system underneath the streets.

Closer to home, Avon uses excess heat created by the wastewater treatment plant to heat some of its streets.

But Neubauer says she was mostly inspired by the Marble Distilling Company in Carbondale, which would most resemble what she is envisioning in Minturn. Marble Distilling Company co-founder Connie Baker says the company prides itself on its ability to reuse the heat from its distilling process.

“Nothing goes down the drain, from the process water being 100-percent recycled to all of the energy coming off the stills being captured to heat our building,” Baker said .

Metteer said she had learned of some of those other operations, which motivated her to approach Eagle River Whiskey with the idea.

“We are excited that this has been done in other communities with other distilleries, so there’s a bit of a template to follow,” Metteer told the council in November.

The Town ߣÏÈÉú approved the placement of a line item into the 2025 budget for a potential apportion to be made at a future date to support the construction.

But first, Neubauer said, there’s a bit more process to get through.

“We still have to secure our conditional use permit,” she said.

Assuming that goes through, the project could break ground in the spring.

“We’re pretty excited about this opportunity to take a local establishment, use this option and create something new that would be very environmentally friendly,” Metteer said.

Neubauer said they’re already working on a catchy name for the concept.

“We’re thinking about calling it ‘Single-Malt Snowmelt,’ she said.