Marc Piscotty
Buttery, nutty and sweet: What’s not to like?
In October 2018, Margaret Ebeling was aware things were changing with her employer, Middleton-based Death’s Door Spirits. As the firm’s marketing director, she knew there were financial issues, but never dreamed that bankruptcy was looming. An early indicator, however, was the planned discontinuation of Kringle Cream, a holiday cream liqueur that owner Brian Ellison first developed in 2013. Ebeling had an idea about how to keep what she considered a signature drink alive.
“The good people of Wisconsin deserve their Kringle Cream, so I bought the brand to save it,” says Ebeling, whose father’s family can trace its Green Bay roots back to 1850. “The state would be a darker place without its own cream liqueur.”
Ebeling, who moved from Denver to Madison in 2014 to work at Death’s Door, planned to distill and bottle Kringle Cream on a contract basis using Death’s Door’s facilities and distribution network, but new owners Midwest Custom Bottling, which bought the firm out of bankruptcy, had other ideas. The new owners already made Rumchata, another rum-based cream liqueur, and saw Kringle Cream as a competitor. On Dec. 20, Ebeling was invited to succeed elsewhere, and she and her brand were now on their own.
“I call myself an accidental entrepreneur,” says Ebeling, the founder, owner, CEO and sole employee of Madison-based Nordic Distillers. “My office is my dining room table and my puppy is my assistant.”
Kringle Cream is a Puerto Rican rum-based liqueur produced with Wisconsin cream and blended to taste like kringle, the Danish sweet designated in 2013 as Wisconsin’s official state pastry. Ebeling’s business card identifies her as the “Kringle Queen.”
At the beginning of the year, Ebeling had no distiller and no distributor either in Wisconsin or several of the other 12 states in which Death’s Door sold its products. Within 48 hours Ebeling struck deals with Central Standard Craft Distillery to produce the product and the Capitol-Husting Company to distribute it. Both are in Milwaukee, but Nordic Distillers still calls Madison its headquarters.
To create Kringle Cream, Ellison started by sending kringle to Allen Flavors, a food flavor, fragrance and aroma supplier in New Jersey. Food scientists there analyzed and recreated the pastry’s buttery, nutty flavors using natural ingredients. The liqueur is 15 percent alcohol by volume and retails for $18 for 750 ml bottles. It’s gluten-free and nut-free and, even though it uses real Wisconsin cream, can safely sit on the shelf unopened for as long as three years, Ebeling says.
But the Kringle Queen hasn’t stopped with the liqueur. On Oct. 31, she introduced Kringle Cream Latte, which blends the liqueur’s flavors with cold-brewed coffee and other ingredients. Packaged in four-packs of 6.3-oz. cans, it sells for $16.
Unlike the original product, Kringle Cream Latte uses wine rather than rum as its alcohol base. The change is, in part, a concession to the volatility of federal taxes levied on spirits compared to those on wine. Thanks to recent legislation, taxes on distilled products dropped from $17 per gallon to $2 per gallon. If that legislation is not renewed, Ebeling and other distillers could be facing dramatic product price increases, she explains.
“I also wanted to use cold-brewed coffee because I think it balances better with the other ingredients,” Ebeling says. “The latte has a rich, creamy texture with kringle notes, kind of a buttery pecan flavor with a smooth coffee finish. The wine acts as a neutral agent, and the beverage finishes at 13.5 percent ABV.”
For this holiday season at least, Kringle Cream Latte will be available only in Wisconsin, making the Badger State its test market. It’s a little hard to find, Ebeling says, because some large chain stores balked at adding a holiday product so late in the season. But early placements for the product include Total Wines & More, Hy-Vee-East Washington, Regent Market Co-op, the downtown Hampton Inn and the Red Rock Saloon. If all goes well, other flavors in the canned line will follow.
“Kringle Cream does 90 percent of its sales in October, November and December,” she says. “The banks don’t like that, so I’m looking for other products to balance our income during the year.”
