A couple of weeks back I drove two and a half hours north to Kirby to write about Wyoming Whiskey Distillery, and the whole way home I kept thinking the same dumb thought: there’s a nationally awarded craft distillery roughly twenty minutes from my house in Casper, and I’d been treating it like background scenery. That’s the thing about living somewhere. You drive past the good stuff so many times it stops registering.
So this one is close to home — literally. Backwards Distilling Company sits in Mills, the little town that bumps right up against the west edge of Casper, and it has been quietly turning out gin, vodka, rum, moonshine, and even absinthe since the middle of the last decade. I finally went in like an actual visitor instead of a guy running errands, and I’m a little annoyed it took me this long.
The first thing that hits you walking into the downtown tasting room on Wolcott is that it does not look like the inside of a factory, which is what I half-expected. It’s a proper bar — warm light, a long counter, bottles lined up like a row of carnival posters, and that low hum of people actually talking to each other instead of staring at phones. I grabbed a stool, looked at a drink list organized around circus acts, and immediately felt like I’d wandered somewhere with a point of view. Kimi would’ve loved it; she’s the cocktail person in our house. I came in planning to “just try the gin” and stayed a lot longer than that, which is the highest compliment I can pay any bar.
How a Family Argument About Absinthe Turned Into a Distillery
The origin story is my favorite kind, because it starts with somebody complaining at the dinner table.
As the Pollock family tells it, the whole thing got rolling back in October 2012. Chad Pollock was grumbling over family dinner about not being able to find any decent absinthe — the once-banned, anise-forward spirit with the green-fairy mythology around it. And his mom, instead of changing the subject, said the six words that apparently launch businesses: “Why don’t you make some?”
They were all foodies. They loved cocktails, loved craft beer, and they’d been looking for something of their own to build together. Amber Pollock — Chad’s sister, who’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education and taught elementary music in Natrona County for a few years — has talked about how the idea just clicked as a thing the whole family could do as a unit. By that January they’d incorporated and gotten a building. Production took longer than the optimistic plan (it always does), but they got there.
What I love is that the family didn’t come from booze. They came from music, teaching, and a genuine love of weird, well-made things. You can taste that everywhere in what they do now.
And here’s the part that turns a cute origin story into something I respect: the absinthe that supposedly started the whole argument didn’t actually show up on the shelf for years. Backwards opened with gin, vodka, rum, and moonshine, and the absinthe — the one Chad couldn’t find, the one his mom dared him to make — took something like six years of experimentation and research before they were willing to bottle it. They finally launched it in 2021, returning to the very thing the company was born out of nearly a decade earlier. There’s something very Wyoming about that kind of patience. Nobody rushed the hard one just because it made a good story.
When they did release it, they didn’t cut corners on style either. It’s a traditional French-style absinthe built around a pre-ban recipe from the 1870s, anise-forward, leaning on what absinthe people call the “holy trinity” of herbs: grande wormwood, green anise, and fennel. Chad has talked about the absinthe being more technically punishing than anything else they make — it carries something like fifty times the botanical mass of gin, the herbs sit in the still where they’re easy to scorch, and the finished spirit is more prone to oxidation. The quality of the green anise is also what creates the louche, that milky cloud that blooms when you trickle cold water over a pour. Watching it happen at the bar, slow and a little theatrical, I finally understood why people get romantic about this stuff.
The Circus Thing Is Real, and It Works
Walk in and the first thing you notice is that everything is themed around a Prohibition-era traveling circus sideshow. The bottles read like a lineup of acts: Ringleader Vodka. Sword Swallower Rum. Contortionist Gin. Strongman Gin. Milk Can Moonshine. The branding is loud and gorgeous and could easily have been a gimmick.
It isn’t, and here’s why: the Pollocks actually went to circus camp as kids. Chad and Amber spent summer vacations learning to juggle and picking up basically every other circus skill you can name. So when they landed on a sideshow theme, it wasn’t a marketing agency reaching for “quirky” — it was the family pulling from something they genuinely grew up loving. There was, as Amber has put it, just so much imagery to attach to. The whole identity is sincere, which is exactly why it lands.
It’s also, frankly, a smart contrast to the rest of Wyoming’s spirits scene. Where a place like Wyoming Whiskey leans into wide-open-range, serious-bourbon gravity, Backwards goes the other direction entirely — playful, theatrical, color everywhere. Two completely different answers to the question of what a Wyoming distillery can be, and the state is better for having both.
Grain-to-Bottle, and the Grain Is From Down the Road
Here’s the part that actually matters to me as a food writer, underneath all the circus paint: Backwards is a grain-to-bottle operation. They mash, ferment, distill, and bottle on site at their Mills production facility. They’re not buying neutral spirit from somewhere in the Midwest, slapping a pretty label on it, and calling it Wyoming-made. They’re making it.
And the inputs are about as local as it gets. The corn comes from a farm a few minutes down the road. The beet sugar — Wyoming runs on sugar beets, which is a whole story for another post — comes from Worland, a couple hours away. When you taste a Backwards spirit, you’re tasting Wyoming agriculture that didn’t have to travel far to get into the glass.
That’s the kind of thing I moved to this state to find. Kimi and I came up from D.C. in 2022, partly for the mountains and partly because we wanted to live somewhere food still has a sense of place. A distillery using corn grown ten minutes away is exactly that sense of place, bottled.
What I Actually Drank
I went in on the gin, because Backwards has built a real reputation there. The Contortionist Gin is the flagship and the one to start with — bright, balanced, the kind of gin that makes a gin-and-tonic taste like you tried. It’s not just my pour-loyalty talking, either: Contortionist landed at #4 on USA Today’s list of the top ten craft gin distilleries back in 2021, which is a genuinely wild thing to say about a bottle made in Mills, Wyoming. But the one that got my attention was the Strongman Navy Strength Gin. Navy strength means it’s bottled at a higher proof (historically, high enough that gunpowder soaked in it would still ignite — that’s the actual origin of the term), and it has picked up national recognition, including a Best in Category nod. It’s bold without being hot, and in a cocktail it punches through everything else instead of disappearing.
I also tasted the Sword Swallower Rum, which has its own award hardware, and got a small pour of the absinthe — the spirit that started the whole family argument back in 2012. Drinking the absinthe last felt like the right way to close the loop. It’s the thing Chad couldn’t find, so the family made their own, and now you can sit twenty minutes from my house and drink it.
One more thing worth knowing before you build your tasting flight: these folks don’t just run the same four bottles on a loop. Over the years Backwards has put out a string of limited-edition whiskeys, canned cocktails you can grab off a store shelf, the absinthe line, and even a liqueur made in collaboration with the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. That kind of restlessness is my favorite quality in a distillery — it means whatever’s on the board the day you walk in might not be there the next time, so you order the weird seasonal thing while you can.
If you’re newer to spirits and “Navy Strength” sounds intimidating, don’t worry about it. The folks pouring know their stuff and will steer you. This is a tasting room built for people who like to learn what they’re drinking, and if you want to keep going at home, a decent set of coupe and rocks glasses makes everything you take home taste a little more intentional.
The Tasting Room and the Tour
Backwards now runs two spaces. The production facility is in Mills at 158 Progress Circle, and the downtown Casper tasting room is at 214 S. Wolcott St — a great-looking room right in the walkable part of downtown, which makes it easy to fold into a night out.
The tasting room runs Wednesday through Saturday, 3PM to 10PM, and Sunday 2PM to 6PM (closed Mondays and Tuesdays). It’s 21-and-over, full stop, so leave the kids at home for this one.
If you want the full behind-the-scenes version, they offer pre-booked tours only — no walk-ins — starting at the Mills production facility with a guided walk through how the spirits get made, then finishing with a tasting at the downtown room. You see the corn-to-cocktail pipeline up close, which I’d recommend if you’re the kind of person who reads the “how it’s made” plaque at every brewery. Call ahead to book.
A real visitor tip: make a downtown evening of it. The tasting room sits close enough to food that you can build a whole night around it — start with cocktails at Backwards, then go hunt down dinner. If you’re in burger mode, my rundown of the best burger joints in Casper will get you fed.
What I’d Actually Pour at Home
I’m not a flair-bartender. I cook way more than I mix, and most of what I make at our place leans Mexican or Mediterranean, with a fair amount of wild game on the cutting board. But a good local spirit changes how I think about the back porch, especially once Casper finally warms up, and I came home from Backwards with a plan.
A bottle of Contortionist basically demands a gin and tonic done with a little care — good tonic, a fat wedge of lime, plenty of ice, and that’s it. Don’t overthink it. The gin is doing the work. If I’ve got people over and want to look like I tried harder than I did, I’ll stretch the Contortionist into a French 75 with lemon and a splash of something bubbly; it’s the easiest “fancy” drink in the world and it disappears fast on a hot afternoon.
The Strongman Navy Strength is the one I’d reach for when a cocktail needs to survive a lot of other ingredients. Higher proof means it holds its shape in a Negroni or a martini instead of getting bullied by the vermouth, and it pairs shockingly well with the kind of smoky, lime-heavy food we eat — think a gin Paloma riff next to carne asada, which sounds wrong on paper and works in the glass. The Sword Swallower Rum I’d keep for slower nights; rum and a good ginger beer is my lazy default when I don’t feel like measuring anything.
The absinthe I treat like a special occasion, because honestly it is one. The traditional way to drink it is the ritual — a slotted spoon, a sugar cube, cold water dripped over the top until it louches — and it’s a genuinely fun thing to do for a couple of friends who’ve never seen it. You don’t need the full antique kit to start; a cocktail-making starter set and a steady hand will get you most of the way there. And if you’d rather drink Wyoming whiskey than gin, the same back-porch logic applies — I get into that more over in the Wyoming Whiskey writeup from Kirby, which is becoming the unofficial home base for this whole spirits series.
Why This One Matters for Wyoming
People assume Wyoming food and drink stops at “steak and a beer,” and Backwards is one of the clearest arguments against that. A family with zero booze background, working out of a small town most travelers blow past on I-25, built something that wins national awards and sources its corn from down the street. That’s not a fluke. That’s what’s actually happening in Wyoming right now if you bother to look.
This is the second stop in what I’m turning into an ongoing Wyoming spirits series here on the blog — Wyoming Whiskey up in Kirby was the first. The two could not be more different in personality, and that’s the point. There’s a whole craft-spirits landscape in this state, scattered across distances that would make people from anywhere else laugh, and it’s worth driving for. Sometimes it’s worth driving twenty minutes for, and you didn’t even know.
If you want to play ringleader at home, a cocktail-making starter kit plus a bottle of Contortionist will get you most of the way to a proper gin program on your own counter. Pair it with a Wyoming Honey Whiskey Lemonade on a hot afternoon and you’ve basically got summer handled.
Go See the Circus
If you’re anywhere near Casper, put Backwards Distilling on your list — and if you’ve lived here for years and kept driving past it like I did, consider this your push. Pull in, sit down, let them pour you something with a ridiculous name, and taste what a Wyoming family built out of a dinner-table dare.
When you go, take a photo of your pour and tag @wyofood — I want to see what you ordered, and I want to know if you were braver than me and went straight for the absinthe.
— Sean