Bay Area craft distillers bring in the flavor.
When I arrive at Noonan’s, owner Brendan Moylan has arranged the nearly 90 bottles of American micro-distilled spirits along the length of his massive bar like so many soldiers according to rank. Brandies here, whiskies there, a smattering of gins and a great battalion of vodkas, some straight, some fruity or otherwise enhanced. The grappas bring up the rear—89 bottles of booze on the bar.
Moylan, a Marin county resident, is a spirit aficionado and owner of the Larkspur-based Noonan’s, its neighboring Marin Brewing Company and sibling brew house Moylan’s in Novato. He’s a formidable link in the network of Bay Area distillers—the craftsmen (the women have yet to fully arrive) who regard the simple chemistry of distillation as an art form, taking all that is pure and good from a substance as potentially deadly as alcohol and creating elixirs which capture the essence of life itself.
From Santa Cruz to St. Helena, small copper-pot distilleries are producing an uncommon quality of spirit that gives good old Kentucky bourbon a run for its money. No longer limited to brandy and grappa distilled from fine California grapes, the discerning tippler can seek out specialty whiskies, rums, eaux de vie, gins, vodkas of dizzying flavors, and all sorts of liqueurs and creative oddities.
Like the winemaker and brew master, the distiller has obstacles unique to his business to surmount. Part of the craft requires knowing when to take charge and manipulate the product and when to relinquish control to the forces of nature. The artful still master also must balance experience with intuition. The craft is so complex that many distillers find their way through lengthy apprenticeships, often at the knee of a father creating a lineage of master distillers.
“To be a master distiller, you have to do something better than your teacher,” confirms Jeff Alexander, jack-of-all-trades in the alcohol business. Owner of Alexander Cellars in Santa Cruz, he also operates a sizable pot still where he carries out all manner of alchemic experiments and markets a world-class gin under the name Sarticious Spirits. Alexander got his start brewing beer, making a name for himself at Los Gatos Brewing Company. But in order to get to the holy grail of all things alcoholic, he yearned to begin distilling. With no craft-distilling lineage of his own, Alexander sought out the next best thing: the master distillers at St. George Spirits, tucked away in a former airplane hangar at the old Alameda naval base.
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St. George Spirits established itself more than two decades ago by German-born Jörg Rupf, who hails from the fertile and fabled Black Forest region and is in fact descended from a line of distillers. California was an epiphany for Rupf, who fell in love with the plethora of perfect fruit, inspiring him to begin creating his ethereal eaux de vie—the pure liquor distilled from fermented fruit; in a word, brandy.
Having won numerous awards for his wares and concentrating on other ventures these days, Rupf has left most of the operation in the capable hands and perfect-pitch palate of Lance Winters, another brew master-turned-distiller. Winters left the glitz of a naval career in nuclear engineering for the glamorous title of craft distiller. He’s come a long way since the day he showed up to woo Rupf with a significant bottle of homemade whiskey which turned out to be both heads and tails above your average moonshine. He was hired on the spot.
Today Winters oversees production of the Aqua Perfecta, the raspberry and pear liqueurs, the grappas and whiskeys. But the big pet project, the one that has really grabbed the attention of every boozehound and critic, is the line of flavored vodkas called Hangar One, named, in theory, for the production building itself.
If you want to break into the industry today, vodka is where it’s at. Vodka consistently outsells other spirits, often as high as eight bucks a shot or $30 per 750 milliliter bottle. Noonan’s stocks at least 300 bottles from countries as varied as Iceland and New Zealand or the more obvious Russia and Poland. There’s Belvedere, Ketel One, Grey Goose and Stolichnaya. Chopin, Absolut, Ciroc and Skyy. So what’s the difference? They all look like water and smell like alcohol (or occasionally like citrus or vanilla, say). And where do these so-called boutique spirits fit in? Just how does Hangar One taste of mandarin orange blossom or kaffir lime leaf and what the heck is Buddha’s hand, anyway?
Bottled up: Gins capture the essence of botanicals at Distillery 209. Photo by Lori Eanes.
“You have to start with the best ingredients,” says Winters, which comes as no surprise. Distillation is like a great big amplifier. Let’s use pears as an example. It takes about 15 pounds of succulent Lake County pears to make just one small bottle of eau de vie. You let the fruit ferment with a selected yeast culture, similar to the first step in making wine. The sugars break down. The yeast produces its various gases that add distinct aromas and flavors to the final product. The pears exude their vapors. If this process is done within a contraption known as a pot still, or “alembic” still, it is possible to collect and concentrate all the alcohol and intrinsic aromas, or simply that which makes a pear a pear. Pears that are bruised and overripe will make poor contributions to an eau de vie, for the aromas of decomposition will also be amplified in the final product. Thus, you could say that the process of distillation captures the spiritual fingerprint of that gnarled citrus known as Buddha’s hand and puts it right in a bottle of vodka.
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In the tasting room at Hangar One, my nose is ensconced in a glass of mandarin orange blossom vodka, a top seller. “We have a lot more in common with perfume making,” admits Winters. I tell him how I’ve longed to bottle the essence of cilantro so I could wear it around and smell fresh and herby.
“Come here. I want to show you something,” he says with a glint in his eye. I follow him into the lab. It isn’t quite Harry Potter’s potions classroom, but there are dark brown bottles and flasks and jars containing a number of unidentified liquids. A diminutive still is set up against the back wall, for the test runs done for each new batch. Winters hauls out three large green jugs and three tasting glasses. My stomach leaps slightly. He hands me the first and I stick my nose in, hesitantly. I must have furrowed my brow then, because he says, “Know it, but you can’t place it, right?” I nod. “Sweet basil,” he beams. And then it hits me with the pungency of a bowl of pesto, with hints of camphor and tarragon. The next one I peg: celery. Bloody Mary, anyone? The final experiment is Fresno pepper. “I’m working on a chipotle-pepper vodka,” says Winters. He plans to collaborate with chef Anthony Paone at T-Rex Barbecue in Berkeley who will smoke the chilies for him, as soon as Winters finds the perfect fruit, of course.
I can’t help but look at these spirits as Tinkerbell caught in a jar—something you can’t really see, but you know it’s there. And it’s not so magical and mysterious, if you know a little bit of chemistry. Each fragrance is represented by a particular molecule, just as many ordinary molecules have a particular smell, pleasant or not (think ammonia). This wafting of fragrant molecules during distillation is, both literally and figuratively, the heart of the process. The craftsman’s challenge is how to trap Tinkerbell without getting stuck with the stinky fairies as well.
Buddha’s hand? No, they’re Hangar One vodkas at the tasting room in Alameda. Photo by Lori Eanes.
As luck would have it, Nature made it so that these wonderfully pleasant-smelling aromas travel together. That is, they have similar boiling points, or temperatures at which they evaporate and become “spirits” separating from the confines of their liquid entrapments and escaping into the collecting tube—only to find themselves trapped again within the concentrated liquid alcohol at the other end. The other less desirable elements tend to boil off either before or after the heart of the operation, thus creating the “heads” and “tails,” both of which must be chopped off in order to create a potable spirit.
The inexperienced distiller, therefore, lies at the peril of his ineptitude. It was the failure to know how to sufficiently execute these spirits that made the bathtub gins during the time of Prohibition so potentially lethal. It is also for this reason, of many, that home distilling is illegal and getting a still license is difficult. This stuff can kill you if you don’t know what you are doing. Or at least give you a nasty hangover.
Large quantities of ethanol (the kind of alcohol you drink and can even put in your car) can, of course, be made industrially in a column still that is arranged so as to take the guesswork (and thus the craft) out of distillation. This procedure produces a highly-purified “grain alcohol” that is about 95 percent ethanol, which meets the U.S. government standard of identity for vodka as an extremely pure, colorless, flavorless, odorless liquid. Of course, few people drink vodka of this proof so producers dilute it to about 40 percent. Add a few drops of lab-produced lemon essence and voilà! Lemon vodka. Or is it?
If you take this same highly purified, colorless, flavorless spirit and put it in the hands of a craft distiller, as a blank canvas to an artist, you get some remarkably different results: otherworldly gins and ripe, juicy vodkas. The distinction between gin and vodka is fairly simple. Gins are more likely to be flavored with a covert mixture of botanicals, with piney juniper berries providing the backdrop, while vodka tends toward fruit, though in reality the limits are subject only to the creative capacity of the craftsman. Flavorings can be as subtle as the soft sweetness of viognier grapes in Hangar One Straight, floral as rose petal or lavender, bold as cinnamon or obscure as black truffle. The distinguishing factor here for the craftsman is the use of real ingredients and special techniques to flavor a neutral spirit base.
“The difference,” explains Winters, “is like listening to a synthesized drum machine versus a real drum. You know it’s a drum, but there’s no real feeling behind it.” In other words, there needs to be a balance between all flavor components, good and bad. Another way to think about it is to smell a bottle of imitation vanilla flavoring, or synthetic vanillin, the most compelling aroma in a vanilla bean. Smells like vanilla, right? Now smell real Bourbon vanilla. The aromas are rounder, some detectable, others not. Memories are stimulated, maybe a rush of endorphins. It’s the same thing with the drum, and the same with spirits made from the real deal. They inspire.
“That’s my job,” admits Winters.
The intuition involved in the process is part innate, part learned and developed, much like conducting an orchestra. You have to know when to bring in the flute, add some bass or let it mellow. Here is where Jeff Alexander is a master. He just knows how to detect the missing elements and add the right ingredient at just the right level. Each batch will be a little bit different, so he does three runs each day, tastes them all to get a mental “average” and figures out where to make the necessary adjustments. It’s like making perfume, but this stuff you can drink. Scarlett O’Hara would be so thrilled.
Alexander recalls that his first-ever batch of gin was “bitter and out of balance.” He used 14 herbal accents then and is now down to about eight or nine, notably cilantro, orange, and juniper, yet it’s decidedly the remaining secret five or six that make this drink truly noteworthy. He whispered a couple of them to me, but I promised to forget them as soon as I left. As when creating a balanced Indian curry, the background notes should become undetectable alone, combining into something new altogether, like a truly refined perfume, the kind that makes you follow someone into the next room and, perhaps, even fall in love.
The trick is in timing and temperature. The botanicals are soaked in a vodka base and then placed in the still. Heating the herbal mixture slowly at a low temperature just “kisses it,” says Alexander, like steeping tea. The more these delicate substances become abused with heat, the harsher the flavors and aromas. “Think of the smell of overboiled vegetables,” he explains. I imagine the sulfurous compounds and acrid notes. “My way gives it a bright nose,” he says.
Bright nose indeed! The most striking feature is the absence of juniper berry assaulting your nasal pathways. But it’s still there; it just kisses you. The cilantro fragrance, however, is what gets me going. I wonder secretly if I could just wear the gin, and maybe only drink it occasionally. I tell Alexander that I believe if people knew that gin could taste like this, we’d have more gin drinkers around. “Well, I hope so,” he says.
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Sarticious Spirits isn’t the only company hoping to convert gin drinkers. Distillery 209 occupies space over the San Francisco Bay on a pier just south of the baseball park. Arne Hillesland, now head distiller at Distillery 209, began working with the nascent company during the research and development stages, and while he is forthcoming with many of the production details, he also is quick to guard certain trade secrets.
The association between distilling spirits and perfume-making could not be more evident than in this facility. We approach a small room that wafts a cunning aroma. The shelves are lined with sacks of botanicals, which, I’m told, have distinct characteristics when distilled. Tuscan juniper is bright and citrusy; this coriander is more floral; a Spanish lemon peel has a purer lemon quality; the Guatemalan cardamom is less astringent; and the Italian bergamot is out of this world. I take some bergamot rind and put it in my pocket.
“Cassia is cinnamon’s darker, earthier cousin,” says Hillesland, holding out the bag for me to inhale. It’s a good thing that Leslie Rudd, the gourmet food and beverage mogul who is the mastermind of the operation, has connections to a spice trader, one whose family has been in the business for several generations. Hillesland explains that procuring a reliable source of dried botanicals was the only way to ensure a consistent, quality product. He’s actually planning for the future. “It may sound corny,” he says, “but some of these old recipes have been passed down through generations. If I ever have a hope of doing that, it has to be this way.”
The specially designed state-of-the-art equipment here is also an important part of the process. To be sure, Rudd spared no expense. The gleaming 1,000-gallon Scottish copper still needs stairs to approach the main working parts. Peering inside through the open porthole, I imagine it would make a nice studio apartment. During production, this space is filled with 192-proof corn-based neutral spirit (essentially vodka), water and a proprietary selection of dried botanicals that have been soaked in the spirit overnight, allowing them to “open up.” The mixture is heated slowly, causing the aromatic esters and other vapors to rise and fall inside the towering column protruding from the pot. As the temperature increases, the lighter elements will eventually make it over the swan neck into the collecting tube, leaving the others behind. Hillesland says that during the run, the distillers taste the product periodically. “It goes through phases,” he says. “There’ll be a juniper phase, then a lemon phase, then a cassia phase and so forth, as each of the flavors and aromas makes it over.” Sounds a little like Violet Beauregarde chewing Wonka’s experimental gum.
When I finally do taste the gin, it’s all there. The juniper is the sentry to announce that this is indeed gin, then floral and citrus from the lemon, bergamot and coriander, and subtle notes of exotic spices from cassia and cardamom finish it off. Even the corn alcohol base was selected due to the ability of corn to suggest sweetness, a quality attractive when marketing to the American palate. This gin, however, has also done well in London, the New York of gin: if you can make it there, well . . . Distillery 209 sold 20 to 30 cases within three hours at the famed Harrod’s specialty foods store.
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If high-tech and cosmopolitan (no pun intended) define Distillery 209, then Stillwater Spirits is a do-it-yourself kind of operation. Far up in Petaluma, located inside the Foundry Wharf, Don Payne mans a massive 530-gallon Kentucky copper still that he designed himself to suit the needs of his fledgling operation, which he co-owns with Paddy Giffen and John Moylan, Brendan Moylan’s dad. The design attempt is not so out of character once you consider that Payne enjoyed an initial career in heating and refrigeration. Payne also sets himself apart from the pack because he is basically self-taught, having taken only a short course in bourbon distillation in Kentucky. But what truly makes Stillwater different is that, unlike most other local distillers, Payne makes straight vodka from scratch right in the pot still.
This American Single-Malt Vodka is the main attraction here at Stillwater. That’s because the single malt is made from high-quality two-row barley specially malted down at Moylan’s brewery and fermented with his own strain of yeast. Add hops and you’re on your way to making beer. Put it in a still instead and you’ve got something highly unusual.
“You can make vodka from just about anything,” says Payne. Rye, wheat and corn are fairly common starter grains for vodka, though some top-shelf brands are made from potatoes (Chopin) and even grapes (Ciroc). It all basically starts out as beer—fermented grain. All told, fermentation is yet another realm in which it pays to be a craftsman, for when yeast and sugar get together, they can create a diverse flavor profile of mainly aromatic esters. With the vodka, Payne keeps ester formation to a minimum in order to preserve the true character of the malted barley.
I’m reminded of the whole point of vodka, a neutral spirit. I ask a hypothetical: “What if you just let it go and didn’t worry about the ester formation? What would happen then?”
He looks at me and grins. “Well, I’d put it in oak barrels and make whiskey!” Aha! Now I get it.
It’s this “crazy fermentation,” along with barrel aging, Payne says, that gives rum and whiskey their distinct character. Not a suitable approach for vodka, nor gin for that matter. In fact, gin is but one of the new projects in the pipeline. Payne tells me about an Asian pear tree of his, covered in bottles to capture the fruit for presentation of an eau de vie. The fruit will mature inside the bottle, which will then be filled with the liquor for a dramatic effect. There are also flavored versions of single-malt vodka nearly ready: Eureka Lemon and Chin Pei Mandarin, known to the Chinese for its medicinal attributes. A chocolate liqueur is also in bottles, waiting for labels. Liqueurs are distinct from other spirits in that their flavorings are added post-distillation and contain some residual sugars. This liqueur, made from Scharffen Berger chocolate nibs, is aged for a year in previously used red wine barrels. The result is a delicate match of raw cacao, subtle vanilla and smooth malt.
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While these newcomers to micro-distilling are certainly making their marks, Marko Karakasevic is marking his spot. When your Yugoslavian-born, 12th-generation Master Distiller father offers to teach you the family secrets, you jump right in. Charbay Winery and Distillery is located in St. Helena with its major distillations in Ukiah.
No one knows better than Karakasevic that vodka is the darling of the industry these days. He has literally led the pack regarding flavored vodkas including Ruby Red Grapefruit, Blood Orange, Meyer Lemon, Green Tea and the recently released Pomegranate. While sharing the source of Charbay’s ingredients was no problem, Karakasevic guards the fabrication methods closely as family secrets. He hints that the flavors are extracted and concentrated using a special process that sets his vodkas apart and evidently goes beyond just using great fruit. The results are luscious, highly drinkable spirits.
But it wasn’t so easy to convince his dad, Miles, to extend the business to vodka. “My dad’s a perfumer at heart,” says Karakasevic. This attachment is evident across the span of spirits Charbay produces from whiskey and rum to pastis, a traditional French liqueur that gets a Karakasevic update. At Charbay, the pastis is infused with three types of anise (Moroccan, French and star anise) plus 18 other botanicals in a base of vodka, instead of the traditional brandy. Miles Karakasevic had no interest in creating vodka due to its inherent flavorlessness, especially considering that the whole business of the Karakasevic family is in creating flavors through their special time-honored techniques. Marko Karakasevic’s persistence paid off, however, and the vodka line was born. Ironically, it is the supposedly neutral Charbay Clear Vodka that is winning top spirit awards normally reserved for more full-flavored spirits like whiskey.
When I speak with Karakasevic, he’s making brandy. Later, he might be shelling tough black walnuts for the family’s Nostalgie Black Walnut liqueur, another update on an old Mediterranean tradition. It takes two and a half years to extract the essence from the walnuts, which are released in a base of three-times-distilled pinot noir. Karakasevic says that distilled pinot has been used as a base for some of the world’s finest perfumes and gives the liqueur its distinct floral quality. “You can even wear it,” he says. Sounds right up my alley.
Karakasevic says there’s no doubt about it: “The micro-distillery revolution is on.” He is so excited about it that he claims to work 24 hours a day when distilling, catching a couple hours of sleep here and there.
“Aren’t you afraid of burnout?” I ask.
“Nah, when it gets like that in my business, you just sit down and have a cocktail.”
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Katherine Dittmann is a former chef and graduate student in nutrition science and writes about edibles and potables for The Monthly.
