I’m the co-founder and spirits maker at Greenbar Distillery, one of the oldest craft distilleries in the U.S. and maker of a line of flavorful, organic California spirits. Greenbar Distillery began as a hobby when my wife — and much better half, personally and professionally — and I got engaged in 2002 and started to meet the relatives. Litty hated the taste of straight vodkas and fruit brandies my family served for the toast to the new couple. I started making complex infusions so she could have something tasty to drink on these occasions. She liked the layered infusions much better than the previous “nail polish removers” and began to participate in the family tradition of toasting and sipping spirits with meals. Soon, friends and family started asking for bottles, and then their friends and so on. Two years into this delicious hobby, we decided to turn our pastime into a profession in 2004 by launching Greenbar Distillery.
When we launched CRUSOE rum in 2009, we wanted to create a hybrid rum that captured the best of agricole and industriel for the perfect rum cocktails — floral, grassy aromas and sweet, molasses flavors.
To achieve this profile with the blackstrap molasses base we had available to us, we broke virtually all rum making traditions, including using white wine yeast, cool, slow fermentation, hyper-precise distillation and lengthy micro-oxygenation. Few of these had ever been done alone and no one had combined these to craft a rum like ours.
While rum’s not exactly a stodgy type of spirit in terms of technique, I’m most proud of pushing its boundaries as far out as possible to keep it from becoming traditional and boring.
My grandmother introduced me to rhum (she grew up in France) when I was a bit too young to appreciate it.
The flavor stuck with me and in grad school I fell in love with the range of simple, delicious rum drinks I could make by mixing some French and Spanish style rums.
As one of the least rule-bound spirits, I feel that much of rum’s possibilities still lie in the future. Which creative distiller wouldn’t want to be part of this scene?
This one kills!
Hopped Daiquiri
1.5 oz CRUSOE Spiced rum
0.5 oz GRAND HOPS amaro
1 oz fresh lime juice
1 oz simple syrup
For me, it’s a real tug of war between rum turning boring and becoming whiskey 2.0, with older, rarer and trying-too-hard finished offerings, and rum taking its rightful place next to tequila as the other flavorful white spirit, with more complexity, finesse and versatility than it has today. At least that’s the direction we’re trying to take CRUSOE Silver rum in the future.
We need more delicious rums that aren’t “acquired tastes” or marketing fairy tales.
We started too early in the craft spirits space to have had formal training or mentors. We mostly learned by making progressively higher quality mistakes. If anyone truly taught us how to make spirits, it was Dr Roger Boulton, head of enology at UC Davis. He graciously took our calls early on and forced us to ask the right questions and seek out unique solutions to fermenting, distilling, flavoring and aging spirits.
Just one — visit the Central American farmers we’ve been working with for the last 10 years to plant more than 700,000 trees and see how they and the trees are doing.
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