Greenbar Craft Distillery Infuses L.A.’s Spirits With a Modern Style
Photo by Anne Fishbein
December 9, 2014
Litty Mathew and Melkon Khosrovian Three days a week, at 10:30 a.m.,
Melkon Khosrovian, Litty Mathew and their entire production team at
Greenbar Craft Distillery – Los Angeles’ first distillery since
Prohibition and creators of the largest line of organic spirits in the
world – gather around a long, high-top table in the company’s sleek
downtown headquarters.
On this particular day, shreds of dry ginger from a few potential
vendors (along with a neutral spirit infused with each) are set up at
one sampling station. Nine mason jars filled with hand-charred cubes
of wood, each suspended in a brown liquid, form another. Three glasses
of fermenting, partially infused and unfiltered versions of Greenbar’s
Crusoe Rum (spiced like an egg nog, not like Captain Morgan), Fruitlab
Orange (made with 75 percent Valencia, 25 percent navel oranges) and
TRU Lemon Vodka (flavored with 2,000 hand-zested lemons per batch) sit
next to their previous-batch counterparts for comparison.
“These are coming along nicely,” Khosrovian says after sampling each
one.
Days-old fermenting grape juice, which tastes like a sweet white-wine
spritzer, also gets passed around; eventually it will be distilled and
infused into a spiced brandy that, because of California’s liquor
laws, will be sold in the tasting room in lieu of their molasses-based
rum.
The setup is not unlike one that might be seen in a tea manufacturer
or perfumery, where dozens of herbs, spices and aromatic fruits and
vegetables combine to create complex concoctions.
The inconsistent nature of organic produce plus an obsessive
commitment to flavor continually brings the crew here, to a room
overlooking a dingy Industrial District street, where all the batches
of booze currently under way are taste-tested and new projects are
researched and developed.
“These sessions help us all figure out what we’re trying to
achieve. And what we’re trying to achieve is a product that you can
take home and make a great drink out of,” says Mathew, who started
professionally infusing spirits with her husband, Khosrovian, 10 years
ago this month. “We’re actually working backward in the sense that we
start at the bar and we’re thinking, ‘How can we make this daiquiri
better?’ or ‘How can we make a drink more tasty?’=80=89”
Photo by Anne Fishbein
Inside the distillery
If formulating product for a very specific cocktail sounds like a
bizarre approach to crafting spirits, it is. While American
small-batch distilleries today are having a major moment (rapid
expansion in the once-stagnant industry has brought the number from
fewer than 60 just 10 years ago to more than 600 today), most of these
new operations are going back to stand-alone basics: good
old-fashioned moonshines, 18th-century bourbons and traditional dry
gins meant to be consumed spirit-first or, at the very least, plugged
into a classic spirit-forward recipe that has survived generations
without much alteration.
In an era when most distillers and mixologists are intently focused on
re-creating and showcasing the booze of our pre-Prohibition
forefathers, Greenbar has for the last decade been doing exactly the
opposite.
=46rom vodkas infused with celery, dill, fennel and other savory
ingredients, to liqueurs fermented with white wine yeast and then
infused with plants found on a hike through Griffith Park, to a
whiskey aged on five more kinds of wood than any other whiskey that’s
ever been made before, Greenbar not only represents the inevitable
post-modern response to the spirit industry’s throwback obsession –
it’s pioneered it.
“Bartenders, as a whole, are trained classically. We’re like
ballerinas. There’s one way to do it and that’s it,” says Lauren
Reyes, bar manager at Mohawk Bend in Echo Park. Her bar stocks most of
Greenbar’s 28 products and, because it doesn’t carry any spirit that
isn’t made in California, about half of Mohawk Bend’s seasonal
cocktail menu ends up being made with Greenbar products.
“It goes back to Prohibition-era cocktails where you are familiar with
all the ingredients and if you don’t have one of them, then you get
confused,” Reyes says. “But we have to be more open-minded here, and
you have to let yourself be free. If you stick by the rules all the
time, you’re never going to have any fun.”
When Khosrovian and Mathew first began selling their artisanal sipping
vodkas out of a Monrovia office park in 2004, Greenbar was (perhaps
more appropriately) called Modern Spirits. The original line was an
outgrowth of Mathew’s dislike of her husband’s Armenian-family hooch.
At Khosrovian family gatherings, glasses of fruit brandies, vodka or
mulberry wine would get passed around for toasting, and Mathew – who
is of Indian descent but was born in Ethiopia and partially raised in
Jamaica before moving to the Inland Empire – cringed at the thought of
drinking it straight.
By watching how Mathew cooked at home (she is a Cordon Bleu-trained
chef and food writer), Khosrovian began infusing store-bought vodka
with layers of ingredients they bought on their weekly trips to the
Hollywood Farmers Market, creating flavors such as
pear-lavender-vanilla and kumquat-blackberry. He slapped a nice label
on it so his family would think he brought something fancy to
drink. When Khosrovian’s cousins started taking bottles home from the
family dinners and their cousin’s friends began calling asking how to
get more, the couple knew they were onto something.
“We either had to get our phone number unlisted or go into business,”
Mathew says. “Luckily, we chose the latter.”
At first, they purchased predistilled neutral spirits and infused them
with local, hand-processed produce. But with the vodka market flooded
by cheap, chemically flavored raspberry, vanilla and cotton-candy
versions from big-name brands, bars didn’t want to invest in high-end
versions of a partially disdained product, and consumers weren’t
interested in the multiple layers and subtle complexities of Modern
Spirits’ chocolate-orange-peppercorn and grapefruit-honey vodkas. For
the first four years in business, the products were a hard sell.
In 2008, one of Khosrovian and Mathew’s produce suppliers switched to
an organic farm, and the subsequent batches carried a distinct
increase in flavor intensity. After consulting with a viticulturist
who confirmed that pesticide-free produce creates more flavor and
aroma as a natural defense mechanism, the company launched its line of
TRU organic vodkas and never looked back.
Over the next few years, the couple began infusing rum and gin and
added a series of liqueurs and bitters. Going organic also gave them a
heightened sense of environmental responsibility, which manifested in
Earth-friendly packaging and a pledge to plant one tree for every
bottle purchased (nearly 400,000 to date).
By the time they moved into their current 14,000-square-foot warehouse
in 2012 and decided to begin distilling their own base spirits there,
the original line of Modern Spirits was retired, making Greenbar Craft
Distillery not just an all-organic spirits manufacturer whose products
are carbon-negative but also the only distillery of any kind in
Greater Los Angeles.
Read more: Greenbar, L.A.’s First Distillery Since Prohibition, Opens
Tasting Room (VIDEO)
“We used to buy the distillate because we didn’t have room before, but
we’ve always wanted to make it vertically integrated,” Khosrovian says
of their current still setup. Because many of their distillates
require precise treatment to create a final product, Greenbar has a
traditional copper pot still as well as a higher-tech continuous
column still. “We love to have control from the bottom all the way
up,” he says.
“We’re just so flavor-driven here,” Mathew adds. “Everything we do is
about capturing the most we can out of real things. We still do so
much by hand in a way that big companies aren’t capable of.”
Back in the conference room, the morning’s tasting session is coming
to a close. The final sample is of Greenbar’s Grand Poppy, an
unclassifiable liqueur and one of Greenbar’s newer products, whose
closest cousin might be a European aperitif or an Italian amaro with a
local flair. It’s most creative home is in a cocktail called the
Griffith, which won a recent cocktail competition for the title of
L.A.’s Signature Cocktail. Bitter, then sweet, and potent in aroma and
taste, the liqueur is made with 16 ingredients native to the state,
mostly herbs, roots and plants from Griffith Park that a purist might
say have no place in a spirit.
But Khosrovian and Mathew don’t concern themselves too much with the
naysayers. They prefer to work with adventurous bartenders like Reyes,
who understand that not everything has to reflect the so-called
“Golden Era” of cocktails. In Los Angeles, with its
international-fusion landscape a longtime destination for people from
all around the world, it only makes sense that the city’s largest
distillery is finding ways to create entirely new drinking experiences
instead of copying the old-world ways.
“It’s so California, isn’t it?” Mathew says with a smile.
See also: More photos from Greenbar
Greenbar Distillery is open for tours with an RSVP. In celebration of
the company’s 10th anniversary, now through the end of the year, $1
from every Griffith cocktail sold in the city will be donated to a
fund that helps maintain Griffith Park. 2459 E. Eighth St., Los
Angeles, (213) 375-3668, greenbar.biz.
From: Baghdasarian
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