Erica Ramirez isn’t a Portland native, but she’s worked in its bars long enough to know what most out-of-towners get wrong about the city: “It’s the whole hipster ‘Portlandia’ thing,” she tells me, referencing the sketch-comedy series that satirizes the city’s twee affectations for artisanal coffee beans and putting birds on things. “The whole like, twirled mustache sort of vibe … it’s definitely a thing, but that’s not what Portland is.”
Ramirez, who grew up in San Diego, spent her teenage years hanging out in punk and metal circles; she’d follow friends’ bands on tour, and would often stop in Portland along the way. “I'd been up here a couple of times and just really liked it,” she says. “It seemed like pretty artsy, had a really good food and beverage scene, a lot of queer people.”
Ramirez started out working back-of-house for a local, small-batch ice cream shop, then a creperie and wine bar. In 2011, when a friend went on to open Parkside, a bar in Portland’s Kenton neighborhood, she invited Ramirez to come along. “They needed someone that could make food and make drinks at the same time, because when they first opened they only had one person per shift,” says Ramirez. “So I was like, ‘Well, I can definitely make food ... I've never bartended before, but I'm sure I can do that as well.’”
Ultimately she figured it out, brushing up on the classics while experimenting with housemade fruit syrups and oleo-saccharums (sugared citrus oils) for fresh and flavorful riffs on Gimlets and Margaritas. Ramirez learned alongside her clientele, too: it had only been a few years since Portland’s pioneering craft cocktail bar, Teardrop Lounge, had opened its doors and laid the groundwork for the revitalization of artisanal drink-making in the city. “There was definitely a big foundation by the time that I came along for craft cocktails,” she adds.
At Parkside, Ramirez eventually worked her way up to the position of lead bartender and, later, oversaw the bar’s cocktail program. Then, in 2016, the iconic brunch restaurant Besaw’s was forced to relocate to Northwest Portland after a lengthy battle with its property owner, and the restaurant’s new owners decided to complement the location with an adjacent cocktail bar in order to establish, as Ramirez puts it, “a really rad vibe on the corner.” Ramirez was ready to step up her game and grow beyond the confines of a neighborhood bar, so she applied, and joined The Solo Club’s opening staff.
“The whole like, twirled mustache sort of vibe … it’s definitely a thing, but that’s not what Portland is.”
Since moving to Portland, Ramirez has seen the city weather a lot of change. “There’s a certain quality of grittiness that’s gone,” she says. It’s a city where a historic restaurant or beloved dive bar might be razed to make way for a new high-rise apartment building to meet the demands of a swelling population. And while Portland’s food and beverage scene has earned national respect, working within it can feel like sprinting on a hamster wheel of hype. “You'll open and you're slammed for three months … and then all of a sudden, you're like, ‘Okay, what the fuck happened?’” says Ramirez. “It took Solo Club a year and a half or two years to gain a really good regular base.”
But amid the rising rents and a hospitality landscape that shifts like sand dunes, one thing about Portland has remained the same since Ramirez first moved here: the ineffable quality that TV shows like “Portlandia” love to gently lambast. It isn’t pretentiousness, or exclusivity—it’s simply giving a damn about what you make. A lot of craft businesses in the city embody that spirit, and Aria Gin, Ramirez says, is one worth celebrating.
Portland is blessed with so many craft distilleries that asking Ramirez, or any bartender, to talk about just one is inherently unfair. The city has long been associated with great booze, from the founding of the nation’s first state distillers guild in 2007 to the growth of its Distillery Row. Even before the word “craft” entered the vernacular, people were producing small-batch spirits in Portland—Clear Creek Distillery, for one, has been making eau-de-vie locally since 1985.
Martin Ryan Distilling Company, which makes Aria Portland Dry Gin, doesn’t have the decades-old roots that Clear Creek does, nor does it make a sizeable portfolio of products like House Spirits (distiller of Aviation Gin, Krogstad Festlig Aquavit, and Westward Whiskey, among other brands). Rather, it directs all of its attention and care to making just one single product; one which took years of fine-tuning to get right. And that spirit of hyper-focused enthusiasm, says bartender Mitchell Sennewald, feels deeply Portland.
“It’s like watching the Patriots play football,” says Sennewald, a bartender at the National-themed Portland bar Pink Rabbit (and a friend of Ramirez’s). “It's clear that what they love to do is also what they're very good at.”
Ryan Csanky, cofounder of Aria, is a Portland native whose service industry career first took shape behind the bar at Wildwood, the revered Portland institution that, in many ways, pioneered farm-to-table cuisine in the Pacific Northwest all the way back in the mid-’90s. Hearing Csanky talk about bartending at Wildwood in the mid-aughts reminds me of Thad Vogler’s comments about searching for a better vodka at San Francisco’s Slanted Door in the ’90s: it was a challenge to find spirits worthy of serving alongside such thoughtful, forward-thinking cuisine.
For Csanky, one challenge lay in devising a Wildwood-worthy Martini. If Csanky was going to put the Wildwood name on a Martini, it would need to meet three criteria: it must be made correctly (in other words: stirred, never shaken); built with gin instead of vodka, plus good, non-oxidized vermouth; and made with a local spirit instead of something sold nationally, or even internationally. “It was time for the mass-produced imported vodka Martini to return to the ’90s where it came from,” Csanky recalls thinking.
In Csanky’s quest for the fitting gin, he discovered that Pacific Northwest distillers were getting creative and pushing the boundaries of what an American gin could be, tinkering with botanicals ranging from lavender and kumquat leaves to pink peppercorns. These gins were clever, surprising, fun to experiment with. But what they weren’t? Classic. “When you start thinking about all these non-traditional ingredients, you start to lose not just the traditional gin drinker, but you also start to lose classic gin cocktails,” he explains. “It's fun to build a cocktail around a gin made with prickly pear or rhubarb, but you can't just plug it into any classic recipe.”
“So much of what gives Aria that Pacific Northwest spin isn’t necessarily what’s in the botanicals of the gin; it’s that Portland attitude and enthusiasm.”
Csanky searched the Pacific Northwest for a crisp, clean London Dry Gin, a style developed in Britain in the 19th century and characterized as the archetypal interpretation of a classic, well-balanced gin. The term “London Dry,” like “bourbon,” is actually a quality designation with rigorous and exacting standards, which dictate the ABV of its starting base spirit (96%); the minimum strength after dilution (37.5%); and the fact that no enhancements, sweeteners, or additives are permitted after distillation. (Unlike Champagne, however, a London Dry isn’t defined by its geographic designation and can be made anywhere.) Crafting one is a delicate balancing act; it takes a lot of skill and know-how to make a truly great one.
“I looked all around the country, and at that point, I saw a lot of innovation and creativity and dynamic flavors and interesting expressions, but not the realistic alternative to the big, mass-produced imports,” says Csanky. His search for a small-batch, domestic London Dry had come up, well, dry. So he decided to make his own.
Csanky and his cofounder, Erik Martin, set out on an arduous research-and-development process that involved tasting dozens of traditional London Dry Gins and parsing through each one to determine which elements succeeded and which didn’t. In the process, they found that most gins tended to tip toward a particular flavor characteristic that dominated the rest: some leaned more toward spice, others citrus, or juniper, or florals. “We thought, well, we like all of those things,” says Csanky. “So, let's make a gin that's not defined by a single ingredient, or a single dimension of the flavor, as much as it is all of those things that people want from a gin, working together in a really nice harmony.”
Plus, he adds, it was deeply important to the ethos of Aria to bring something new to the landscape. It wouldn’t make any sense to simply cop the flavor profile of a gin brand like Plymouth or Beefeater and put Aria’s name on it, “no matter how much I like it,” he says. “It doesn't make sense because nobody wins. It doesn't do anybody any good.”
After about four years of research, experimentation, and fine-tuning, Csanky and Martin launched Aria Portland Dry Gin in 2012, producing it in space borrowed from Northwest Portland’s Bull Run Distillery. Since then, the brand has grown—in 2015, the founders moved out of Bull Run and opened their own facility, under the name Martin Ryan Distilling Co.—but the distillers themselves have remained singularly committed to that gin. No new vodka, no foray into whiskey. I mention to Csanky that it feels rare to find a distillery specializing in one product and one product only, and he agrees that their approach is perhaps unusual. “I have a stove at home, but that doesn't mean I cook Thai food,” he says. “Just because I have the equipment doesn't mean I have the knowledge.” Different spirits require different skillsets and expertise, Csanky says, and he knows enough to know that right now, their expertise lies with making gin. “We thought, ‘Let's just do one thing and do it well.’”
Beyond being distilled by two Portland natives, Aria’s connection to the city isn’t one you can describe using terms like “terroir.” The botanicals, while fair-trade and organic, aren’t foraged on hikes or procured from local farmers; they’re sourced from around the world. And the spirit isn’t made using an ancestral Pacific Northwest recipe, but one inspired by a style of gin developed on the other side of the globe. (Though part of the gin, I should add, is very local: its water comes from the pristine western slope of Mt. Hood, which dominates the Portland skyline.) But in the eyes of the bartenders who love it, upon whose backbars Aria has been and will continue to be a fixture, the gin’s identity goes beyond ingredients.
“That was really the idea with Aria, to take all the things people expect with a traditional English gin and bring them together in a way that is unified, and comes together as this beautiful balanced whole.”
“I think a lot of people see Portland as this pretentious city ... and then they come, and see people behind the bar that are very enthusiastic about what they do, and the people they get to do it with,” says Sennewald. “There's an attention to detail that's paid here, even down to the dive bars. So much of what gives Aria that Pacific Northwest spin isn't necessarily what's in the botanicals of the gin; it’s that Portland attitude and enthusiasm.” One might paint that attitude as “hipster,” but another word for it—for constantly, obsessively, meticulously striving to make something great—could be passion. It’s tempting to conflate reverence with preciousness, but it’s also kind of lazy. Like Ramirez says, that sense of pure earnestness and respect for the craft is so much more than a twirly mustache trope.
Whatever you call it, that x-factor has worked for Martin Ryan—the distillery has stayed the course, even in a city that’s been whipsawed by change and a series of fleeting infatuations with the next new thing. “You'll find [Aria] on just about any backbar of most cocktail spots around town,” says Csanky. “Eric and I both grew up here, and we’re really proud to be part of a community of people that make awesome things from passion. That's really what the gin is about. And we couldn't be more proud of the community that loves and embraces us.”
Words by Gray Chapman Graphics by Ryan Troy Ford
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