In 2012, bartender Paul Taylor flipped open a local paper and was struck by a headline: Washington, D.C., it was reported, now had its first distillery since before Prohibition. Taylor headed straight to a local Schneider’s liquor store to get his hands on a bottle of the stuff: New Columbia Distillers’ Green Hat Gin. He still has the bottle, labeled Batch #001.
Raised in nearby Arlington, Virginia, Taylor has lived and worked in the D.C. area his entire life—“I guess you could call me a townie,” he jokes. Over the last decade, much of that time has been spent behind the bar, whether at billiards halls or James Beard nominees. “I've seen D.C. from the perspective of a sports bar, a dive bar, a beer-and-shot place, as a vodka soda bartender ... and I've seen this craft revolution grow and get to the point where it is right now,” he says.
These days, Taylor’s working at the pinnacle of it. As partner and beverage manager at Columbia Room, he oversees one of the most lauded beverage programs in the city. The vaunted D.C. bar is tucked between city blocks on Blagden Alley, a cobblestone corridor and National Register Historic District dating back to the 1870s.
Over the past century, Blagden Alley and the surrounding Shaw neighborhood, once a vibrant working-class district, has since experienced the full spectrum of gentrification, from displacement of its low-income residents to, more recently, investment by commercial developers. It’s now home to the likes of a mezcaleria, a specialty coffee shop, and a basement wine bar serving mid-Atlantic oysters and charcuterie, and the artists who built Blagden Alley’s reputation as an underground arts community have since left for more affordable neighborhoods.
Entering Columbia Room from the old-timey alley means making a series of discoveries. First there is the lush, outdoor Punch Garden, then the museum-like Spirits Library. From there, visitors enter into the Tasting Room: a sunken bar where guests sit at eye level with bartenders and music plays quietly enough to have a conversation. The bar’s distinctive layout, Taylor explains, was inspired by the idea of portals to another world. “As crunchy as that sounds, it really applies to the bar, because you're really going from one world to another, to another, to another,” says Taylor. He likens the experience to the feeling of finding a $20 bill in your winter coat pocket. “There's all these elements of discovery … and I think we provide that, in a more liquid way.”
Taylor’s path into bartending is, as he says, “the classic bartender story.” Around 2007, he was waiting tables at an Arlington pool hall, Carpool, to put himself through school. One day, a bartender bailed on their afternoon shift, and Taylor jumped in. The first drink he made for a customer was a Rusty Nail, a 50-50 pour of Scotch and Drambuie on the rocks that came into popularity back in the Rat Pack era and, more recently, has acquired an admittedly dusty veneer. (It’s kind of a grandpa drink.)
Taylor’s serendipitous shift behind the bar was a one-off back then, but it soon led to his first true foray into the line of work: a barbacking gig in a sister pool hall in D.C. called Buffalo Billiards. “It was before the Recession, and it was way too much money for a newly 21 year old to have,” he says, laughing as he remembers the sheer lunacy of paying for cabs in and out of the city every day. (“That could’ve gotten a nice car payment,” he adds.)
“We had all these new tools to play with, new spirits coming out, new ways to make syrups or infusions. We had the big ice cubes. We thought we were really doing it.”
Taylor then made his way back to Arlington, working at a neighborhood bar called Rhodeside Grill. There, he and a friend were tasked with creating four drinks for the bar’s menu. “I think we filled up an entire Moleskine of ideas,” he says. The prospect of inventing drinks was exciting, but so were the novel ingredients Taylor and his peers suddenly had at their disposal. “We had all these new tools to play with, new spirits coming out, new ways to make syrups or infusions,” he says. “We had the big ice cubes. We thought we were really doing it.”
Before Taylor was tinkering with giant ice cubes and grapefruit bitters, the generation of bartenders preceding him—including figures like Adam Bernbach, Jeff Faile, and Derek Brown (founder and partner at Columbia Room)—had laid the groundwork for better drinking in D.C., a town that had been unfairly saddled with the reputation of being limited to steakhouses and French restaurants. “The culture was turning, and people wanted something different,” says Taylor. These bartenders were starting to deliver it.
Across D.C., drink technique was improving. Backbars were diversifying. Those ice cubes were getting bigger. Guests were becoming more curious to try something new. But D.C. still did not have a distillery to call its own. It hadn’t had one for over a century, even as the craft spirits boom was revving up across the country.
That changed in 2012, when father/son-in-law team and fellow gin aficionados Michael Lowe and John Uselton put their heads together and started New Columbia Distillers, D.C.’s first distillery since before Prohibition—which, it’s worth noting, unfairly began earlier and lasted slightly longer in D.C. than in the rest of the country. The Volstead Act didn’t dry D.C. out completely, though; instead, it spurred along a thriving speakeasy and bootlegging business, including one quasi-mythical fellow named George Cassiday who boldly ran bathtub gin right up to Capitol Hill and later even set up shop in the basement of a Congressional office building. (Clearly his client base, who had facilitated the teetotaling 18th Amendment, weren’t above defying their own legislative handiwork.)
Cassiday, the eponymous man in the green hat, kept lawmakers’ thirsts slaked ’til he was caught and arrested in 1925. Nine decades later, Uselton and Lowe learned about his story in local author Garrett Peck’s book, “Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t.” Through Peck, the founders tracked down Cassiday’s son, sat down with him over a couple beers, and sought his blessing for the name of the gin.
He said yes, and shortly thereafter, the Cassiday family received the first case of Green Hat Gin to come off the bottling line. At this point, Uselton says, he thinks they’ve met just about every Cassiday family member who’s still alive. They still regularly drop into the distillery and make small talk with visitors. Sometimes, one of them celebrates a birthday there.
Of course, no one said being the first would be easy. For New Columbia, that challenge lay primarily in D.C.’s laws, which at that point didn’t allow them to offer tastings or direct sales out of the distillery, limiting them to wholesale. “So, while we were doing construction, half of our time was working on the construction and the other half was going to D.C. City Council to try and get that changed,” says Uselton. They teamed up with D.C. brewers, who had achieved similar changes in local legislation, to work out the language and pitch it to lawmakers. Fortunately for Uselton and company, it was an easy sell. “Most of the Council members we talked to were like, ‘Oh, this is a great idea. You should get somebody to introduce that,’” he says. “And we're like, ‘Well, that's why we're talking to you.’”
“In the years afterwards, as we got more and more distilleries in the District, we were able to get more and more laws passed. Now, we can sell and serve cocktails, and the hours that we’re allowed to be open to the public has greatly expanded over the last five or six years.”
They were ultimately successful, and like the generation of bartenders that came before Taylor, who laid the groundwork for a drinking renaissance in D.C., New Columbia blazed a trail for its fellow distilleries. Together, their efforts have allowed a craft spirits community to thrive. “In the years afterwards, as we got more and more distilleries in the District, we were able to get more and more laws passed,” says Uselton. As more joined the effort, Uselton and his peers presented a united front and got things done. “Now, we can sell and serve cocktails, and the hours that we're allowed to be open to the public has greatly expanded over the last five or six years.”
For Taylor, the booze itself opened up a new understanding of what gin could be. “I grew up in a Beefeater household,” he says. “When I was first learning about spirits, and came across Green Hat, it was like, ‘Oh, this is not only a gin from D.C., so I can be proud of something from where I'm from, but it's also a different style.’” At that point, he adds, London Dry still seemed like the reigning king of gin styles; the only alternative he’d tried by then was Bluecoat American Gin. Green Hat, with its unmistakable body (courtesy of its rye base), and its savory notes of celery seed balanced with more traditional juniper and citrus, taught Taylor that gin contains multitudes. And, he adds, “It’s something you can be proud of.”
New Columbia forged a path for craft spirits in the District, spearheaded legislative change, and, in 2012, gave eager bartenders not just a new crayon in the coloring box but one to call their very own. But there’s another reason Green Hat Gin feels so rooted in D.C., Taylor adds, and that reason is the Rickey.
Only two cities in the country have their own official cocktail: one is New Orleans, which lays claim to the Sazerac. In 2011, D.C. joined that shortlist, represented by the Rickey, a simple highball of gin or bourbon with soda water and lime invented (by a lobbyist) in the 19th century at D.C. dive bar Shoomaker’s Saloon, which shuttered in 1917 as D.C. got a legislative head start on Prohibition.
“The Rickey is, by today's standards, not incredibly inventive,” admits Taylor. “But, you know, it gets real hot in D.C. in the summer, and the Gin Rickey is like air conditioning in a glass.” Today, D.C. bartenders have embraced the Rickey to the degree that the drinks community even hosts its own annual citywide Rickey competition, where bartenders are tasked with reimagining the drink. Appropriately, the event takes place in the middle of summer.
So much has changed since Taylor’s first day behind the stick. Carpool, the decades-old pool hall where he served his first Rusty Nail, is no longer—the place shut down in 2017, a casualty of D.C.’s real-estate boom, says Taylor. And D.C. is no longer known exclusively as a steakhouse and power-lunch town. “That was the stereotype for a very long time, and I think we're getting over that,” he says. “We pushed so hard.”
“The Rickey is, by today’s standards, not incredibly inventive. But, you know, it gets real hot in D.C. in the summer, and the Gin Rickey is like air conditioning in a glass.”
The drinking public has changed, too. Taylor tells me of a recent night when he recommended a nearby mezcal bar to an out-of-town guest. “They were like, ‘Oh my god, I love mezcal, my favorite variety of agave is Tobala.’” Taylor was dumbstruck, in a good way. “In 2008, I did not know what that was. Fast-forward 12 years, and I have a guest telling me that? That knowledge is out there now, and they want to try all these different things.”
Of course, Green Hat is no longer the only spirit in town. But it’ll always be the first, and the Rickey will always be D.C.’s drink. I ask Taylor: if he were behind the bar at Columbia Room, and an intrepid guest asked for a drink they couldn’t leave D.C. without trying, what would it be? “It'd be Green Hat in a Rickey,” he responds, without skipping a beat. “You wouldn't be able to explain the whole story of Washington, D.C., but you'd be able to start the conversation.”
Words by Gray Chapman Graphics by Ryan Troy Ford
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