“We were hobbyists for a long time. Two of us were distilling in our parents’ garage since probably high school.”
“What kind of stuff were you guys making?”
“Nothing good.”
Much has changed since the days when Anthony Caspary and his brother, Andrew, were brewing up Nothing Good just for the fun of it. They’re no longer in their parents’ garage, for one, though they’re still in Ventura, California. And from that point until selling the very first (official, legal) bottles of Ventura Spirits in 2013, their distilling chops have come a long way. In careful, small batches, the distillery now produces some of Southern California’s most special and place-driven booze, from a spirit made from Nopal cacti to a California limoncello. Most of all, though, there is an ethic behind what they do—and it starts and ends with the land.
Bartender Aaron Polsky came up in New York City’s dining scene as a runner, then a server, and later, a bartender, working in a string of distinguished bars and restaurants before moving to Los Angeles to help open a bar in late 2015. That venue never actually opened, but in those early days on the West Coast, Polsky started spending his evenings hanging around Harvard & Stone, a dark and raucous bar in L.A.’s Thai Town. Six months in, Harvard offered him a job, and he took it.
Polsky worked at Harvard & Stone for three-and-a-half years. Last July, he left to pursue a different path: launching a line of canned cocktails, and the more ambitious plan to reconfigure the drinks industry by simultaneously debuting a talent agency for bartenders. LiveWire Drinks, a remnant of Polsky’s original plan to work in the music industry, functions more like a record label than a ready-to-drink product. With LiveWire, he puts out hits from artists (in the form of canning and distributing bartenders’ signature drinks), while acting as a talent booker and contract negotiator—almost in the spirit of a union.
Though the idea for LiveWire has percolated for a long time, securing investment, partnering with other bartenders, and getting the drinks into the market has been Polsky’s sole focus since his last day behind the bar at Harvard. “I can't tell you the amount of canned beans I've eaten in the last seven months to be able to pay rent,” he jokes.
“Around here, you can go and hike around in the Chaparral, and on the right day with the right amount of rain, the air smells like our gin smells, because of the plants that are used in the gin.”
One of the early challenges of the endeavor was finding a distillery with which to partner for the canned drinks’ spirit components. Polsky had first encountered Ventura Spirits years ago, back when he was making a name for himself in L.A.’s bar scene. He was struck by the sense of place they seemed to bring to everything they made: gin that smelled like a day spent hiking around the Central Coast; strawberry brandy made from local stock rejected by supermarkets. “They're here, they use products from here, and it's a cool, honest, and really well-made set of products,” he says. “I just got a really good feeling from them.”
Last fall, Polsky attended a spirits brand event on a farm north of the city, and realized he was minutes away from Ventura. “I texted Anthony and said, ‘Hey man, I'm up in your neck of the woods, want to chat?’ So I came up, and we talked, and it was kind of a right-then-and-there handshake thing.”
Ventura’s ethos centers on local ingredients, but not for the purposes of a compelling marketing story or catchy tasting notes. “The idea of terroir in spirits has always been something that's very hard to argue, I think, because it is such a heavy intervention product by nature,” Caspary tells me. Co-opting the language of terroir from wine and trying to stuff it into a bottle of vodka might make for good marketing verbiage, but little else. Rather, Ventura’s focus on the local points to a philosophy that positions distilling as a crucial part of the agricultural chain.
That idea is the barometer by which Caspary and his team measure everything they do at Ventura. Historically, Caspary explains, distilleries have always been at the end of the agricultural chain, taking residual material and converting it from a perishable state into a non-perishable state. It’s the last stop on the line. “You see it happen virtually everywhere you have large-scale agriculture or high-value agriculture,” he says. “There are stills in places where they make good wines. There are stills in places where they grow sugarcane or process sugar.” This is true for every distiller. The difference is in whether or not they recognize that.
Even before Caspary and his co-founders distilled professionally, they were foraging locally and experimenting with their findings. Prickly pear, which grows in abundance on the hillsides, started off as an inexpensive source of sugar. It ended up yielding a surprisingly distinctive and nuanced brandy. “Around here, you can go and hike around in the Chaparral,” says Caspary, “and on the right day with the right amount of rain, the air smells like our gin smells, because of the plants that are used in the gin.”
I ask Caspary where his respect for the land stems from, and how that ethos later grew into the backbone of Ventura Spirits. “I think it comes from loving where you live, first of all, and seeing the kind of value that agriculture brings to the people who live around it,” he tells me. It was proximity: growing up north of Los Angeles, seeing the land open up along the highways, understanding how integral it was to the place he called home. His partners sometimes hypothesize that if they weren’t distilling, they’d simply farm. The land in and around Ventura County is abundant and expensive, home to some of the most productive farmland in the country, along with some of the highest land values. One in 10 households in the county depend on that land to make a living.
Fresh fruit that can’t be sold because it’s too soft, or too unattractive for retail, or has been sitting in cold storage for a year—these are assets that a Ventura farm might struggle to get rid of, but that Ventura Spirits can easily (and literally) help liquidate, he explains. It’s a way of making sure that the produce has value, from the time it germinates all the way until it becomes compost.
The ways in which Ventura Spirits brings a sense of place to its products are “to make use of the ingredients, and to be part of the system that adds value to the people and to the land here,” Caspary says. “What has always been important to me in the back of my mind is that we give people a new way to experience the place that they live in.” He talks about going hiking, and how, after tasting the purple sage and yerba santa in the distillery’s Wilder Gin, maybe you’re more inclined to stop and appreciate what’s around you, or better able to articulate the aromas in the air. “What I hope is happening is that people are having that surprising and delightful and adventurous experience, and they're taking just a moment to contemplate it.” says Caspary. “And when they do, I like to think that they're deepening their connection to the place.”
“You really taste the agriculture. I know people say ‘terroir,’ but really it’s the agriculture of it. The strawberries, the soil, the workers picking it—I might be reaching there, but it tastes handmade.”
Joe Keeper has watched Southern California’s distilling scene blossom over the last 16 years he’s run Bar Keeper, his barware and spirits shop in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood. He remembers when Ventura’s team first came into the shop and invited him to taste what they were working on. Now, Keeper says, he can taste their stamp in everything they make. “You really taste the agriculture,” he says. “I know people say 'terroir,' but really it’s the agriculture of it. The strawberries, the soil, the workers picking it—I might be reaching there, but it tastes handmade. It really does.”
Keeper gets a lot of tourists in his shop, looking for a little taste of Southern California to bring back home. They often leave with a bottle of something distilled by Ventura. “These products are indicative of California, and you can taste the botanicals in there ... I don't have to tell you what to look for, when you taste it,” he says. “You'll identify them readily. They're distinct.” It reminds him a bit of a certain distillery up the road in Alameda—Ventura’s spirits seem transportive, he says, in the way that St. George's Terroir Gin is “like licking a pine tree.”
“It's different than when people say, ‘Oh, we're getting locally sourced wheat and corn,’” adds Keeper. “That's wonderful, but I can't taste the difference between locally sourced wheat and wheat from another state. Whereas, the produce that they use in their products … it's really indicative of the environment they're located in.”
Ventura’s distillers didn’t have misty-eyed dreams of giving California an agave spirit (or, a tequila you can’t call “tequila”) to call its own. They didn’t plan to make an agave spirit at all, until a rancher in Santa Barbara got in touch. He’d taken a risk, and planted a bunch of Blue Weber agave plants on fallow land he’d previously used for avocados. That was five years ago. The ranch manager and land owner invited Caspary out to come take a look at the plants. They established a relationship, kept in touch. Then, last spring, the agaves began to flower. “That meant that they were in the end of their lives,” Caspary explains. He thought they had another four or five years before that happened (the typical lifespan is closer to a decade). “But nonetheless,” he says, “the plants told us they were ready.”
The first batch of La Paloma, a run of about a hundred bottles, tasted light and floral and a bit fruity, but the distillery kept iterating. The second batch, a couple hundred bottles, was an improvement. The third batch Caspary describes as rustic and earthy and “pretty good,” though others have a bit more to say about it. “It’s wild how good it is,” says Polsky. “To me, it's got this richness to it that tastes like ... if you ever have the opportunity to taste the just-cooked agave pulp at a tequila distillery, that's what it tastes like.” He picks up caramelized banana, a touch of acidity, and a rich, deep quality that reminds him of the añejo or reposado tequila made by Fortaleza, a tiny and ultra-traditional Mexican distillery that makes tequila the way it was historically produced.
“It’s wild how good it is. To me, it’s got this richness to it that tastes like ... if you ever have the opportunity to taste the just-cooked agave pulp at a tequila distillery, that’s what it tastes like.”
La Paloma isn’t found on shelves at L.A. bottle shops; it’s sold straight out of the distillery. And like any true agricultural product, it will only be around for so long—that third production run yielded about a thousand bottles total. Caspary isn’t sure whether the spirit will ever make it into the wholesale market, nor is he certain how long they’ll continue producing it, because production is dictated entirely by the supply of agave.
“Between the ranch and our distillery, we've shown that there may be some opportunity for a slightly different agricultural future for this area,” he says. Unlike avocados, which net ranchers high yields, agave doesn’t require a lot of water, and doesn’t drain the groundwater the way avocado farming often does. That ranch took its chances on trying something new, a crop that might not irrevocably change the land or sap it of its resources, and Ventura could support it. “Not only were we excited about the opportunity to do it, but we want to support people,” says Caspary. “Because it's important that people are being supported and taking risks that are good for the system.”
Words by Gray Chapman Graphics by Ryan Troy Ford 
