I Ventured to Ventura Spirits
If you are ever on the west coast, Ventura Spirits is definitely worth a visit!
Last weekend I ventured 1 hour & 45 minutes up the coast to Ventura Spirits, located in Ventura, CA. And it is such a cool, down-to-earth distillery producing craft spirits… I don’t use the word “craft” lightly. All of the ingredients used for their spirits are sourced from local farms around Ventura and they constantly have the goal of reducing waste in mind.
I have to say, it was so refreshing. This isn’t just another distillery taking up precious agricultural space to grow specific ingredients to meet their needs. They work with existing local farms and use ingredients like the farm’s reject strawberries to make delicious strawberry brandy. They’re using recouped barrels to age some of their spirits rather than only working with brand new oak barrels like most other US distilleries. Even for the production of the Limoncello they have figured out how to maximize the entire lemon by using both the peels and the juice. So yeah, like I said, this was all really refreshing to hear.
Anyways, during the tour we tasted through their 6 core products:
Haymaker’s Vodka: 6-times pot distilled vodka from a mash of potatoes and apples
Wilder Gin: 100% organic neutral wheat spirit is distilled with wild-harvested, native California sagebrush, purple sage, bay laurel, yerba santa and pixie mandarin peels
Opuntia Prickly Pear Brandy: distilled from a mash of the fruit of the nopal cactus
Strawberry Brandy: distilled from imperfect California strawberries and aged for 3 years in neutral French oak casks
Amaro Angeleno: distilled from local grapes and married with native botanicals, herbs and citrus
Limoncello: made from neutral wheat spirit with lemons, cane sugar and distilled lemon juice
We also took a detour after the prickly pear brandy to taste their two agave spirits: La Paloma and Yolo. These are both produced from blue agaves grown in two different areas of California. It was really interesting to see how the location that they were grown had such an impact on the flavors in the final spirit!
We also tried their Persimmon Brandy, Tallien Strawberry Liqueur and another product that has yet to be launched… I’m not sure how much I can say about it, but just like their other products, this one is super unique (especially to the US) and is made using a waste product from a local farm.
Everything was so delicious (you can watch me taste through four of their products on YouTube) and Todd (our guide) made the tour feel so special. He was so knowledgeable and actually answered all of my questions… this might sound like an obvious thing, but how many distillery tours have you been on where you’re given a wishy-washy answer to a question. As someone who guided tours for 3 years, I know that distilleries don’t always give you straight forward answers for one reason or another. Full transparency is not baked into the industry and it really should be. But I digress…
