Made in Ventura: Inside Ventura Spirits

Everything we do is really informed by where we are and what grows here. And so the idea is to, you know, hopefully have that reflected in the bottles, in the spirits that we make, and to make something that's highly differentiated and compelling. My name is Henry Tarmy. Anthony Casperi. I'm Andrew Casperi. And we are here at the Ventura Spirits Distillery. Ventura Spirits was founded by myself, Andrew and Anthony, who are brothers, and my brother-in-law, James Greenspun. We are in the basement of a just about a hundred year old building. It's been a great place for us to, you know, find our feet and figure things out. And we keep adding on and adding capacity and figuring out new things to do in here. Everything we do is animated by the place that we are in the world. The inspiration behind all of our products brings directly from the wild places here in Ventura County and the incredible agriculture that surrounds us. We let ourselves be driven by the ingredients that are available. We are 100% dependent on the people around us that do work the land. We like to work with the ugly oranges and the misshapen lemons and the blueberries that by our standards are fantastic, but for one reason or another didn't make it onto store shelves. It takes a lot of fruit to produce a sufficient amount of fermentable sugars in order to make a bottle of alcohol. For us, as long as the fruit is whole and sound, we don't care how it looks. We bring them in, we mash them up, we press off the juice, ferment them into wine and distill them into brandies and liqueurs and other products. We have a fun fruit liqueur program that is fairly unique. Some people will tell you in creative fields, like you have to artificially create constraints for yourself, otherwise you don't make anything interesting and that's true for us too. The only real liqueur example that I think is truly novel is the one that we made from agave. Of course, traditionally grown in Mexico to produce tequila and mezcal. You know, local farmers are really interested in it because it uses so much less water than, for example, avocados. And one of our newest releases is an agave liqueur that's made entirely from California grown agave where you have the agave spirit, which you could compare to a tequila or mezcal and then it's mixed with juice, basically the sugars from the agave that you would then ferment and distill into agave spirit, but we're holding some of that back just the same way we do with our fruit liqueurs. We are working with agave because that's a need that local farmers and ranchers have expressed and so we're doing it. Most of the spirits that we drink came about because of some very practical relationship between distillers and farmers. Skylar at South Mountain Citrus is a great farmer and a great friend of Ventura Spirits. At this point, we're sourcing almost all of our lemons from her. Her fruit has allowed us to make consistently good lemon products. I wish that it took more lemons to make a bottle of limoncello, for example, so we could buy more. We tell Skylar specifically that she can hang on to the stuff that she knows is gonna get rejected by the packing house and sell it to us, what I probably think is top dollar because we're happy to, it's organic fruit, it's fantastic and she's a great person and they're a great family so we're really happy to work with them. My name is Skylar Fallman. I'm here at South Mountain Citrus in Somos. So we're just a little local lemon ranch out here. We've got a couple of acres and we are organic and we're one of the partners with Ventura Spirits. You've got some bug right here but then this side's pretty darn good. So Ventura Spirits would take this whereas if it went to our packing house, it would get kicked off to juice. But Ventura would take this and take off the rind and make that into their limoncello. What's kind of amazing as a lemon rancher is you have a lot of yellow fruit but not everything will actually go to market. So this guy may not go to like a Ralphs or a Vons because he's a little too big. This guy would go to a Ralphs or a Vons but then you have things that have, you know, some mite on them and they've got some bugs and infestations and so that would go all to juice. But what's great about my partnership as a lemon rancher for Ventura Spirits is that they'll take this bigger fruit and turn it into something really wonderful which is their limoncello and their lemon spritz. It's fun and exciting as a rancher to be able to partner with local companies and have something that would go to waste or go to juice get turned into a yummy treat. Being here in Ventura and specifically here on North Ventura Avenue means everything to us. It's a huge part of our identity and who we are and how we live and what makes it into our bottles. Ventura is at this interesting point geographically where it's like on a frontier in a number of directions. You have the ocean on one side, you have like the Los Padres and kind of an incredible wilderness on the other side and then you have LA Metro which is on the other side. Creates a lot of cool intersections. The goal is for these spirits to in some ways almost be the advocates for the place. By drinking something from Ventura Spirits they're enjoying Ventura County and they're learning something or gaining some kind of appreciation for the place. My favorite is aged strawberry brandy. I'd have to say our Amaro Angelino because I find it really interesting and versatile and challenging. Every time I go back to it, it makes great cocktails, keeps on opening up and keeps on giving new flavors and aromas the more I engage with it. I'm a big fan of Wilder Gin. I'm a big fan of our Agave Spirits and I really like Angelino Amaro as well. It's bitter, it's sweet. You can drink it on its own with a little bit of soda water and it's a great modifier. The room where we store barrels, it's an interesting room of time capsules that tell the story about what our interests have been over the past decade and there's some old stuff in there actually. There are a couple of barrels of strawberry brandy that are almost 10 years old now and we're only a 13 year old business now. Walking into the barrel room is a fun way to understand what makes us tick. We have a lot of strawberry brandy aging, for example, that's a wholesale product, Strawberry Thief that's out in the world and then there are also a lot of onesie, twosie kind of fun experiments. The tasting room was recently expanded. It's busy on the weekends. We're right on the bike path. It's a great place to stop. It's a place to get out of the sun. Not everybody drinks, not everybody likes what we make but everybody comes here and has the chance to learn about what we do and we lay it all out for anybody that wants to know. There's a story of Ventura culture and agriculture to be told here and that's what we do. That's the highlight of visiting our place. We are open every day, seven days a week. We do more extended tours and tastings on the weekends, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, but people are always welcome to drop in any day of the week. We have a little bottle shop and we do drop in tastings where you can try a few things and figure out what you like. Yeah, we're distributed in California primarily. There are some accounts in Hawaii and in New York, mostly around New York City. Some is available in Japan. You'll never get to taste everything unless you come here but you know, but it's out there. And if you're out of state, there are many retailers inside of California that will ship around the country. But in the meantime, come visit Ventura and check out many of the awesome bars and restaurants in the downtown area and throughout the county. Many of them serve more than one of our spirits. Local retailers also sell bottles. You can pick them up and of course, we'd love to have people come here, visit our tasting room, tour the facility if they're interested and they can shop, get merchandise and many of the spirits. We do a fair amount of small batch production. Well, I guess all of it's small batch production. We do some tiny batch production that never leaves the distillery here. It's only bottled and sold from here. The individual spirits that we send out of here are on some level ambassadors for the place, right? That provides some sort of insight about some aspect of where we are and what grows here and what the natural world is like and makes this place special. Very fortuitously, we found a place to set up shop that had lots of room for us to grow. And so that's what we've done over the years. We've started in this area here, tasting room included, and then gradually added more square footage as we needed it. The hope and the goal is that you try a sip of Ventura Spirits Limoncello or Strawberry Thief, Strawberry Brandy or Wilder Gin and you learn a little something about what makes Ventura and this area special. It is absolutely unique. The natural beauty that is present here, and I think just self-evident and obvious in Ventura County is worth seeing. It's not like any other place in the world that I've been. It's an awesome mix of landscapes and ocean and people and food and culture that there's no place like it. I have two kids, 16 years old and 13 years old, and I couldn't think of a better place to raise them. I like to think that in some ways we're expressing that sentiment, you know, that love for this place through the spirits that we're putting out. I can't think of any place I'd rather be. If you wanna make good stuff, I can't think of a better place.