St. George Spirits

An idea reaches the still first

Lance Winters weighs an idea by its aroma before it reaches steel; as winemaker at St. George Spirits in Alameda, he works inside a former naval airplane hangar where scale and concentration sit side by side. His title at the distillery is Master Distiller, a post he has held since 1996, after work as a nuclear engineer with the United States Navy. The change of station altered the material, not the discipline. Timing, pressure, patience, and control still govern the hands.

Lance Winters describes the work with little ornament: “I make stuff at a distillery.” The sentence fits the room. St. George Spirits is known for taking an idea, often a scent memory or a regional impression, and asking what form it should take in liquid. Winters has called spirits a form of self-expression, but the expression here is not loose. It passes through stills, cuts, botanicals, ferment, heat, and repetition. The house works in small batch artisanal production, with a sustainable philosophy and an appetite for spirits that carry a clear point of view.

Terroir as material, not decoration

The program at St. George Spirits runs through aroma first. Terroir Gin, released in 2011, makes that position plain: around a dozen botanicals, including Douglas fir and California bay laurel, with many gathered in the San Francisco Bay Area. The bottle does not use place as a label alone. It uses place as matter, bringing the resin, leaf, and shade of the region into the spirit itself.

That same method moves through Dry Rye Gin, St. George California Agricole Rum, and St. George Green Chile Vodka. Each begins with a proposition, then finds its structure through distillation. St. George is also known for producing the first legal American absinthe since 1912, a fact that belongs to the house’s particular temperament: historically aware, technically willing, and uninterested in making the obvious version of anything. The work asks for precision, but also for permission to follow scent before category.

The hangar changes the scale of the bench

The room is a 65,000 sq ft former naval airplane hangar at the Alameda Naval Air Station. It gives the craft an industrial frame without turning it cold. Stills, tanks, and barrels sit with the breadth of a building made for aircraft, while the actual decisions remain close to the hand: a cut held a little longer, a botanical treated as structure rather than garnish, a spirit allowed to carry green chile, rye, fir, bay, or cane without apology.

The noise stays conversational, which matters in a place built on experiment. A guided tasting here does not need theater; the liquids do the explaining, one aroma at a time. The counter, the still house, and the warehouse all point back to Winters’s central habit, turning perception into form. The Terroir Gin and its Douglas fir.