New craft gin distiller goes to market next month
The first thing you notice when you walk into Tara Jasper’s Healdsburg office is the smell. Heady, exotic, floral, spicy, it makes you wish for a sachet of it for your pillow or a soak for your bath.
She pops open a bag of dried botanicals and tells you to stick your nose in and really breathe deep. “Isn’t that amazing?” she says.
Is she making bath bombs? Essential oil tinctures? Those pillow sachets? No. This heady mix of scents is the first step of the distilling process for Jasper’s nascent business as a gin distiller. Bottled under the name Sipsong, the first variety, Indira, will be publicly available in April.
“I’m the founder, distiller; I’m a one woman show. I bottle everything by hand,” she said.
It’s been a bit of a winding road for Jasper to become a craft distiller, but it’s a road she started walking very young.
“I knew I had a particular palate at a young age when my parents couldn’t figure out why I wouldn’t eat the fruit that my mom had cut on the cutting board, “ she said. “I didn’t know how to explain it then, but I realized that that my mom had been cutting the onions and garlic on that cutting board the night before and then she would cut the strawberries on it in the morning and I just couldn’t handle it. I have a very sensitive palate.”
But that palate is only part of the story. “I also remember from a very young age, seeing a product on the shelf and trying to figure out how it got there and asking my dad, who taught business at Piner High School and he would explain it to me in detail. When I was trying to decide on a major he said, ‘you should major in business.’ So, I understand how business works,” she said. “But, I’ve always loved my palate and playing with food and cooking.
But, when I met Dane (Jasper, CEO of Sonic Internet and her husband) he was the first time I had ever seen someone really following their passion and he seemed so much more alive and happy than anyone I’d ever met and I wanted to do that,” she remembered. “But, I didn’t know what my thing was. He said: ‘If you can do anything what would you do?’ And I said I’d go to culinary school.”
Jasper undertook a two-year program at the Santa Rosa Junior College, supplemented with classes by such local luminaries such as John Ash. She continued to dabble with foods and flavors. A love of shrubs (vinegar and fruit drinks) led to her learning how to make liqueurs at home, and Sipsong was initially envisioned as a liqueur company.
“So, I started making liqueur and reading about distilled sprits. Six books later — and probably the most influential was Long Lost Liqueurs and Gins,” she remembered. “That’s when I started to think ‘Huh. Gins are cool. That would be fun,’ and starting to experiment. And at that point I had already started my own business because I thought I was going to making liqueurs professionally,” Jasper said.
“When you go to culinary school they talk to you about the quality of your ingredients and about sourcing your ingredients,” she continued. “That’s one of the most fun things. You just make a day of it and go to the farmers’ market or you forage some wild fennel, finding the ingredients that inspire you. When I thought about making a gin, I thought about what are my favorite botanicals that inspire me and that I love working with. It all became very clear.
“Literally,” she finished with a laugh. “It’s a clear spirit.”
Jasper measures out her botanicals at home and tracks any tweaks to her recipe on a computer program. She then makes the trip to Windsor for time on Sonoma Brothers “beautiful Arnold Holstein solid copper gorgeous still.”
“I’d been going around visiting all these distillers and I had a meeting with (owner Christopher Matthies) and he said ‘I tell all these young distillers when they come to see me, they should work out of another distillery first. There is so much that would have been great to know before we opened our own spot.’ I let that percolate for a couple of weeks and then I called them back and said, ‘you remember when you said that? Are you really offering, because that would be great.’ ”
Jasper says cost is part of the appeal, but not the only one. “I’d done a five year (profit and loss) and I figured it would be $600,000 in without breaking even if I blew up. So, I decided working out of another facility would be better. And, I love it because I learn so much from them. They are really great guys and I feel lucky to be working out of their spot.”
The gin takes about four hours to distill, according to Jasper, but then she lets it sit for about a month, which she has found really allows all the flavors to emerge. Another interesting fact is that Indira is completely grape based, just as the original gins were. “Reading that book on lost gins really inspired me,” she said.
But that doesn’t mean she’s taking all the old advice. “Indira is a super botanical rich gin. It’s on the high end for the botanicals and what happens when you do that is you get louching.”
Louche is a French word that describes a cloudiness in a spirit that comes from the oils in the distillation mixing with water. It is also known as the ouzo affect, after the milky-colored Greek cocktail.
“It used to be that it was determined the spirit wasn’t very good if you got louching, because it meant you weren’t doing very good with your cuts or that is was just not distilled to the purity you want to distill it to. It can happen if you pull a ton of oils from your botanicals. Essential oils are done with distillation, so I’m pulling oils off the botanicals and I don’t want to dump that. If you add your tonic and your spirit louches it is a beautiful thing. You are tasting beauty.”
She also uses only what she calls the “heart of hearts,” pulling only the smoothest middle of her batches. “When I started this process Dane was like ‘Why are you doing this? You don’t even like distilled spirits.’ I don’t like the ones that burn; I’m never going to drink a shot. But, I will sip a sipping tequila that’s beautiful. So, that was the intention behind Sipsong — to make sipping quality sprits and then I realized that by pulling that heart of hearts, I could do that.”
Those intuitive realizations are the impetus for Sipsong. “Sipsong is very intentionally named. It means intuition and inner wisdom and for me this entire process has been about me listening to my gut, which is just another word for that. And totally trusting that and it feels so good,” she said. “I’ve never been so happy and I’ve realized I can do that in my entire life.
“I can also encourage others to trust their Sipsong,” she continued. “It’s a beautiful thing. And (our tagline) ‘distilling the moment’ is kind of the same thing, living in the moment. When I blended that gin I couldn’t have been more in the moment. And magic happens.”
While Indira has been the focus, Jasper is beginning to plan for her next variety, which will draw from her local environment. “It’s going to be more focused on things growing wild around Sonoma County,” she said. “This is still happening in my imagination right now, but I hope to release a very small quantity of Sonoma County gin.”
“This is my first time putting a product on the market and I started out so worried about what people would think,” she continued. “It’s a very vulnerable place to be. I just had to tell myself, ‘look, there are some people that don’t like cilantro; they think it tastes like soap.’ So there’s got to be different palates out there and some people wont like it, and that’s ok, because some people don’t like cilantro.”
Indira will be found in local restaurants and bars and Jasper is planning tasting events, especially through non-profits, over the coming months. Sipsong’s Indira will be featured as part of the Healdsburg Flavors fundraiser for the Healdsburg Education Foundation on May 1.
For tickets to Healdsburg Flavors, go to
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/healdsburg-flavors-2018-tickets-43671917882
