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Release Notes
I can't find anything about this release, not even on the St. George Spirits website. Their latest official release documented there is Lot 10. This appears to be a prerelease of Lot 11 Alex obtained at Whisky Live SF 2011. It'll probably pop up officially later on and I'll fill in the gaps regarding price and availability etc.
Yours Truly
The Distillery: St. George Spirits
| Established: 1982 |
| Silent since: False |
| Address: 2601 Monarch Street, Alameda, CA 94501, USA |
In May 2004, St. George Spirits moved to its current location, an old navy hangar in Alameda.
AVIATION GATEWAY TO THE PACIFIC Official US Navy photograph / courtesy John Voss St. George Spirits sits on land that had strategic military importance during the WWII era. With direct access to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean beyond, Alameda Point was considered the ideal place for a naval base. The land was transferred from the City of Alameda to the federal government in 1936 for the tidy sum of $1. Naval Air Station Alameda was officially commissioned in 1940 and soon became known as the "Aviation Gateway to the Pacific."
In 2000, Jörg and Lance united their skills and released the first bottling of St. George Single Malt Whiskey.
On April 1st 2002, Jörg and Lance released the first batch of Hangar One Vodka. It was the result of their desire to distill aromas and flavors from exotic ingredients that wouldn"t showcase as eau de vie, but flourished as vodka. The process was informed primarily by their experience working with fruit brandies, but also from knowledge gleaned from perfume making, where alcohol is used as a carrier for scent, and in the case of the vodkas, taste.
Back home, his family had been brewing beer and distilling fruit brandies (eau de vie) for several generations in the Black Forest city of Freiburg. The quality of fresh local fruit in California and a complete absence of U.S. fruit brandy producers compelled Jörg to leave behind life as a judge and an academic in order to open up America"s first eau de vie distillery, and start the micro-distillery movement in this country.
Using traditional small copper pot stills and old-world methods, Jörg produced brandies and liqueurs with assistant distiller Bill Mannshardt. When Bill retired in 1996, Lance Winters, former navy nuclear engineer and brewer, came on board.
St. George Spirits was founded in 1982 by Jörg Rupf, who had originally come to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1979 to do research at UC Berkeley on a post-doctoral grant sponsored by the German Government.
MAKE BOOZE, NOT WAR. When the base was decommissioned in 1997, a motley crew of tenants began occupying the old hangars and barracks. St. George Spirits moved in to Hangar 21 in 2004. The 65,000-square-feet facility is a masterpiece of mid-century industrial architecture, with exposed steel beams, clerestory windows, and a redwood ceiling.
When we moved into the space, we installed our stills, built the tasting room, and wired the place for sound so that we could blast our iPods - otherwise, it"s pretty much unchanged from its days as a working airplane hangar.
Trivia:
- In December, 2007, St. George Absinthe Verte, produced by St. George Spirits became the first brand of American-made absinthe to be legally produced in the United States since a ban was enacted in 1912.
- From 1970 through 1994, our hangar was home base to VA-304, a reserve attack squadron known as the Firebirds. On the western side of the hangar, the message "Welcome from the Firebirds" still greets visitors as they pull into our parking lot. Inside the hangar, the black, white, and red ATKRON 304 insignia of a skull and phoenix can be seen from the tasting room - look for it on the eastern wall.
from StGeorgeSpirits.com, Wikipedia