Maker
It’s an ideal place for making and aging liquor.
The five-story ceilings, foot-thick concrete floor,
and cool Pacific breezes yield stable indoor
temperatures that never exceed 76 degrees
Fahrenheit. But the most interesting rooms are
the maze of former offices that Winters has
converted into a geeky playground to entertain
fellow workers and lucky visitors, as well as a
refuge to tinker and experiment.
In an upstairs tasting room, bartenders, restaurateurs, and distributors can sample his latest
wares. They retire to the adjoining conference
room to talk business, where Winters holds forth
from a repurposed ejection seat from a B- 52
Stratofortress.
In another room sits a 100-year-old Chandler
and Price offset printing press rescued from a
Napa barn. Winters tracked down a manual and
two refrigerator-sized cases of lead type for it;
he’ll use it to make labels for a gin he’s creating,
which he insists must smell like Redwood
Regional Park in the East Bay hills.
That gin will be born in his personal office,
where a desktop 10-liter still sits next to his
computer, across from a shelf of rare books
that provide recipes, wisdom, and inspiration.
A leather-bound French perfumer’s guide from
the 1700s helps locate the most aromatic (and
flavorful) portions of a fruit. Monzert’s Practical
Distiller from 1889 breaks down distilling equipment and processes. A 19th-century housewife’s
guide holds forgotten secrets from when making
alcohol was often a DIY enterprise.
Prickly pear cactus, candy cap mushrooms,
and Douglas fir are just a few of the ingredients
Winters has felt were “screaming to be made”
into liqueurs, even if they lacked an obvious
audience outside his own adventurous taste
buds. Most of these concoctions get no further
than the hand-labeled bottles that clutter almost
every horizontal surface. The best of these elixirs
will be served in the distillery’s tasting room as a
unique reward to intrepid fans who cross the Bay
from San Francisco. The most popular flavors
make it to market, such as a brandy fortified
with Lapsang souchong tea and vanilla, a vodka
flavored with chipotle peppers, and another
flavored with wasabi.
88 Make: Volume 11
The cash cow that pays for all this experimentation is Hangar One Vodka. It comes “straight”
as well as in four flavors: mandarin blossom,
kaffir lime, raspberry, and Buddha’s-hand citron.
While other distilleries’ flavored vodkas taste
like they’ve been dosed with snow-cone syrup,
Winters’ flavors are complex and heady, to be
savored like wine.
Winters goes to great lengths to preserve the
smells and tastes of fresh rare fruit in alcoholic
form. The stainless steel and copper Holstein pot
still holds 500 liters at a time and gives off the
air of a modernized German-engineered steam
engine. Pressure gauges, levers, knobs, and
small windows allow the distiller to control and
observe the distillation process, as he tastes and
smells the alcoholic steam condensing into liquor.
Behind the bubbling pipes of the biggest still
sit the damp brown remains of 550 pounds of
orange blossoms that have given their all to a
batch of mandarin blossom vodka. Days before,
the blossoms (only open ones) were handpicked
and shipped in a vat of inert argon gas to prevent
oxygen from sapping their essence. Now they
look like a heap of yard trimmings. A few feet
away, Winters opens the tank of vodka that’s
been steeping in the blossoms. It smells like
acres of flowering citrus.
Lance Winters has a long history with potent
potables. As a kid he was stymied in an attempt to
mix crayon dust and water, and decided to move
things along with the heat of a bare 100-watt
light bulb. While most kids would have been
spooked by the ensuing explosion, Lance was
drawn further toward science. He spent eight
years traveling the world in the Navy as a mechanic on nuclear aircraft carriers. But when
he left the service he found that the skills he’d
learned stoking the USS Enterprise’s eight atomic
reactors were out of date with modern civilian
power plants. He began brewing beer as a hobby.
When he edited a brewpub startup manual,
in lieu of cash payment he asked for a job in the
brewing industry. It wasn’t glamorous, but the
entry-level job at Brewpub on the Green (situated
on a golf course in Fremont, Calif.) led him
from waiting tables and cleaning spent hops and
barley out of beer tanks to brewing and managing
