SPIRIT WINDOW: Each window on the still is a spot where the spirit gets evaporated and condensed on its way up the column, sort of like a mini-distillation.
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BATCH ONE: Breaker Bourbon and American Star Vodka are just the first of many corn-, rye-, and wheat-based spirits Ascendant Spirits is planning to distill for gin, whiskey, and vodka lovers.
HYBRID DISTILLATION: Ascendant Spirits uses a one-of-a-kind hybrid still built by Vendome Copper and Brass Works. It’s really two stills in one—a pot still used for making whiskey and a column still used for making vodka and gin—and everything Ascendant distills goes through both the pot and the column, making for a more refined spirit.
Whiskey weather PHOTOS BY STEVE E. MILLER
BY CAMILLIA LANHAM
Distilling moves into Wine Country with the notion that someday all booze will be created equal
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rohibition ended. The national alcohol crackdown was repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933. Now, 80 years later, Santa Barbara County’s first legal post-Prohibition distillery is officially operating. Master Distiller Stephen Gertman put three products on the shelf for Buellton-based Ascendant Spirits’ March 1 grand opening party, including the intriguing American Star Caviar Lime Vodka, made from the fruits of a small Goleta orchard. Organic caviar limes are shaped and colored like dried bean pods, but they’re full of tiny blobs of translucent pulp. Gertman also helped attendees to taste Breaker Bourbon and American Star Vodka— though only in quarter-ounce pours, one taste DESIGNER STILL: Ascendant Spirits owner Stephen Gertman worked with Vendome’s engineers in Louisville, Kent., to come up the perfect still for his specialty brand of spirits.
per product, as mandated by state law. Soon to follow those fertile spirits will be gins made from wild-harvested juniper, organic locally picked strawberry vodka, moonshine, and single malt whiskey.
Aging climate
For Gertman, the grand opening party marked the realization of a dream that took two years of tilling soil, a little luck, some help from his family and friends, and hard work. With perseverance, he turned a 13-year love affair with whiskey into what’s now his own distillery, tucked between Terravant Wine Company
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and Figueroa Mountain Brewing Company on Industrial Way. Gertman is an ambitious man who’s just beginning his 30s and is in the middle of career No. 2. Originally from Boston, he attended Occidental College and the College of Design in Pasadena. After school, he moved from industrial design to the world of broadcast. He became a TV producer and followed that path for eight years until one day he decided he was sick of dealing with the things that go with a career in the industry. After working on Top Gear—and, as
he sees it, reaching the apex of his career in Los Angeles—he quit and found himself a new job. “As soon as I left,” Gertman said, “[Ascendant Spirits] was the goal.” The day after he stopped filming, he hopped into his first American Distilling Institute class. From there, he managed to secure himself work as an assistant distiller at Breckenridge Distillery in Colorado—under the master distiller who, incidentally, taught him to distill whiskey from donuts during his first distilling class. Donut-whiskey became grain-whiskey, and Breckenridge’s temporary assistant distiller
became the fulltime master distiller in a new facility in Buellton. The facility has a small tasting room, a custom-made hybrid copper still, a steam-heated mash-tun, a few fermenters, and a wall of whiskey barrels aging in what Gertman said is the ideal climate. Purple and blue are just starting to color the copper on Ascendant Spirits’ still—which really consists of two stills. The first distillation takes place in a huge, 500-gallon still shaped like a potbellied stove. The liquid becomes even more refined as it’s transferred into a large stainless steel tank with copper columns above it for the second and/or third distillations. The liquor coming out of the still is extremely high in alcohol content, so it gets proofed down with water before getting either bottled or thrown into charred oak barrels for aging. The climate is so ideal for aging whiskey that Gertman doesn’t use a heating or cooling system in the distillery; he just opens the doors and lets nature do its thing. And that thing happens daily. The way he explains it, aging whiskey properly is all about temperature shifts: cool mornings, warm days, and cool evenings. Temperature regulates the way whiskey soaks up flavor from the barrels it’s aged in. Heat opens up the wood’s pores, which pulls whiskey in. Cold air closes off the pores, which in turn pushes the whiskey out. Gertman said seasonal temperature shifts are part of the reason why Kentucky bourbon is so good. “While it’s happening seasonally in Kentucky, it’s happening every day here,” Gertman said. “So we think we can age a whiskey in two to three years the way it’s aged in five to six years in Kentucky.”