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ABV: Was there a day after you started working on Spirit Works Distillery where you were thinking “What have I done?” Timo Marshall (TM): I do that every day — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered out of the office as if I’ve landed on the moon, and I look around this space thinking “What are we doing?” It’s a very big, it’s a huge undertaking to build something as capital intensive as this space.
Timo was born and raised in the South American nation of Peru — his parents were associated with the British Consulate there — before moving to England in his teens, where his family is from originally. He met Ashby while working with an environmental group aboard an icebreaker ship. Various projects brought them to San Francisco, where they looked at ways they could settle down. They both liked the idea of operating a distillery, with the original idea being they would make gin and sloe gin, and grow all of the ingredients on-property, including the blackthorn bushes from where the sloe comes.
ABV: What brought you and Ashby to Sebastopol and from there Spirit Works? TM: We were based in San Francisco, working with environmental advocacy and environmental non-profit organizations within the Bay Area. We always knew that we wanted to move out of San Francisco to an area like West County up here in Sonoma and we wanted some land that would work for itself to do something, pay for itself.
While this concept didn’t make it into the final business plan, Ashby had some solid ideas of what she was looking to make, and they ordered a custom still and secured the property and investments.
We were looking at doing something fairly unique like producing Sloe Gin. We thought that we would grow the botanicals for gin and sloe berries out here on the land and then hook up with a local distillery and produce product that way.
In 2012 they began work, and in 2013, the doors to Spirit Works Distillery opened. At first their offerings only included gin and vodka. Emboldened by the enthusiastic response, they expanded into offering whiskey (including both rye and wheat versions), their sloe gin (including an entirely unique variant aged in charred American white oak barrels that has to be tasted to be believed. They’e also experimented with a barrel-aged gin (with great success), and a whiskey aged in sloe-gin barrels that is mind-blowing.
We found it hard to find a distillery that would share that information with us — the more we looked into it, we said “Why don’t we make our own gin and see where that goes?” We spent a lot of time assessing that and still kept our day jobs. Then eventually we realized that we couldn’t do both land or distilling, by then we’d got bug and we just wanted to build the space. It took us a little bit of while to put our business plan together and find the money and then once that happened it was very quick.
ABV visited Spirit Works Distillery one sunny day in November, where we spent a very pleasant afternoon talking with Timo, sipping some sloe gin, and learning more about this spunky start-up that is making big waves while making top-tier spirits.
We started putting this together in 2012, we started distilling in January of 2013. In terms of the craft distilling movement, we’re early adopters, I
Timo Marshall
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Winter 2018
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wouldn’t say [laughs] by any stretch of the imagination that we’re first on the bandwagon, but definitely, we got in early on the game which is good. ABV: Did you have any previous experience with distilling? TM: No, in terms of this is the first business that we set up in this way. In terms of distilling, Ashby and I spent as much time as we could in different places learning the art of distilling. But we actually ended up also going back to business school, relearning business process, accounting, all those sorts of things. We spent time in a couple of other distilleries practicing there, not for very long. Most of the learning process that we did for that was actually was our store. We didn’t put a product out for almost eight months after we started distilling. ABV: How did you find the start-up money? TM: Just asking around and smiling a lot, we were lucky we had a group of people that were interested from the beginning and had a lot of faith in our ability to produce a space like this, we were lucky in that way. ABV: Your bottles have a unique shape — who designed them? TM: Ashby designed the bottle herself. She wanted a bottle that could be picked up by smaller hands in a bar, that’s why she wanted this flask style shape and of course, the moment we started designing our own bottle, it was easy to have it embossed. The labels were created by a designer in San Francisco called Tom Ingalls. He has done a lot of amazing work with wine labels and he’s done a few spirit labels as well, but he’s worked with us for our design work since before we had a distillery.
The first batch of gin labels that we did, didn’t say gin on the side, it just had a little thing and people were grabbing our bottle and they were fitting it back on the shelf sideways because it fits, and so they didn’t know what it was so we had to add gin to the side for people to recognize the bottle Also, we had to think that most people are right handed so they’re going to face the label and put it back on the shelf. ABV: You were originally going to focus on selling gin — how did vodka end up being part of your repertoire? TM: When we first started working with our distributor, we told them that we just wanted to sell them our gin and maybe our sloe gin down the line and they said, “Well, we’ll take the gin and the vodka.” We were like, “No, we don’t — we just make the gin.” They said, “Okay, well, we’ll take the gin and the vodka.” “So I guess we’re making vodka.” ABV: You also offer a barrel-aged gin. This is not a common process for making gin. TM: No, no it’s not, but it’s becoming more and more common now. We experimented with lots of different types of barrels until we hang down on the type barrel that we like to use for our barrel gin. Which is essentially a new charred barrel, American oak . We pour our gin in there fairly high proof, the extraction happens really fast over a few months, maybe four months or so something like that. Depending on the time of year and we just go tasting it along the way. This is one product you have to taste a lot of along the way but it’s not a bad thing to do [laughs]. But you have to taste it often and you can’t skip on it because we want this to taste like aged gin, we don’t want just to taste like barrel spirits. You have to keep tasting it, that you can taste
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