Love, American Style Durham Distillery’s founder reveals how her family’s love for gin combined with a unique distillation process turned Conniption into a national sensation WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY CARRIE DOW
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elissa Green Katrincic set the scene: the late-1970s in Upstate New York. A four-year-old Katrincic and her sister sat at a table while their maternal grandmother prepared dinner. Their grandfather poked his head around the corner and asked her grandmother, “Are you ready for a cocktail?” When grandma excitedly answered yes, Katrincic got excited too because cocktails in her grandparents’ house meant martinis with olives. “If I was over there, he knew inevitably that
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when he put olives in his dirty martini,” said Katrincic, smiling, “they would disappear.” Not condoning underage drinking, but even at that tender age Katrincic loved the taste of gin-soaked olives and said her grandfather would always put a few extra in his drink just for her. As an adult, she realized her grandparents’ daily cocktail break symbolized something grander. “I just have very positive memories,” she reminisced. “That generation really focused
on what I like to call the ‘cocktail hour.’ It was this pause at the end of their day where they relaxed and reconnected while they were making dinner. (Her grandfather) would make a huge production out of it. He had a whole cabinet (of barware). He’d get everything spread out on the counter…It was a single cocktail that had this sense of closure.” As an adult, she marked the seasons by sipping cocktails with her sister and mom. “It was martinis in the winter and gin and tonics in the summer.” She credits her family’s love of gin back to her grandfather. Her grandmother actually preferred scotch. “Which I never got into,” she shrugged. However, when she met her husband Lee Katrincic — they married in 2002 — he did not share that love for gin. “He had that old-school idea that it was like licking a pine tree,” she said. But Katrincic could be persuasive — she had a 15-year marketing career with some major corporations like Pfizer and Burt’s Bees — so after 10 years of matrimony, Lee fell in line with the family’s favorite spirit. It eventually became their hobby. “Whenever we’d travel, we’d try new gin cocktails, but we’d also go into liquor stores and see what new gins were on the shelf. We started our gin collection never assuming we’d make our own.” It was returning from an anniversary road trip in 2013 that Katrincic had an idea. Her company at that time was facing a buyout and restructuring while she was raising two young boys. She didn’t want to stop working but wanted off the corporate treadmill. “We’re driving home and I said, ‘Why don’t we make gin?’ And (Lee) started laughing! And he will tell you that. And while I’m sitting W W W . ARTISANSPIRITMAG . C O M