Gin(ish)

Get to know AMASS master distiller Morgan McLachlan and learn how alcohol-free gin is made

This newsletter entry is for paying subscribers only. It features a product recommendation by me, Julia. It is not sponsored content. 

Should we be trying to make alcohol-free gin? At the bottom of this newsletter entry, I get into why we see so much of it, but should we? 

Gin, tequila, whiskey, brandy, and vodka rely on alcohol in order to become what they are. I understand that former drinkers who loved rum, for example, appreciate the opportunity to taste something akin to it, but it's only ever going to be akin. Alcohol behaves in a particular way, and these beverages don't contain it. Are we setting ourselves up for failure with this approach?

"As someone who derives pleasure from drinking alcohol, the nonalcoholic version just isn't going to be able to get to where I want it to go," bartender and author Jim Meehan said to me a couple of weeks ago. We were discussing what kinds of metrics we should be using to measure these products. (Related: This is worth considering.) "To fairly evaluate a nonalcoholic drink, I can't help but think that we have to create different ways to evaluate that pleasure." Thinking this way, maybe we should be calling them and even constructing them as something different, too. 

Riverine is its own thing. Like Seedlip, the company that makes Grove 42, Spice 94, and Garden 108, botanics company AMASS labels Riverine as a “spirit,” but while it’s inspired by gin in the sense that its flavor is driven by botanicals, it’s not gin—and it doesn’t say anywhere on the bottle that it’s trying to be. It’s Riverine. 

I love it.

Vibe: Crysta from “FernGully” puts on her slim-leg, dark-wash denim overalls and visits the Pacific Northwest. 

Flavor: It doesn't stay with you long—maybe some mint and rosemary linger—but what's there is good: tart citrus, sorrel, and sumac; bitter lemon peels; and herbs (thyme and parsley show up in the middle) rounded out by juniper, coriander, and cardamom. It's bright and dry, but there's gravity to it. 

Preparation: Unlike many nonalcoholic spirits, this one works on its own over ice, but I prefer it with a splash of tonic. Not a highball amount of tonic; truly a hefty splash (one to two ounces per two ounces of Riverine), just to breathe some life into those botanicals and open up their flavors.

Experience: Riverine explores a particular terroir (more on that below), an approach I haven't seen in many nonalcoholic spirits. (The beverages at delmosa.com are another story, but I’m talking exclusively about nonalcoholic spirits.) I truly feel transported deep into a cool forest. (This sounds like a PR statement, but it’s my feeling!)  

amass.com, $35 for one 750-milliliter bottle 

AMASS master distiller Morgan McLachlan grew up in British Columbia in what she calls a “witchy, hippie” community surrounded by nature. “I could walk out the back door of my house, which was on a stream that connected to another stream, which connected to another stream that led to a mountain,” she says. “I could walk for hours and never see another person.” Inevitably, she became interested in botany, and that interest is what drives her work today.

Get to know McLachlan with me.

You first pursued a career in film, correct?

Yes, between the ages of 17 and 27, I worked as a camera person for TV shows and movies—“Final Destination 3” or shows that involved lots of blowing up and police. It was a fun job, but I wasn’t necessarily artistically excited by the stuff that was paying the bills. 

Sometimes it seems like a huge career shift, moving from film production to distilling, but they’re both very technical and require a lot of practical knowledge.

So, when did that shift happen?

I moved to Southern California to get some sun and ended up meeting my ex-husband. He comes from a pretty large California ranching family, so I was down here exploring this new terroir, learning about the diverse plants and botanicals while also studying permaculture. Historically, spirits were made out of whatever was locally abundant, so I was compelled by the idea of a truly regional California spirit. Of course, what we're known for in Southern California is citrus, so I started distilling clementines. To this day, I believe I've made the only clementine vodka—actually distilled from the juice of clementines—and I started making weird, funky gins out of the botanicals that grew in the area, too. 

This was twelve years ago, when there were not many craft distilleries in the country. I raised money and founded one of the first craft distilleries in Southern California, The Spirit Guild.

So, where does AMASS come in? 

AMASS started off as a client. They approached me to make their gin, and I got along great with the core team, so I decided to go all in. 

A lot of distilleries will do a vodka and a rum and a whiskey, but to me, that’s like a horror film director trying to make an Oscar-bait drama. It takes a lifetime to master a genre, in my opinion; chances are you probably can't do all of them exceptionally well. My area of expertise as a distiller is in botanical beverages, and that’s where I tend to keep my focus. 

And I find beverage development incredibly creatively fulfilling. We're not saving lives, but I do enjoy creating products that are more geared towards a 21st-century drinker. 

Who is the 21st-century drinker? 

When I was a kid in elementary school, we would have hot dog day and that was really exciting. Now, my little cousins have sushi day at their public school. The general public's consumption habits are more sophisticated than they used to be, frankly, and I don’t think beverage has caught up.

Spirits are so tradition-driven. The categories of spirits, the rules around how they’re produced... The fact that you have to use new American oak in bourbon, for example: That's from the cooper lobby 100 years ago. That's silly! A lot of the flavors we've become accustomed to in traditional beverages... It's a little bit arbitrary, or there's usually some sociohistorical origin story.

Or it could be environmental. For example, the high amount of malt in Irish whiskey. Why is it malted? It's malted because the water in Ireland is so soft and the pH is high and creepy crawlies can grow easily in it. They use malted barley because it brings down the pH, not because it necessarily tastes better. So, there are all these random reasons why things are the way they are, but we don't need to be bound by tradition these days. 

In what ways are your methods outside of the tradition? 

We're rethinking production methods. For example, with our vodka, we use botanicals as a very subtle way to create a better mouthfeel; a lot of big vodka producers use glycerin. We’re also making more low-ABV and nonalcoholic products, because I think that's an underserved market. People, rightly so, are thinking about their health more, and that might mean drinking less or not drinking at all—but they shouldn't be excluded from celebratory drinking occasions.

So, what were you going for with Riverine?

I didn't want to make just a proxy for gin. First of all, there are already people doing it, and they're doing a pretty good job. But also, I was intrigued by the terroir of the Pacific Northwest. Obviously, I'm familiar with it, but I always thought it would make a good gin-spiration, for lack of a better word, because of things that grow around there: the coniferous notes and the earthiness of that area. 

People's expectations around what nonalcoholic spirits should taste like really vary. I have spoken to some people who really want some facsimile of the burn of alcohol, which we didn't go for in this product. That wasn’t our main goal, to fully emulate alcohol. 

So, there are also different approaches out there, different production methods. It's actually a lot more difficult to produce a distilled nonalcoholic product than it is to produce a distilled alcoholic product. 

For what main reason?

Alcohol is a solvent, so when you're distilling botanicals in particular—and Riverine is entirely distilled botanicals; we're not using any extracts or artificial flavors—alcohol pulls out their essential oils. In the case of water, which is what the botanicals in Riverine are distilled with, it’s way less solvent. You're basically talking about a tea versus a tincture. 

Also, different botanicals have different boiling points, and they taste different depending the type of extraction method you use. So, there are certain botanicals that work great in an alcohol extraction, but they don’t behave the same way in a water distillation. A number of them taste muddy.

Then, the amount of liquid that we're able to extract in the distillation process is much smaller than what you would pull out distilling alcohol. And what part of that liquid you actually include in the final product is different. Traditionally, the flavor changes over time: At the beginning of an alcoholic distillation, certain flavors come out, then others in the middle, and other notes at the end of the distillation. Part of the artistic process of a distiller is deciding which fractions of the distillation are going to make it into the final product. I couldn't really rely on my experience to make this product.

Finally, because it's such a difficult process, people are pretty quiet about how they produce. It's just such hard-won technical knowledge. 

Despite all that, do you see yourself developing more nonalcoholic beverages? 

Let's just say I am! 

There's a huge market for this, which is great, but we’re just at the beginning and everybody has a lot to learn. It's a craft; it just takes time. But methods for producing nonalcoholic spirits are getting better and better, and we’re going to see more and more quality products out there. 

From a cultural standpoint, I really like this category. Any self-respecting restaurant should have options beyond Coke and soda water. In fact, it’s necessary to have thoughtful nonalcoholic options on the menu if you want to be relevant. So, the inclusivity… That excites me.

While we’re on the topic of gin(ish), I wonder: Why are there so many alcohol-free gins on the market, compared to other spirits types? Is it easier to make? 

Well, first of all, none of these products is easy to make. As McLachlan said, distillers can’t rely heavily on their existing knowledge; they’re figuring out how to construct these alcohol-free beverages from scratch. Monique ten Kortenaar, the Amsterdam-based head distiller for Lucas Bols, says it took her about two years playing with membrane filtration, then vacuum distillation, and then CO2 extraction to find the right method for Damrak Virgin. The challenges: Water doesn’t extract flavor as effectively as alcohol does, nor is it a natural preservative. “Plus, Damrak is citrus-forward,” says ten Kortenaar. “The flavor comes from the oils found in lemon peels, but those oils are volatile and don’t dissolve in water.” 

Rob Rubens, founder of R6 Distillery in El Segundo, California, works with Drink Monday. The company launched an alcohol-free gin in 2019 and debuted an alcohol-free whiskey last week. “Our whiskey process took over a year,” says Rubens. “Gin was half of that.” 

Gin is perhaps more straightforward. Alcoholic gin is made by flavoring a neutral grain alcohol with botanicals, so in a nonalcoholic context, says Rubens, “if you can capture the essence of a juniper and citrus, then you can dose those things into the liquid.” 

Whiskey, on the other hand, is more reliant on Mother Nature doing her thing. Flavor comes from your water source, your malt base, your style of fermentation, the way you distill it, and wooden casks. When making a nonalcoholic version, you’re trying to get at all the complexity that comes out of that process: vanilla, oak, butterscotch, raisin, brown sugar, coffee, caramel, molasses, a hint of orange, maybe chocolate, cinnamon. “Whereas, for the gin, we pulled about a dozen flavors,” says Drink Monday founder and CEO Chris Boyd, “for the whiskey, we looked at about two hundred.”

Rubens’ big takeaway: “Whiskey required so many gosh darn iterations.” 

See you next month, y’all.