Jax based liquor company announces new launch

[urbanlibertarian]

From Florida Times-Union:

http://jacksonville.com/business/2010-04-01/story/jacksonville-based-liquor-company-announces-new-launch

Jacksonville-based liquor company announces new launch
Posted: April 1, 2010 - 5:35pm

By Kevin Turner

Spirits of the USA, a Jacksonville-based liquor company, has finished a three-year cycle of product development and permitting and announced its launch Thursday.
Company founder and CEO Michael Gerard said the privately-held company is off and running, ready to take on multinational conglomerate competitors with its line of nine kinds of flavored vodka, gin, tequila and rum. The company also produces an energy drink called Runner.
"Today was the first real day of marketing and getting it out there," Gerard said. "We're real pleased."
The company seeks to get its products into retail channels, but isn't in a hurry to do so, he said. Four staff members, operating from an office on University Boulevard West, have worked to establish relationships in a few markets with small distributors who deal mostly with mom-and-pop liquor stores.
"That's my philosophy, get to know the customers, and treat them like family," he said. "The response has been very good."
Gerard emigrated to the U.S. from Australia in 1993, where he grew up in a mom-and-pop business environment, but said the environment for a small company taking on bigger companies is much friendlier in the U.S. than his native country.
Gerard said the company was founded in 2007 in Cumming, Ga., where it developed the products.
"I knew the taste profiles I wanted to get, we got that," Gerard said.
Spirits of the USA products are a variety of different imbibements - including a jalapeño-flavored vodka and a gin flavored with juniper berries and botanicals. All of the products the company markets have been produced in the United States except its tequila, he said. Gerard said the tequila is imported from Mexico and flavored here.
In June, the company moved to Jacksonville, a move Gerard said had been planned from the beginning. He said the three-year-old company chose Jacksonville because of its positioning as a distribution point to East Coast markets.
Gerard said production is done in a small distillery in South Carolina, but that may eventually be moved to Jacksonville as well.
Gerard said the company got its state and local permits to produce liquor quickly, but Federal approval took eight months - pushing back the company's launch to 2010.
Joe Whitaker, business recruitment and retention coordinator for the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission, said Spirits of the USA didn't take advantage of any incentives to get started, but he said he helped the company locate in the city's enterprise zone area, a state program that offers tax rebates based on hiring and purchasing.
Whitaker said the company will bring jobs to Jacksonville in production and delivery once it moves its entire operation to town.
"Anytime we can create jobs for our citizens, we all win," he said.
Spirits of the USA hopes to bring its products to the global marketplace in about three years, Gerard said.
"We still do small batch production. We're not in a hurry to sell truckloads. We want to ramp it up, make sure the quality stays the same. I'm in it for the long-term, not the short-term," Gerard said.

[ProjectMaximus]

very cool. The gin sounds much better than the vodka.

[Ocklawaha]

WTF? Come on Gerald, damn man, no Whiskey? I can already taste it, "From the waters of Florida's sparkling Green Cove Springs, the finest whiskey on earth..."


OCKLAWAHA

[Tripoli1711]

That is cool.  Correct me if I am wrong, though:  Isn't all Gin made from juniper berries and botanicals?  It's like saying someone is going to offer a sundae with ice cream and hot fudge syrup...

[RockStar]

Gin is a grain neutral spirit redistilled with other botanicals, primarily juniper. There's some great gins on the market now that don't even have a hint of juniper...come by Dos Gatos and I'll be happy to show you some...

~j.

[Tripoli1711]

I'll take you up on it.  I love Gin, but cannot say I have ever really explored outside of the standard 8 or 9 bottles you always see.

[Dog Walker]

Gin is a grain neutral spirit redistilled with other botanicals, primarily juniper. There's some great gins on the market now that don't even have a hint of juniper...come by Dos Gatos and I'll be happy to show you some...

~j.

If it doesn't have juniper berries isn't it just another flavored vodka?

[Captain Zissou]

I've seen their trucks driving around near the southside.  They have some pretty sweet logos for all of the products. 

[RockStar]

It's the secondary distillation process with the botanicals that sets it apart.

[fieldafm]

Rockstar... do you guys/gals have these brands at Dos Gatos?

[urbanlibertarian]

Uh-oh! Here come the Untouchables!
http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/02/cocktails-cops-cant-resist

Cocktails Cops Can't Resist
Bartenders revive classic cocktails. The law responds by reviving classic crackdowns.

Katherine Mangu-Ward | April 2, 2010

Beat a raw egg white into a citrusy cocktail and you get a meringue-like effect, frothy and delicious. The resulting beverageâ€"technically classified as a flip or fizzâ€"is irresistible, not only to the connoisseurs who are fueling America’s cocktail renaissance but also to the food cops.

On Monday, Virginia bartender Todd Thrasher helped Team USA win the Cocktail World Cup in New Zealand. (His winning cocktail involved artichoke aperitif, lime thyme syrup, and apple bitters. Suddenly those great mojitos you make don't seem so impressive, do they?) But when the sultan of swizzle sticks returns victorious to our shores, he won't find an entirely welcoming climate for his craft in the country that invented the word cocktail.

In case you've been sitting in a dark room somewhere sucking down rum and Diet Cokes, America is in the midst of a cocktail renaissance. A cadre of elite mixologists (or bartenders, as Thrasher prefers to be called) in New York, Portland, San Francisco, D.C., and other creative-class cities is bringing back classics and offering new twists on retro techniques. Meanwhile, alarmed by all this creativity and innovation, retrograde health inspectors and bureaucrats are cracking down on innovation from coast to coast.

Reviving old recipes means finding rare spirits, bitters, liqueursâ€"or making them from scratch. But a Do-It-Yourself booze ethic has long made America's alcohol cops nervous. Today's state-level alcohol control boards are often the same bodies created during Prohibition to bust up stills and snag rumrunners, and they appear to be taking their heritage seriously these days.

Several San Francisco bars ran afoul of regulations by having the audacity to make their own bitters, once considered the vital ingredient that distinguished a cocktail from a plain old mixed drink. Bartender Neyah White found the fruits of a longstanding project to replace all of the store-bought cocktail components in his bar with homemade versions imperiled, as alcohol control agents demanded that months of work on bitters and other infused liquors be poured out.

The language in the relevant section of the California code suggests mixing drinks is legit, but any other tampering with liquor is bound to get you in trouble; don't even think about steeping, infusing, or otherwise indulging in forbidden "rectification"â€"which the agency defines as "any process or procedure whereby distilled spirits are cut, blended, mixed or infused with any ingredient which reacts with the constituents of the distilled spirits and changes the character and nature or standards of identity of the distilled spirits."

The law is a Prohibition Era rule that was designed to keep bartenders from adulterating booze with dangerous additives like methyl alcohol. These days, you're more likely to find bars stocked with clove oil or lemongrass syrup than rotgut with the power to make you go blind. But that hasn't stopped the state from indulging in all manner of old style busts. They've even expanded this retro revenue raising technique to include a hit on the city's swank University Club for serving drinks to non-members.

On January 19, 2010 one of New York's cocktail hot spots, the Pegu Club, got in trouble with city health department officials for serving up a modern variant on the fizz. Despite warnings printed on the menu, and raw egg white listed in the ingredients, a health inspector busted a bartender for failing to orally inform a customer of the risky ingredient. Pegu Club had to yank the Earl Grey MarTEAni from the menu, restoring it only after the health department backed off serious penalties and a court summons.

Thrasher, the brains behind the booze at Alexandria, Virginia's PX Lounge and several other related venues, uses homemade bitters the way a chef uses herbs, he says. And many of his drinks involve egg whites. (He sources the eggs from Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, the self-proclaimed “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic” and the proprietor of Polyface Farms, who has been mentioned in Reason more than once.) "I'm not 100 percent sure what the law is in Virginia," says Thrasher, who spoke with Reason.com and Reason.tv before setting out for New Zealand to become a world champion. "I'd like to think I'm not breaking a law." While he hasn't had trouble with the state of Virginia yet, it may only be a matter of time, since Virginia isn't exactly known for its enlightened liquor policies.

If the cops insist on going retro, barflies are more than happy to keep up with them. Thrasher calls his bar, semi-hidden on the second floor of another restaurant, a speakeasy. That wasn't the initial intent, but customers liked the clandestine aspect, the press picked up on it, and he decided not to bother to put up a sign outside. Maybe Thrasher's customersâ€"already taking their lives in their hands with homebrew bitters and egg-laced beveragesâ€"like the idea of having their fizzes and flips with a dash of danger. If so, Virgina's alcohol control board may be all too happy to oblige.

For now, Thrasher is lighthearted about possibly skirting the law. As he drizzles homemade lemon-pepper syrup on the top of a pisco cocktail fizzing with egg, he jokes, "I'm just waiting for the coppers to bust through any second."

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

[RockStar]

Field,

I've been approached by their sales department, but to be honest, it's not my style. I'd rather use a great vodka and fresh jalapeno then somebody's jalapeno vodka, and I think that our guests at Dos Gatos expect that from us. I just don't believe in the quality of the product they are putting out; until I'm proven wrong, I'm not making shelf space for them. If I wanted infusions, I'd do them myself.

I only carry products that I stand behind 100%...or were given to me free. (LOL on the last part!)

~j.

[Sportmotor]

very cool. The gin sounds much better than the vodka.

You must be old  Vodka is way better then gin can ever be

[RockStar]

I think gin has had a bad rap for awhile for being an old person's drink...(this smells like grandma! LOL). The problem is that most bartenders don't know how to work with it outside of the martini or with tonic. Hendricks gin, released a few years ago, really showed a lot of people how different gin could be from London Dry gins like Beefeater. As well, there are some great small batch gins out now such as Right and Distillery 209 that are taking the movement even further.

IMHO, vodka only stands out when drunk neat or on the rocks. Mix it with anything and it's character is lost.

Stop by Dos Gatos and we'll change your mind about gin.

Oh and we'll be launching our new summer cocktail menu within the next week or so. I will keep everyone posted. Quinton, Joy and I have been working on some amazing cocktails. I've got one you'll drink all summer long... 

~j.

[Sportmotor]

unless you want to attempt to change my mind with a free drink Im not gonna waist $10 or whatever on a drink I highly doubt I will like that is for old geezers