New Artisan Spirits distillery.
The Symphonic Soul of Bourbon New Artisan Spirits opens a distillery with harmony.
“I
BY DIANA SPECHLER PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN SMITH
didn’t want to change the nature of the barrel,” says Robert del Grande, biochemist, James Beard Award-winning chef, and co-owner of New Artisan Spirits, the new craft distillery and tasting room off I-35 and Mockingbird. “I just wanted to tune it. This was about tuning the barrel.” He’s talking about making his new “botanical bourbon.” “It started with gin,” del Grande explains. He and his business partner, former Coca-Cola executive Don Short, started making Roxor Gin together a decade ago, long before they had their own distillery. “How do you score the gin?” del Grande asks rhetorically. “You say, ‘I want the piano here, I want the oboes to play over here…’.” He applied the same technique to the new bourbon. “I started adding harmonizers to the barrel,” he says. “Resonances. Soft, understated things. Rosehips, fenugreek.” The goal was to make a balanced bourbon with real, fresh botanicals, no one ingredient stealing the spotlight—a perfect symphony. The end result is this bourbon finished with twenty barks, roots, leaves, flowers, and nuts. “Even if you’re drinking it on the rocks and it’s diluting,” del Grande says, “it doesn’t fall apart. The ingredients stay harmonious.” “Real plants make better spirits,” Don Short tells me from across the bar at New Artisan Spirits, where I’m hanging with the whole family: Don; Don’s wife, Ann, who does New Artisan’s marketing; and their 27-year-old son, Will, who runs the tasting room. It’s a chic and dimly lit space that strikes me as the perfect date spot— spirits hand-crafted by a mad-scientist chef, an atmosphere that’s
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Roxor cofounders Don Short and chef Robert del Grande.
