For the Long Now Salon project artisan distillers St George Spirits helped us create a pair of distinctive spirits inspired by long-term thinking. Our gin features juniper berries we harvested from the peaks of our property on Mount Washington in eastern Nevada. In this video Lance Winters, St. George’s Master Distiller, extolls the myriad flavors that our juniper brings to the gin. Here, he and distiller Dave Smith are in the middle of preparing the berries for exposure to the vapors of the nascent gin.

Juniperus communis grows wild in sprawling, low bushes at a height of about 10,000 feet on our Nevada land, interwoven with multi-thousand year old bristlecone pines. The “berries” are not technically fruit but tiny pine cones. From Wikipedia:

The female seed cones are very distinctive, with fleshy, fruit-like coalescing scales which fuse together to form a “berry”-like structure, 4–27 mm long, with 1-12 unwinged, hard-shelled seeds. In some species these “berries” are red-brown or orange but in most they are blue; they are often aromatic and can be used as a spice.

Juniper is the key aromatic ingredient in gin, from which its name derives. Lance tasted a sample of our berries and said we had something special. Taste characteristics that Lance mentions include huckleberry, tart blueberry, pine resin, hops aromatics, chocolate, and Chinese long pepper. You can imagine our excitement at having impressed Lance’s experienced and discerning palate.

We gathered juniper by hand in Nevada while Lance assembled a recipe of botanicals including coriander and cedar that complement the berries and results in a gin we are proud to pair with the launch of our new space. The Salon is designed to be a social hub that fosters long-term thinking and inspires conversation. Remarkable spirits, in every sense, are required.

St George Spirits are famous for their eaux de vies, vodkas, gins, whiskeys and other hand-crafted spirits. Their delicious, inventive products come from a scientific and artistic approach to distillation. They marry cutting edge techniques with an extensive knowledge of the centuries old tradition of distilling eaux de vies. And like the best artists and scientists, they are always up for a new challenge.

It is auspicious that we launch this project as St George reaches an impressive anniversary:

When Jörg Rupf founded St. George Spirits in 01982, he was a lone wolf making elegant eaux de vie in a wine cooler world. In those days absinthe was illegal, craft-produced American gins were unheard of, and there was no such thing as an American single malt whiskey.

We want to congratulate everyone at St George Spirits as they celebrate 30 years in business. To think they’ve accomplished so much and aren’t even a century old.

Our collaboration with them has been fun, inspiring and educational. Their care and expertise helps make our Salon and Founder’s Club bottle keep truly special. Their headquarters is close by to us in Alameda, California and they are open for tours and tastings.

See more videos on The Long Now Foundation Vimeo page.

Jillian Northrup is one half of the design-build team Because We Can who are leading the design for the Long Now Salon. She told us how designing the Salon for Long Now is different from a typical commercial bar project. See more of their design on the Because We Can site (links below).

Jillian mentions the unique design solution they devised for storing our Long Now Bottle Club bottles: raising them into the rafters of the space like chandeliers. In the image of the new design below you can see them in the ceiling above the bar. Here’s how you can reserve your own bottle.

The above video and the rest on the Long Now Vimeo page were produced by Sustainability Media who do our seminar videos. In the future we’ll share a longer documentary including these interviews and more on the whole Salon design project. We hope you enjoy these clips as a sneak peek.

If you’ve been in the Long Now space at Fort Mason you may have noticed our witty etched aluminum signs with phrases like “Carpe Millenium” and the great great great great sign below. Those were also designed by Because We Can. A reminder that long-term thinking goes well with a sense of humor.

Links:

• Because We Can
• More pics of their Salon design for Long Now
• Long Now Vimeo page
• Etched aluminum signs

Lance Winters, Master Distiller of St. George Spirits, says the nature of his craft is to archive the essence of a time and place. Lance has helped us make an aromatic gin featuring Juniper berries harvested amongst the 5,000 year-old Bristlecone Pines on Long Now’s Nevada site. Our gin will only be served at the Long Now salon space. Supporters of the Founders Bottle Club campaign can reserve a bottle of this rare Long Now spirit and help fund the construction of the salon.

Lance sees parallels between the art eau de vie distillation and the mission of Long Now:

We take a photograph of the way something smells and tastes and we lock that away on the most archival format we can do. You can crack a bottle of our stuff open a hundred years from now and it’s going to smell the same way it did, by and large, as when we distilled it. So we’re able to capture an olfactory slice of time.

So, you should expect Long Now gin to taste like this:

More videos about the Long Now salon and related projects on the Long Now Vimeo page.