Let’s begin with the booze. Lost Spirits Distillery, which opened August 15 at the Area15 complex, launches with several brands of house-made specialty hooch, including “Japonisme,” a 90-proof, Japanese-inspired rum made with Okinawa black sugar and charred Mizunara oak; “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” a 102-proof rum distilled from Grade A molasses and Pacific Ocean brine; and “Framboise,” a 94-proof brandy fermented from California raspberries—17 pounds of them per bottle, to be precise.
“It’s a product almost no one makes, because the raw materials break the economics,” co-founder Bryan Davis explains.
If Davis and partner Joanne Haruta have wasted even a moment of their journey obsessing over the economics of things, you wouldn’t know it by tasting their wares. The spirits I’ve been lucky enough to sample are intensely flavorsome, smooth as spun silk and loaded with character. They’re great for sipping—just the fuel you need for a two hour-plus distillery tour and tasting—and they’ll make for some outstanding cocktails, once these bottles manage to cross over into this dimension.
And for the moment, that’s all I’m going to say about what Lost Spirits makes. Instead, we’re going to talk about the place where they make it, assuming I didn’t dream it up. Lost Spirits Las Vegas—Davis and Haruta’s second distillery, though the LA location is currently closed—is a sensory adventure. Right from the start, it subverts your expectations of distillery tours, themed environments and Area15 itself. (Spoilers follow.)
You wander through theatrical forests, ride in a Jules Verne-inspired submarine and are entertained in a Cuban nightclub by holograms. The tour playfully confounds your efforts to get your bearings, and your guide, the puckish “artificial intelligence” Tessa, is of little help. (“I, as well as everything you’ll see on this journey, was built on things you can find at Home Depot and Amazon.com,” she jokes in her stop-start computerized cadence.) But even those who get lost might find their way into secret tasting rooms and other hidden experiences.
If Lost Spirits has some fun with theatricality, that’s only because it has the science of distilling locked down tight. Back in 2015, Davis, a self-taught organic chemist and seemingly restless autodidact, discovered a form of time travel: He figured out how to bestow years’ worth of barrel-aged flavor to spirits within only days. Davis and Haruta began to assemble a “crack team” of chemical engineers, materials science experts and electrical engineers to unpack his discovery, because “It’s one thing to discover how to make something work,” Davis says. “Why something works is a whole different piece of the equation.”
Admittedly, even the “how” is difficult for me to explain, which is what makes the part of the tour that touches on the actual distilling worth the visit. You’ll be taken through a barrel room and laboratory, where the process of distilling spirits—and Lost Spirits’ game-changing modification to the process—is explained in layman’s terms, with a generous amount of historical perspective, natural science and solid humor. And it probably goes without saying that the visual aspects of the process are played up; it’s very close to a classic mad scientist’s lab. It’s easily the most enjoyable chemistry lesson I’ve ever had, and in the midst of it I nearly forgot that I was in the middle of a retro-futuristic wonderland.
There’s still more to the tour that I’m hesitant to reveal, though I will say that beginning in October, that “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” room—where that ocean brine rum be served, matey—will be home to a 12-course, $240 tasting menu created by chef Taylor Persh, who also created a 10-course menu for Lost Spirits’ LA distillery. There, he served up such delights as Spanish octopus with butternut squash and fennel pollen, and Exploding Grapes, which infuses the vine fruit with peated malt “and an abundance of caution.”
There’s no telling what he’ll do with two more courses, a wholly plausible undersea world and a complement of Vegas-made spirits.
LOST SPIRITS DISTILLERY Area15, 3215 S. Rancho Drive, 702-213-4888, lostspirits.net. Tour & tasting, $60 weekdays, $80 Friday evenings & weekends.
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