Aaron and his co-founder built Forthave Spirits, a Brooklyn botanical distillery, from scratch using organic, small-farm ingredients. They started with amaro and expanded to aperitivo and gin, funding everything themselves to keep creative control over what they make.
Fourth Ave Spirits is a small botanical spirits-focused distillery in Brooklyn, New York.
Aaron and I first met back in 2011 and discovered that we shared this passion for wine, for art, and for spirits.
What piqued our interest in Amaro was this really vast history that it has and this interesting way that it dovetails with the history of herbal medicine, botanical medicine, the spice route, and culture. When I was in college, I moved to France to study painting, There I fell in love with wine and spirits, and when I came back to New York, that was something that I wanted to keep pursuing.
When Aaron and I first started experimenting making spirits, we were focused on amari.
The original R&D to make the spirits that we produced was to look at what we wanted to drink, something that in general was a little bit lower ABV, a little bit lighter in the sweetener than some of the things that are classically in the digestivo space.
Then eventually when we grew and decided to open a distillery, we wanted to tell the story of what we consider all-natural botanical spirits. We set a challenge to ourselves that if we're going to open this as a business, as a distillery, let's make the same choices we made for ourselves. Everything is plant-based. All the plants are either USDA certified organic or grown by small farmers.
For us to open as a business was a slow process of one step and then another step. We started without investment. We started really without a business plan. The first products that we launched under the rubric of Fourth Day Experience was an amaro, an aperitivo, and a gin, and those were meant to give an outline of what we wanted to do in producing plant-based botanical spirits. We started this with the love of experimenting with making stuff ourselves, so we're always doing that, even within the stuff that we have to produce on a more consistent basis. We're always finding new ingredients that might inspire us.
The best part about owning and running Forthave Spirits is that I have the freedom to create what I want to create and to work with one of my, my best friends in the world.
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