Forthave Spirits: Of Vices and Medicine

Words by Ariel Barnes | Photography by Kyle Johnson

There are three essential libraries in the Forthave Spirits lab, perched high up in the old Pfizer Pharmaceuticals building on Flushing Avenue where Aaron Fox and Daniel de la Nuez mix their medicines. There is the six-foot tall liquor shelf of antique herbal remedies dating back as far as 1940. Some of the bottles are tall yet curved, the sun-stained labels slightly peeled back. All of the names are printed in fat, bold typeface like ‘Presolana’ Gran Liquor and Picon Amer, among, of course, a few familiar bottles of Cynar. The shelves are far from dusty, as the bottles are tended to often.

Then there is their modern library: a wine chiller healthily stocked with Aaron and Daniel’s favorite bottles, which include a L’Anglore Tavel Rouge and a Les Gaudrettes Côtes du Jura Chardonnay.

For spirits makers, the two founders have a process that is uniquely their own, more akin to the mindset of a natural winemaker than that of a whiskey distiller or a brewer. They bring to spirits “a wine palate” since it’s “balance that we go for,” Daniel clarifies, noting he doesn’t drink whiskey. It’s “certainly more [about] texture than flavor, if I had to choose just one,” Aaron adds.

In the grand scheme of things, balance overrides specific flavors “because those change so much, especially in ones like the Marseille,” an amaro in the collection of one-offs they dub their “historical line” (versus the classics like their gin or aperitivo, which fall in the “color line”). Aaron continues: “there's days where you pull it out and everyone's like, wow, this is all the menthol-y stuff. Then you get these tasting notes back some other day and it [smells] like this church from wherever, this Christmas spice thing. But what stays consistent is the character of it, the shape.” 

If achieving balance is the holy grail, it’s an all-encompassing commitment to sourcing that gets them here. To start with, “everything is USDA organic. If it’s not certified it’s because we foraged from upstate farmers that are so small that they haven’t gotten their certification,” Daniel says. “No artificial coloring, no processed sugars.” For the dry ingredients they forage from afar, say, rosehips from Morocco, they use a third party like Mountain Rose to verify the origin.

He’s quick to dispel any notion of dogma: “We didn’t have [the] intention in starting out organic, like, ‘oh, we’ll be the equivalent of [natural] wine.’ We just kind of [made] the same choices that we [make] at home. So, it was a challenge as a business to see if this could work. Then the natural wine world really embraced us.” Daniel notes that, as far as they know, few people in the spirits world are following a similar approach. The anecdotal evidence is compelling: “I would imagine if most of them were practicing organic they would say it. And most don't,” he adds.

When other beverage producers argue that ‘they’re not making health food, so they don’t have to make it organic,’ Aaron’s retort is similarly straightforward: “we’re not making health food either, but I don’t want to be drinking anything with pesticides in it.”

They care more for the story told by the chronology of each bottle’s release rather than pushing something out that will sell fast. Since their first vintage in 2017, they’ve been taking a series of meticulous steps to improve their ingredients and remedies.

Various stages are on display around me as I sit between two shelves of experiments, the Brooklyn sunset to my back. The windows reflect deep hues of purple and contrast with earthy-red brick across the skyline, a view Aaron and Daniel say they never tire of. Inside, plants and vines hang from the ceiling. Some are in need of trimming, a small service I keep in mind to offer later on as a thank you for their time. As we talk, the two buzz around the space, weaving between large tanks and demijohns full of carefully regulated experiments. “My joke is that l studied literature because I didn't want to be a lawyer or an accountant,” Daniel jokes. “And now I'm like both of those. Plus a regulator.” At one point, he peels off in search of a Tibetan yak’s milk he is keen on showing me, but soon relents as they begin recounting the story of how they met.

From Four Thieves to Forthave

Daniel split time growing up between Brooklyn and Coasta Brava, Catalunya. While in college, he worked with Jorge Riera (formerly of Wildair and now of Frenchette) at 360, the natural wine mecca of the early aughts and, coincidentally, Aaron’s favorite restaurant in Brooklyn at the time. Their friendship solidified over bottles of wine and batches of spirits they began mixing together on a lark, drawing on Daniel’s proximity to the New York wine world and Aaron’s experience at Juveniles, the wine bar where he moonlighted during an artist’s residency in Paris. 

Aaron continues to paint, on canvases and on their bottles. They started off by channeling colors: “the idea was to kind of have an architecture. You know what fits. So, the architecture we decided on was to have a color line. Red, blue, black, brown; yellow is the new one. And that’s our take on classic botanical spirits. And then we started to make Amaro at home...”

The R&D of History

“Our first amaro didn’t really make sense [as part of] a color line because this amaro was so unique,” they note. “It didn’t [have just] one style. So, we said, ‘okay, let’s find an old herbal recipe and base the amaro off of that.’ That is the historical line. So, that’s the Amaro Marseille.”

Their central discovery was this: all digestifs began as herbal medicines. Handing me a bottle from the shelf, they explain that this Italian amaro from Barbieri in the late 1940s was the one which went on to make Aperol. They point to the label: “‘Amaro concentrado,’ or Amaro concentrate, ‘for medicinal use.’ So, this was sold in an apothecary.” Before long, digestifs found their way into culinary culture. 

Aaron directs me toward the older bottles, “the deep brown ones, where there’s this kind of caramelized sugar. You can taste somewhat of a pop-burning sugar as opposed to an industrial caramel color. Those you can definitely taste and see.” 

There was a shift in the ‘70s when the labels started saying ‘colore naturale.’ “They began listing E102, E131, artificial colors and flavors,” Daniel expounds. “So, the further back you go, the further you really taste—you see the hand of each decade.” Craftsmanship gave way to industrialization. It’s a trope we know well. He suddenly motions us away: “but the best library is over there...”

The Herb Library

“It [took] so much to come up with these processes…

I think André Breton would be proud.”

[Heat] is not degrees alcohol. It's the same in wine. [You can have] a Châteauneuf that is 15.5% but it's not hot because it's just beautifully integrated.

We work a lot on the process. None of these things are like, oh, this needs a little more salt. Or this needs more this. Because these things are a long process. Everything's proportional. And everything affects everything.

Instead of, this needs a little bit more salt, it's like, alright, this one we prefer its personality when it went through the still, this one we prefer its personality when it was cold, this we prefer its personality extracted at 95, this we prefer its personality extracted at 24, 47, …

In terms of the edges to cut off, flavorwise, we think: if it's balanced it shouldn't be yelling. It shouldn't be one of those flavors where it's like: I've got this, and this, and this, and this.

The botanical spirits is a whole big side that is not even the primary fermentation stuff. Juniper is not a primary fermenter. It's something you get through a still, through different infusions. So that was our architecture as a whole. We wanted to do classics.

Brown, the espresso liqueur we have, is from our friend Cesar at Café Integral. We became friends with him and decided to collaborate on this. We decided on a single farmer and single bean. The bean is called Pacamará. It’s this very large bean, and the farmer tends to his harvests very carefully like a winegrower would.

So, with the beans he does this thing called a partial wash. He leaves some [loose skin] on the bean and then seals them in containers where the beans undergo this anaerobic fermentation, carbonic in wine, you’d call it, and then dries them in the sun.

I do think that they evolve [in bottle]. But I don't think there's any easy rule. I mean none of them go as fast as wine. Wine is its own thing. It's not even as fast as fortified wines, but it's closer to that.

There's no one classic amaro. The classic amari all started as herbal medicine, and throughout the R&D of history over a hundred, two hundred years or so, became after dinner drinks, became cocktails, melding more with cuisine. Some of the bottles were clearly sold in pharmacies: a hundred herbs.

For us it's always about harmony and balance. I think that's part of it coming from the wine perspective, where we look at length and balance and timing. So I think we have much less tolerance for heat than most classical spirits palates.

These dried ones we organize a bit like a growing plant. So, from the lower parts are the roots, bark, mushrooms and stuff like that. Then the leaf parts of the plant, some of them: Eucalyptus, different mints, lemon verbena. And then the flowering parts: rosebuds, hibiscus, stuff like that. And then [up top] are the reproductive parts of the plants, that later stage—the fruits and seeds.

“And since we were so into the history of these, and drinking ratafias in Spain and Aaron drinking amers in France, we said, ‘Ok let’s try to create this category.’ We called it ‘all-natural botanical spirits.’ So, we have an amaro, aperitivo, and gin, the most recognized spirit out there. We thought that would really explain the story of what we’re trying to do.” - Daniel

“That beak [on the Marseilles] would’ve been filled with botanicals in that time period and those same recipes were also made in tonics and fusions or cure-alls to put on your skin, or to drink to either cure or protect you from the plague. And that was later—well there’s a lot of mythological history there, but one line of it was that it was called Thieves Vinegar or Thieves Remedy or Marseille Remedy. That was the base for the original recipe of this amaro. It’s a recipe from the Museum of Paris and many different herbal medicine books. 

Richard Forthave is the historical figure known for this recipe, more commonly known as Four Thieves, which is his name through the history of telephone.” - Aaron

We started thinking: What's the larger encapsulation of amaro? For us that was botanical spirits versus straight spirits. Straight spirits are really the expression of the distilled fermented beverage.

“When we approached this, we didn’t visit other distilleries. We didn’t really know. Aaron has a lot of experience with wineries, but everything else was just two artists coming together being like, ‘How do we do this? How is amaro made?’ No one fucking tells you. It’s all this mysterious thing. So, this is a result of us just figuring it out on our own, like the fact that we’re using plants—we didn’t want to use anything else. [It’s] not that we wanted to have a natural distillery. 

The fact that we’re associated with these natural wines is because friends like Fifi will be like, ‘Come pour at my thing. You guys qualify, you should come pour.’ So, we didn’t really stumble onto this, but the choices we made brought us to where we are.” - Daniel

If we don't perfectly agree [on the blend] then the person who has the question is the one that wins. We have to get to the point where we totally agree.