PostModern Spirits, a Knoxville gem, celebrates cocktail culture in an unpretentious way
Stanton Webster makes fancy drinks without a fancy attitude.
He and head distiller Ron Grazioso opened PostModern six years ago this month with “a vision of doing really fun spirits we were passionate about,” Webster said.
They wanted to celebrate cocktail culture — not the pretentious kind presided over by a bartender with a bowtie and waxed moustache, but having people over and making drinks together. PostModern sells amari concocted from old European recipes, mixed into cocktails named for regulars’ dogs.
And they wanted to celebrate their beloved city of Knoxville.
PostModern’s distillery and bar sit in a former railroad freight depot in Old City, a neighborhood once full of factories and saloons. It made perfect sense to Webster: “We are manufacturers, at heart, but we manufacture nightlife.”
Currently they offer a malt whiskey and a rye whiskey, a vodka, three different gins and more than half-a-dozen amari and liqueurs. They're cracking a new barrel at the company's sixth anniversary party Aug. 26.
The whiskey grain bills are inspired by popular local beers, “because Knoxville is very much a beer town,” Webster said. The whiskey tells the story of the place.
The distillery bar also sells small-batch experiments such as Apel whiskey, aged in barrels that had previously held hard cider and apple brandy.
They don’t yet make a Tennessee whiskey or a bourbon. Their current processes aren’t suited, Webster said, and why offer something if it won’t compete?
Besides, “neither of us had a grandpappy with a recipe for moonshine or whatever, so we had to be true to who we were,” he said.
Which is experimental and fun. “We say PostModern Spirits is at the crossroads of chemistry and artistry,” Webster said. One of the gins is fragrant with lavender; another has galangal and Szechuan pepper, and tingles on the tongue.
Webster and Grazioso love pulling from history; their Sub Rosa liqueur is a variation on a crème de violette and uses a process from the 18th century.
“But we’re also modern people. We have our science backgrounds; we have our educations. And so we’re willing to pull from all these different places and times and styles and techniques and put them together in different and new ways, connecting them across generations,” Webster said.
(Grazioso was a nuclear physicist; Webster has a degree in animal science, though he said he needed help to get through his food chemistry class.)
Webster pulled out a copy of Fenaroli's "Handbook of Flavor Ingredients," a doorstop-sized tome that helps Grazioso extract precisely the flavors he wants in gin and liqueurs.
To make experimentation simpler, PostModern started making its whiskey in small barrels that age the liquor faster. It shortens the feedback loop. With the malt and rye whiskeys down — and the latter in fact sold out after winning a prominent whiskey prize — they're moving to larger barrels.
The collaboration with fellow boozemakers goes beyond the whiskey grain bill. When making whiskey, they cook the mash at a friend's brewery. Leftover grains, spent gin botanicals and all the other fauna are available to anyone who wants to do "something fun or interesting" with them, Webster said.
They could go creative for days. But they do have a limit: “Making stuff’s fun. Selling it is required,” Webster said.
Danielle Dreilinger is an American South storytelling reporter and the author of the book “The Secret History of Home Economics.” You can reach her at ddreilinger@gannett.com or 919/236-3141.
More: Oak barrel Ruby delivers unprecedented product to PostModern Spirit's anniversary event
This article originally appeared on The American South: PostModern Spirits in Knoxville: Fancy drinks without a fancy attitude
