As consumer interest in botanicals in spirits has grown, so has their curiosity about foraging for those botanicals.
Foraged spirits thus join a confluence of trends, as more enthusiasts seek local spirits tied to their place; as New World gins, amari, and other regional, botanical-driven spirits and liqueurs grow in popularity; and as consumers place growing emphasis on sustainable sourcing.
Foraging also opens a wider world of possibilities for the craft distiller. You can learn, gather, experiment, and collaborate—all within reasonable range of your distillery—while exploring new flavor and aroma possibilities and while turning those spirits into expressions of their time and place.
Even for the urban distiller, foraging can be a valuable tool in the repertoire. All you need to get started is some know-how and an understanding of the commitment that foraging requires.
[PAYWALL]
The Flavors of Season and Setting in a Bottle
“It’s funny when something you’ve been doing forever becomes trendy,” says Emily Vikre, cofounder and CEO of Vikre Distillery in Duluth, Minnesota.
Vikre says she now sees consumers becoming more comfortable with the more complex flavors of herbs and spices. She foraged for food ingredients before starting the distillery, and it always made sense to extend that approach to her spirits. “It’s a passion for flavor combined with a passion for place,” she says.
Jamie Hunt, founder and CEO of Fast Penny Spirits in Seattle, is also a longtime forager. Before the distillery took over Hunt’s days, she would forage for truffles with her dog; they got the training through Seattle-based Truffle Dog. Now she partners with Truffle Dog to manage the truffle-foraging—her own dog sometimes still goes on those trips—for her two amari: Amaricano and Amaricano Bianca.
Photo courtesy of Fast Penny Spirits (Seattle)
“Amaro is … a regional product, historically,” Hunt says. “It combines what’s grown in the area with global ingredients, so we wanted to look at what we had available in Washington state.”
Crater Lake Spirits in Bend, Oregon, was built on foraging, says national sales manager James Padilla.
When founder Jim Bendis started the distillery, “his thought was, ‘Bend sits in the largest juniper forest in the United States. Why isn’t anyone making gin?’” Padilla says. Bendis started picking juniper for a Prohibition-style, compound gin 30 years ago. Still made with locally foraged juniper berries, that gin remains a popular Crater Lake flagship today.
At Dry Land Distillers in Longmont, Colorado, founder Nels Wroe says the foraged approach inherently made sense for the brand’s ethos. “We are very dedicated to creating spirits that are true to place,” he says.
Wroe says there are different lenses through which “sense of place” can be viewed, such as region, state, or microclimate. For Dry Land, ingredients are part of their ecosystem, which Wroe calls “one tough climate.” The team has worked to identify what they can responsibly, creatively, and successfully find and showcase in new ways. “Many of the ingredients we use here have never been put in a spirit before,” Wroe says.
In a setting not normally associated with foraging—Brooklyn, New York—Bitter Monk cofounders Ektoras Binikos and Simon Jutras have built a portfolio of esoteric amari, liqueurs, and bitters under the banner Atheras Spirits. Launched together in March 2024, their Bitter Monk bar and Atheras brand are products of pandemic-induced tinkering. Binikos and Jutras opened their Sugar Monk bar in 2019 in Harlem; when it closed during the pandemic, they turned it into a laboratory.
“We went crazy experimenting, starting with bitters and expanding to amari,” Binikos says. They already were brainstorming with New Jersey–based forager Tama Matsuoka Wong, who started bringing them different ingredients to try.
When Sugar Monk reopened, the founders saw how much people loved the foraged creations. They soon hatched plans for Bitter Monk and Atheras, knowing they wanted to expand on that creativity, offering snapshots of different regions through foraged ingredients.
Binikos, for example, comes from a family of microdistillers on the Greek island of Ikaria, so he’s worked with Ikarian forager Liza Kondou to incorporate flavors from there.
What’s Getting Gathered
If distillers had only their own imaginations to constrain what ingredients they foraged, the sky would be the limit. However, several factors limit what’s feasible.
Those limitations include what’s local to you, or to the region you want to capture in your spirit. Another is seasonality—even if you plan to freeze or dry your ingredients, harvesting them must fit in with your scheduling. There’s also environmental responsibility because you should consider what grows in enough abundance that you can pick without harming the ecosystem.
“You need a scalable solution,” Hunt says. A specific ingredient might not be plentiful enough to harvest responsibly; or, you might not have the labor available to forage at the scale you need, especially if it’s for a flagship spirit.
“We can have some fun with limited releases because we don’t have to distribute those or create them again,” Hunt says. For Fast Penny’s core, distributed amari, truffles are an ingredient she knows she can reliably, responsibly access.
Similar considerations guide what Vikre forages in Minnesota. “For our widely available products, the main things we forage are spruce tips and staghorn sumac,” Vikre says.
For more limited releases, as well as for cocktail ingredients in Vikre’s tasting room, she says they’ve foraged burdock root, dandelion root, crabapples, juneberries, aronia berries, and chokecherries. The spruce tips and sumac, though, are “very widely abundant in this area,” she says. “We literally just go out and pick it. … Everything we pick is on [farmland] that belongs to our friend, so we can also be sure it’s 100 percent certified organic.”
Photo courtesy of Crater Lake Spirits (Bend, Oregon)
Crater Lake focuses their foraging efforts on those gin-defining juniper berries. Helpfully, there’s no specific season for juniper berries, so Padilla says they pick on days when the weather is nice, and they freeze their hauls.
Photo courtesy of Atheras Spirits (Brooklyn, New York)
Because Binikos partners with foragers in both New Jersey and Greece, he has access to some of the more traditional Mediterranean amaro ingredients as well as novel botanicals local to Bitter Monk. They work with things such as meadowsweet (pictured above), fig leaves, angelica, fern, pine, and wild sage. For example, an Atheras herbal liqueur called Flora is a local expression that includes meadowsweet, wild fennel, and wild celery.
DIY Approaches, Partnerships, and Urban Collecting
The primary decision around foraging is whether you’re going to do it yourself or partner with a professional forager.
Doing it yourself allows you some flexibility as well as a more hands-on connection to the land and the inspiration you’re looking to convey in a liquid—but it also has a steep learning curve when it comes to safety. Vikre calls herself “an anxious forager,” explaining that she must be 150 percent sure about what she’s picking.
“Nature is wonderful and abundant and will also absolutely kill you if you eat the wrong thing,” she says.
Partnering with a pro might remove you from the tactile nature of the process, but it’s a time-saver that opens more possibilities for urban distillers. It also comes with a seasoned expert’s safety promise. Even if you want to learn to forage yourself, you should start by hiring a professional to teach you the ropes. Vikre recommends looking for classes and tours in your area, as well as reaching out to local farms, gardens, and farmer’s markets to find dedicated foragers and consultants.
There’s also another form of foraging that Dry Land has come to rely on to balance their sustainability concerns with their creativity and the spirits they produce. Wroe calls it “urban collecting.”
As the Dry Land team started partnering with private and public lands to forage, Wroe says, they felt that something was just not right as they went off-trail. “We were disrupting what we loved about [the outdoors] and felt the damage we were doing foraging outweighed any benefit we could get from it.”
Photo courtesy Dry Land Distillers (Longmont, Colorado)
So, they put out calls to local farms, growers, neighbors, and organizations such as Slow Food Boulder, asking whether anyone happened to have the ingredients they sought. Those ingredients—such as the pineapple weed (pictured above) already growing in Wroe’s sister’s yard—popped up in all kinds of places, with no need to trample through nature or risk over-harvesting.
Over time, Dry Land has built a community network; for example, people report to say they love their crabapple tree, but it makes a mess, so the distillery is welcome to all the crabapples they want. As these relationships develop, some of those people even grow extras of different herbs just for the distillery.
Wroe says they’re careful about knowing the source of each ingredient, so they know it hasn’t been sprayed with chemicals. They’ve also started their own urban botanical garden, working with the city to overhaul the planters in the pedestrian breezeway next to the distillery. That’s also reduced water use for that landscaping by about 70 percent.
In terms of cost, foraging yourself might seem “free,” but that doesn’t account for time and labor. Partnering with a pro is a more straightforward expense, while community collaboration such as Dry Land’s can offer a more flexible range of options.
People are excited to bring things into the distillery, Wroe says, and they buy these helpers cocktails in gratitude. When working with more dedicated or professional growers, he says, they pay fair prices that still work out better than many commercial options that require shipping.
Working with Foraged Ingredients, from Distilling to Branding
Once you’ve identified your ingredients and how they’ll be collected, it’s time to nail down how best to use them.
Binikos says he works with some botanicals fresh and others dried, based on what form yields a better flavor. If he knows he wants to use something fresh, seasonality can mean urgency. “When we make Flora, we have a two-week window to collect the fresh herbs we use,” he says. “They’re all very fragile.” The angelica stems he uses, for example, have about a month of tenderness before they harden and lose their flavors.
Vikre says she gets the best flavors when she freezes her spruce tips and dries her staghorn sumac. That’s fortuitous because she needs to be able to preserve those ingredients to use throughout the year.
Photo courtesy of Vikre Distillery
At Fast Penny, Hunt says she’s found more appealing flavors and better longevity from working with dehydrated truffles. “The funkiness people associate with truffles turns into more earthy, cocoa-y, fruity flavors, which go well with amaro,” she says. Plus, their flavor holds up in the actual amaro for a much longer time—important for a product that someone could potentially have on a shelf for a couple of years.
Hunt compares it to a truffle liqueur she made just for fun using fresh truffles. “It was super-delicious for six months, and then just started degrading,” she says.
Both Hunt and Binikos introduce their foraged ingredients to their amari and liqueurs via maceration with high-proof spirits—Hunt does not distill, and Binikos is just now starting to experiment with it.
Crater Lake also macerates their distillate with the juniper berries to stay true to the pre-Prohibition style. That’s important, Padilla says, because the Prohibition-era cocktails trendy now often specify compound gin, which can be tricky to find.
For her spirits, Vikre and her team work in the botanicals through a combination of pre-distillation maceration, vapor distillation through a gin basket, and then, often, a post-distillation steep.
Into the Mix
There’s a final juncture at which you can incorporate foraging into your spirits and your brand: at the bar.
Even if you can only get some botanicals in amounts sufficient for cocktail mix-ins, that can still provide a platform for storytelling and consumer education at the tasting bar. Through conversations with guests and informative cocktail menus, you can use foraged ingredients to express your brand’s values and sense of place.
Photo courtesy of Fox & Oden (Holland, Michigan)
That’s something that young Michigan-based whiskey brand Fox & Oden is currently exploring. The company’s process of blending and finishing whiskey is not one where foraged ingredients would fit. However, CEO Ali Anderson says that finding other ways to connect with foraging is valuable for introducing people to the brand’s ethos.
In New York City, Fox & Oden hosted an event at which expert Journei Bimwala led a foraging tour, and celebrity mixologist Ivy Mix hosted a cocktail class. Mix combined Fox & Oden’s bourbon with things made from foraged ingredients, such as mugwort bitters and crabapple juice. That provided a way to link Fox & Oden’s Michigan-centric brand with New York, which Anderson says they are planning to do in other parts of the country.
“In Michigan, what does our team like to do on weekends?” Anderson says. “We go outside. We go fishing, we go hunting, we get out there with friends.” The brand is also committed to sustainability, he says.
“When we thought about how we could exemplify these values, it made sense to go do what we do and get outside and connect with people who are foraging out there.”
