Not all remarkable spirits fit into neat, preexisting categories, nor are even born with intent.
One such sui generis, “broke-the-mold” product—Warming Hut, from Hinterhaus Distilling in Arnold, California—is the result of a serendipitous combination of bourbon and too much port wine.
The distillery, which opened (less serendipitously) in 2020, sources bourbon and finishes it in local wine barrels.
“It’s varietal-driven, so each batch is a different variety of wine that we finish it in,” says founder and distiller Nate Randall. “We’ve done 13 or 14 different varietals now, which is insane.”
Oops! Becomes Wow!
Hinterhaus finished its second bourbon release, in 2021, in local port wine barrels. Randall’s instructions to the wineries with whom they work are simple: “Take your wine out of [the barrels], then don’t touch them. Put the bung back in them and give us a call.”
The distillery picks up the barrels the same day and fills them within a day or two. Randall says they do a better job these days of checking the barrels for anything out of the ordinary—but they may have been less thorough with that early batch of port barrels.
“When we went to harvest these, we went to dump a barrel and it was dark—dark, dark, dark,” Randall says. “It was pretty clear that we hadn’t turned the barrel over and checked to see how much port there was in it, and it was clear that I couldn’t put it out that way. Clearly it was a blend of bourbon and port; it wasn’t bourbon anymore.”
He put the juice back into the barrel and set it aside to figure out a plan. A few weeks later, a local beekeeper approached him about making mead—the apiary had a ton of local, terroir-driven honey available, Randall says, and the pieces started coming together. What if they took the port-bourbon barrel and added the honey to make a liqueur?
“That just got things riffing,” he says. “Once … we sweetened it with honey and tasted it, it reminded me a little bit of a chocolate cordial that has alcohol in it. Trader Joe’s used to carry … these little chocolate bean-shaped things with brandy in them, and it was coming up to the holidays. I thought it’d be cool if we could replicate the flavor of a chocolate cordial. It’s already got bourbon, it’s already got honey, it’s already got port wine. We started working on figuring out how to add chocolate to it.”
They went with a chocolate flavoring, which then made him think of a chocolate-flavored Italian soda, or an Italian ice finished with whipped cream. With that in mind, the final piece was a touch of shelf-stable whipped-cream flavoring, rather than a dairy product. “We didn’t want to do a cream thing, like a bourbon cream, mainly because we weren’t in a position to be adding a tote of cream base,” he says.
Initially, Hinterhaus released Warming Hut as a one-off the day after Thanksgiving 2021. Now it’s become an annual holiday release, winning the American Craft Spirits Association’s Innovation Award in February 2024.
“Most people who taste it have never tasted anything like it,” Randall says, and that first smell and taste are essential. He compares it to a time earlier in his career, when he worked at a little startup called Tesla Motors.
“That was one of Elon [Musk’s] big things, … having the very first experience with the car be special and unique,” Randall says. “You immediately knew: This was different. It’s that moment of tasting and smelling something that’s off the radar of what they’ve tasted out of a spirit before. Then you start telling them what it’s made from, and there’s a lot of good reasons why they should leave with that bottle.”
The packaging looks good. The product smells good and tastes good. It’s made with local wine and local honey. It’s going to be a great Christmas gift, and on and on. “It’s just layering it with reasons people should purchase it,” Randall says.
Craft Doesn’t Equal Tradition
Creating Warming Hut reinforced some of what Randall already knew about product development: “Be creative, fail, try, experiment, and employ a beginner’s mindset,” he says. “If you didn’t have all of the knowledge and bias you do, what sort of flavors would you chase? Craft does not equal tradition. You could do the same thing with a totally different flavor profile and a totally different season.”
Because they rely on small-run, local products, the blend is a little different every year. Randall has dialed in the ratios for the flavorings and the bourbon, and he keeps the same mash bill from year to year. The honey, though, can vary dramatically in consistency, flavor profile, and availability.
“That’s a variable we can’t control, so we just decided we’re going to do X percent of honey, and that’s how it’s going to be,” he says. It does create some filtering issues. “Two years ago, [we] had a batch that was much cloudier and couldn’t get [it] through the filter.”
Warming Hut’s TTB-approved recipe notes a percentage of port wine, but they’re not able to source it from the same winery every year. Randall calls it “a variable that is”—here he pauses—“very variable.”
“The port that we’re getting can be drastically different,” he says. This year’s local port, for example, is a 12-year vintage that may not come back around for a while. “We use a lot for color, so the volume of port varies pretty drastically year-to-year.”
They’ve experimented year-to-year with blending aspects—such as how early to put the bourbon in the barrel to marry it with the port, and whether to add it with the honey and flavorings or just the bourbon and port.
“Basically, every year we’re trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got,” Randall says. Ultimately, however, Warming Hut is a representation of local flavors and products that can be inconsistent from one year to the next.
The batch size has increased since 2021, but California’s spirits laws prevent it from being a meaningful additional revenue stream. Distillery visitors can buy only three bottles per person per day; Randall says he sees customers buying Warming Hut instead of something else, rather than in addition to something else. “Maybe instead of three bourbon, it’s one bourbon and two” bottles of Warming Hut, he says.
Savoring the Moments
Randall is considering putting Warming Hut into distribution but doesn’t want to oversaturate the market. It’s a balancing act to make enough that will sell through promptly.
“If you start turning on distribution, how much do we do to make it mean something but not screw it up?” he says. “It needs to be something that sits at the front shelf, and it’s gone really quickly.”
Part of that decision-making rests on how much appeal remains when the customer can find Warming Hut at a grocery store in Los Angeles or San Diego, far from the distillery. As much as the flavor aspect and the local products contribute to Warming Hut’s success, it’s ultimately a result of how people attach emotion to the spirit in the context of the holidays, family, and enjoying special times.
“It’s become this really cool localized tradition,” Randall says. “The dream is to have a real impact with one of your products, at least for me—the moments. We get that sometimes with bourbons. People will tell us, ‘I had this with my dad,’ something like that. A real moment with something you made.
“With this one, it’s just awesome. People get it on Christmas morning in their stocking every year, and that’s super-special. You can’t replicate that. That’s one of the reasons we try not to over-produce it, too. If you come back after Christmas and try to get more, you can’t. Hopefully it’s gone.”