Genepy, Sweet Annie, lemon balm, blessed thistle, feverfew, lemon verbena, red clover, citra and centennial hops, New York state honey, and many others! 27 botanicals in all.

Our Genepy is a special release, produced once a year in Greenport, NY.

We start with our first maceration–which provides color, flavor, and a pinch of bitterness–by adding a portion of intensely green herbs, including genepy, lemon verbena, and hyssop, to a small vat of high-proof spirit. This sits for two weeks before being strained off and set aside in glass. We then add more herbs to our vat–27 in total–including more genepy as well as loads of other artemisia like Sweet Annie, Wormwood, and Mugwort, and allow this to macerate for another two weeks.

The resulting intensely flavored and bitter concentrate is redistilled down to roughly 125 proof (any lower and we wouldn’t be able to hit 100 proof with our sweetening blend!). This aromatic spirit is then blended with New York state honey, invert sugar, and our coloring tincture before being added to Sauternes barrels where it rests for roughly three months before being bottled.

Genepy is the Alpine liqueur. It’s an herb in the wormwood family only found naturally at high elevation in the Alps of France, Italy, Switzerland, and eastward. It’s finnicky, a shrub of a plant, and notoriously hard to cultivate. It blooms at the end of summer, and that’s when you harvest. You don’t take the whole plant, or its roots, just the sprigs. You can forage it, but the rules are pretty strict. In France, for instance, you may forage it in August, but only within 200 meters of the road, and only a certain amount of sprigs.

But it’s worth the effort. Genepy has a singular flavor. Like truffles, genepy tastes like nothing so much as genepy. As it’s a wormwood it’s pretty bitter, but there’s an evergreen quality there, too–a palate-wakening spice and freshness. Genepy liqueur tends to be sweet, and high proof, Chartreuse being maybe the most famous example.

We wanted ours to evoke the classic style. It’s green with a lovely golden cast, slightly less sweet than you find across the category, and 100 proof. It shows the genepy’s spiciness, with notes of lemon verbena, mace, honey, and wormwood.