For attendees of ADI 2023 Lost Spirits Distillery has graciously shared a 25% discount code, which is good for ANY of their evening Modern Cirque Show tickets — use code DISTILLER25.
When distiller Bryan Davis and partner (in life and business) Joanne Haruta opened Lost Spirits in 2010, they were distilling on Davis’ hand-built still in the middle of an artichoke field in Salinas, California. Inspired by that aromatic soil and the nearby ocean, they developed cult rums and whiskeys, experimenting with ocean water fermentations and different bacterial cultures.
But they couldn’t scale up at the original facility. Though they had hoped to move to the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles had favorable zoning laws, so they moved to a downtown L.A. warehouse in 2016. Drawing on his youth building amusement park rides and obsessive study of the inner workings of everything from woodworking to chemistry, Davis created a Disneyland-esque distillery experience complete with mobile topiary animal bushes, a Jungle Cruise-reminiscent wood-carved dragon boat that carried guests through the distillery, and a room of singing parrots à la the Enchanted Tiki Room. Pepper this with a heavy H.G. Wells’ Island of Doctor Moreau influence, and you start to get a sense of Lost Spirits’ uniqueness. During this time, Davis became globally known for creating a revolutionary, patented reactor that swiftly aged spirits.
In a pandemic-pivot, Lost Spirits opened a new distillery in August 2021 in Las Vegas next to the Area15 complex. Rather than a ride, Lost Spirits Las Vegas is now a walking wonderland through Chinese lantern-strewn, old world London-meets-futuristic city streets, opening into performance areas featuring Cirque du Soleil-esque acrobatics and a full-on jazz club. “Talking” parrots are still here, cheekily selling spirits and swag, and while Vegas law wouldn’t allow the same dragon still from L.A., there’s a new hand-built still.
Without giving too much away, the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine room under swaying lanterns with a Leonard Cohen-style soundtrack may be the most memorable experience yet from Davis-Haruta. It’s an otherworldly space, leading into a dining room where visitors can enjoy a 16-course, 20,000 Leagues-themed fine dining meal created by chef Taylor Persh, who also was their chef in Los Angeles. March 2023 saw the launch of Lost Spirits’ Séance Room, another show in the distillery featuring acrobats, contortionists, magicians, historic artifacts, singers, and mind-bending magic shows, all based on Davis’ deep research into historic “tricks” from the likes of Thomas Edison, Houdini, and Nikola Tesla.
While rum is the focus now, they continue experimenting — think Japanese-inspired rum with Okinawa black sugar and charred Mizunara oak. They also brought on distiller and acrobatic performer Mary Dempsey, as Haruta and Davis run the many aspects of this wild experience and continue to vision cast for the future. Dempsey grew up on a 200-acre sheep farm in New York’s Mohawk Valley, weaving among various creative interests from theater and dance to cooking and wine. In L.A., while bartending at legendary Tonga Hut, she met her first aerial coach and began training in belly dancing, fire eating, and burlesque, before eventually growing her distilling skills at Lost Spirits.
Lost Spirits is a statement of what a distillery could be without borders. Drinking high-proof spirits while roaming these streets, immersed in the center of interactive shows, feels like time traveling or entering storybooks — and thinking entirely differently about spirits and distilleries. In a post-pandemic world, this is just the kind of boundary-less inspiration we all need to change the world. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun, too.
From distilling in Monterey to a one-of-a-kind, amusement park-style distillery in L.A., to a wildly unique entertainment complex and distillery show in Vegas, how do you see your role now as an unprecedented distillery entrepreneur? What are your areas of focus?
Davis: Lost Spirits has always been a distillery. It just so happens to be a distillery with a lot of personality. What started as an obsession with the booze turned into an obsession with creating the perfect place to drink it. Now I have an actual circus and a Séance Room. I can’t wait to see where the next chapter is going to take me. Mars?
Tell us about your unique role as distiller and performer.
Dempsey: Tearaway overalls and a tearaway flannel shirt. Bang! Sequins! It’s delightful. But I have a very full-time job making rum. So I don’t get to perform all the time.
How has your business evolved from Central/NorCal to L.A. to Vegas and how much of the latest incarnation has been shaped by pandemic?
Haruta: Lost Spirits Distillery has always applied an imaginative and artistic process to its work. In the early years, that imaginative process led to whiskey made with North American peat and culminated in a whiskey called Umami, fermented using Pacific Ocean salt water (which reached auction prices of $1,600 per bottle and a 94-point rating in Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible).
Later we fell in love with rum and produced a host of various expressions, including our navy line, which we still make today. After the aging technology breakthrough, we won a bunch of major awards and our focus started to shift toward entertainment.
Fast forward to post-pandemic Lost Spirits. Now the company has 44 of the world’s best performers, a diverse line of rums and close to 100,000 visitors per year. Though the spaces, the places, the people, and even the world around us evolve, at the heart of Lost Spirits is the intention to inspire people. My goal (and Bryan’s goal) has always been to help people see the possibilities of what can be done with their own two hands and I hope that part never changes.
How does running a distillery in Vegas define and influence what you create?
Davis: Lost Spirits Las Vegas was built during Covid. The casinos permanently closed two major shows during the pandemic (Zumanity and La Rêve). So, it created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hire extraordinary talent from those casts and combine their creativity with our distillery. The result was something no one had ever seen before. That was really something we couldn’t have done at any other time and place. It makes me wonder what Lost Spirits Nashville or Lost Spirits Tokyo will look like!
How has the focus on spirits/distillate changed since you came on board as Lost Spirits distiller?
Dempsey: I have been with Lost Spirits for five years and it has been a journey. Learning how to make spirits with Bryan in the days when it was all Navy Rum, Jamaican Rum, and peated malt was amazing. I got to be part of making the 2019 World Whisky of the Year.
Vegas is a little different. It’s all rum… huzzah! I worked at Tonga Hut for a hot minute and it completely solidified my childhood assumption that rum is the best — and the worst. Also, we get to make new things for all these people, which is both great and traumatizing. And I can’t wait to show off [our upcoming] Mizunara [oak] project.
You have created a brave, new, previously unimagined world of distillery tourism. What advice would you give to fellow craft distillers on thinking outside the box about what a distillery could be and how to move into a rapidly changing future?
Davis: Lost of us have other careers before we become distillers. Look to your own past for inspiration. In the mid 2000s, Joanne and I founded an absinthe company in Europe. Before that, I was an artist for an amusement park construction company. So the mix of those past lives became this crazy place.
With literally over 2,000 distilleries in the United States, you will need to be creative. Try to build something that really means something to you and your customers, something your customers want to support for the right reasons.
