The last day of our recent visit to Los Angeles, we purchased tickets for a distillery tour we’d become aware of while researching things to do in the area online. At $40 per ticket it was not inexpensive, and its Yelp reviews, while mostly positive, featured some pretty poor ones as well – however, it looked intriguing, and potentially like a lot of fun, so we took the plunge …
I’m not going to go into excruciating detail of the tour on this review and try to stick to generalities, since a lot of the fun depends on the surprises it has to offer. Instead, I’m going to focus on information that will help you decide if it’s your cup of tea (or booze), and better enable you to enjoy the experience.
First of all, the main thing to know going in is that Lost Spirits Distillery’s niche is to use scientific methods to produce spirits with a well-barrel-aged quality to them in a fraction of the time and inventory it normally takes to barrel age a spirit. They claim to be able to achieve years-worth of barrel-aged flavor in a week or less, using their laboratory’s special techniques.
The tour begins in an industrial district location not far from downtown Hollywood. The notes you receive with your ticket instruct you to be there ready to go 20 minutes before your tour start time, and they mean it – there’s check-in, waivers to sign, what have you, and with multiple types of transportation happening during the tour, the staff clearly relies on cracker-jack timing. Many of the handful of negative reviews, I strongly suspect, were written by people who did not appear 20 minutes or so early, as recommended.
For your money, the whimsical tour takes nearly two hours, and you transition through about half a dozen entertaining guides,
A short boat ride …
A bus ride to and from the actual distillery site (roughly 17 minutes away from the starting location) …
A brief tram ride, and, of course, a bit of walking in their assorted, ersatz jungle mazes …
And yes, there’s some liquor-tasting happening while all of this is occurring!
When we were on the Lost Spirits Distillery tour, there were four things to taste – 1 of their 2 whiskeys, 1 brandy, and both of their rums. I enjoyed them all; my wife, not a whiskey fan, nonetheless enjoyed the brandy (had nice citrus notes), and the rums, the latter of which was a Navy-style spirit.
The pours were tastes, not shots – but given that if guests were chummy with the bus guides they could get additional tastes, and most or all of the samples were over 80 proof – the Navy-style rum, the most potent, topping out at over 120 proof – we felt the amount we were served, while not super-generous, was reasonable. Your dollar is really going towards the entertainment, staff, and ambiance.
There is a gift shop near the end of the tour, but one thing to be aware of: California regulations are such that the distillery could not ship bottles of its product out of state – so if like us, you were visiting from Washington and didn’t have space in your luggage, you will not be able to get any of the delicious liquors home. Lost Spirits Distillery does not yet have much of a distribution system set up, other than shipping its products itself, and there is an additional caveat: Their brandy is ONLY available at the distillery location itself.
Those are the nuts and bolts … as for the tour itself, it made for a genuinely fun, entertaining, and eccentric experience — words can scarcely do some of the zaniness justice, but suffice it to say that our afternoon included chatty public restrooms and what is probably a contender for world’s shortest and most colorful tram ride.
Lost Spirits Distillery apparently won a recent “Best Distillery Tour of the Year” award … and at least for our part, we agreed afterwards that it had certainly been the best distillery tour we had ever been on – an oh-so-not-serious, escapist lark everyone but a complete sourpuss should try at least once!
Here is the Lost Spirits Distillery webpage
And Facebook page