Most of the founders met during undergrad in the late 1990s at the Colorado School of Mines. The five-person group now has a wide array of graduate and undergraduate STEM degrees, but the thread that tied their friendship together over the years — culminating in the recent opening of their tasting room in Olde Town Arvada — is a love of flavor, according to CEO Aubrey Wigner.
“We're all big explorers of flavor, so we used to have these parties where we'd get together and we'd do cooking and cuisine from all over the place, thematically,” he says. “That was how we formed memories of our friendships. And then we were all into brewing and similarly did a bunch of weird beers.”
Wigner garnered some experience with distilling while living in Michigan after college, starting with whiskey, then rum, and finally moving on to gin. He and a friend there were on pace to open a distillery — having received professional training as distillers, put together a business plan, and convinced a local city to offer to sell them a historic building for $1 — and "then COVID-19 hit and just wiped out all those possibilities,” he says.
A few years later, a new job at Mines brought him back to the Front Range and to his friends of twenty years, who had continued homebrewing — and in Ethan Tsai’s case, become a brewing professor and brewery manager, including at the now defunct Tivoli in Auraria. Wigner teamed up with Tsai, Rudy Sosa, James McCall and Sharlissa Moore to open Method & Muse Spirits, with a focus on spirits that bring unique flavors to the drinking experience.
The group pooled some savings and secured commercial distillery space in Golden last fall to get the operation up and running, then held the grand opening for their tasting room on June 21. They saw gin as an opening to add complexity or “new life” to otherwise standard cocktails — even vodka cocktails, McCall says.
“We made fourteen traditional vodka cocktails and then made the exact same cocktails with gin. (In) thirteen out of the fourteen, gin tasted better, in our opinion. The fourteenth was an espresso martini,” he says, noting that's not exactly in the gin wheelhouse. Adding amaro to their production mix, he adds, “was just a gin on steroids with a little sugar."
Gins from Method & Muse range from Floral Alchemy, with a delicate profile of earthy, floral and light citrus, to Bergamot Dreams, a ramped-up version of traditional London Dry with citrus and Earl Grey tea notes, and Persepolis, named for the city in the Persian Empire that was a central location on the Silk Road, featuring additions such as Persian black limes, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon and cardamom.
Their most unique gin is Izakaya Japanese sipping gin, which incorporates a strong presence of Japanese red shiso leaves, Makrut lime leaves and a little bit of Persian black lime.
The amari include a rum-based Caribbean version, billed as an homage to Jamaican jerk spices (complete with the habanero kick), Akajiso ginger amaro, featuring lemongrass, citrus, shiso and lime leaf, crystallized ginger, and a variety of spices, and a Thai amaro that includes a number of Thai green curry spices, using galangal as the bittering agent.
“We’re not trying to mimic anyone's traditional or sacred spirit,” Wigner says, “but we are trying to make stuff that’s inspired from the culinary things that we love about a culture.”
Their final main product (for the moment) is the Bartender’s Salute. “It’s 160 proof. It’s kind of like if absinthe, green Chartreuse, and Fernet Branca had a love child. Just a massive flavor bomb,” he says.
The Method & Muse tasting room offers consumers an opportunity to explore the distillery's range of unique gins and amari.
Gabe Toth
“Arvada used to be the celery capital of the world, so we made a celery seed and lemon peel vodka,” Wigner explains. “It’s still clean enough where someone wants vodka and they drink it, they'll be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that's vodka. But there's something in there.’”
“Or enough flavor in there, also, for someone that isn't a huge fan of vodka,” Sosa adds. "This isn't just drinking straight alcohol.”
They’ve also come up with a Colorado version of traditional shochu for the Michelin-listed restaurant Basta in Boulder, which features rice and sweet potatoes. The distillery has eight-year rye and bourbon sourced from another distillery, as well as an Armagnac-finished rum that’s a blend of six- to eight-year casks. Wigner says they don’t feel a need to fill every niche in the spirits ecosystem, preferring to work with outside parties who excel at making whiskey, or a supplier like Grove Street Alchemy in Longmont for simple, delicious liqueurs.
“We like good whiskey, so we buy good whiskey for us to use the cocktail lounge and for you to buy in bottles,” he says. “But we don't make it and we have no intention of making it, which is a little different than a lot of distilleries.”
They do, however, make custom spirits for those who are interested in a bespoke gin or other botanical spirit. Among other projects, they’ve made a gin for the former tenants at their tasting room in Arvada, Balefire Goods jewelry shop, which just moved a few blocks away, and a wedding gin when McCall got married. For the wedding project, Wigner talked to the couple about the places they’d been and where they fell in love, and a trip to Iceland came up.
“So I put an Icelandic lichen in their gin,” he says. “There's these things you can do with gin that are just out there that you can't do with a lot of other spirits.”
Method & Muse's products aren’t distributed very widely yet: in just five restaurants and a half-dozen liquor stores so far, but the community has come out to support the fledgling operation. The response from the industry has also been a resounding one: Prior to opening, the team entered three spirits in the Denver International Spirits Competition, hoping just to earn one medal on their first go-round. Instead, they took home three gold medals. Then they sent five spirits to the Tokyo Whiskey and Spirits competition, bagging two golds and three bronzes.
Method & Muse Spirits is open Tuesday and Wednesday from 3 to 8 p.m, Thursday from 3 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday from noon to 10 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 8 p.m. at 7513 Grandview Avenue in Arvada. Learn more at methodandmusespirits.com
