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St. Petersburg, Florida, has seen rapid growth over the last few decades. This once-sleepy beach town has recently attracted world-class art museums, high-rise condos, and a redeveloped bay-front pedestrian pier shifting the city’s focus from the gulf’s relaxing retirees to an active cosmopolitan downtown. Recently Formula 1 reinstated the St. Petersburg Grand Prix, showing off this city to an international audience. While growing pains always accompany growth, this influx of new settlers and businesses brings with it new ideas that can transform the ordinary into something unexpected. In that regard, St. Petersburg Distillery is much like its home city.

“We love to experiment,” said Master

A growing city and its namesake distillery boost each other’s profile

Written and photographed by CARRIE DOW

Distiller Warren Gardener. “We never stick to one procedure, especially in the craft industry. You have to think and see things with an open mind because you never know where you’re going to get the right answers from or your inspiration to do something.”

The Jamaican-born Gardener — a 20-year Floridian — and Assistant Distiller Adam Mitton, who came from Chicago, are a part of a younger generation infusing new energy into St. Petersburg. However, both men have been around long enough to see the effects of St. Pete’s changes both good and bad. That is why the distillery’s flagship products are made under the label Old St. Pete.

“It’s really a reference about the history of St. Pete,” said Gardener. “Everybody understands that changes are going on now. If you live here, you have experienced the changes.”

“It’s our way of saying that we’re part of the old school St. Pete,” added Mitton. A part of that old St. Pete vibe is using Florida’s best-known product — oranges — for their Tippler’s Orange Liqueur.

“Florida oranges, no artificial colors or flavors,” said Mitton. “It’s one-to-one, so one pound of oranges per pound of finished product.”

“And that’s the most labor-intensive product that we have,” added Gardener. “We juice the oranges ourselves. You’re talking about

5,000 pounds of oranges at a time. It’s buckets. It’s the peels; it’s the juice; it’s the pulp. Everything is thrown in there.”

“Something else we do with it that makes us different,” he continued, “is we distill everything in there. So when we’re distilling for six or seven hours, we’re cooking the juice, the pulp, everything. It tastes more like an orange jam at a higher concentration, so it changes the chemical make-up of it because it’s just like cooking.”

Gardener and Mitton then age the spirit in ex-bourbon barrels at a high proof before blending with additional bourbon to retain more of the jam-like flavor. That attention to detail and intense orange flavor makes Tippler’s one of the distillery’s best selling spirits. But they don’t rest their laurels on one product.

“Here, we’re definitely more diverse,” noted Gardener. “We came out with a wide range — whiskey, rum, gin, vodka, and our orange liqueur — so that we were able to capture more people. Bring them here and let them know the story and the process with each product.” Rum is another example.

“We’ve got two rums,” said Mitton describing their Old St. Pete Righteous Rum & Spice and premium brand Oak & Palm Coconut Rum. “The base on both is distilled from Florida-grown cane sugar from Okeechobee. The coconut rum is natural coconut.”

“One thing when you’re dealing with extracts,” noted Gardener expanding on the rum, “you definitely have to understand your base spirit. When you think of rum that’s distilled from raw cane sugar and rum that’s distilled from molasses, if you think that extract is going to give you the same results, it’s not. It’s going to be like the base rum is the canvas and the extract is the paint. Raw cane sugar is naturally light, smooth, with a hint of grassiness, but you get more vanilla notes from it than molasses. Paired with a coconut extract turns it into more of a vanilla coconut.”

“Our Righteous Rum & Spice, that’s one of our signature products,” Mitton continued. “Heavy on the baking spice, nuttiness, and raisins. We use natural vanilla extract and we use cassia bark, which is bougie cinnamon.”

“We use the cassia bark instead of cinnamon sticks or extract,” Gardener explained, “because the cassia bark gives it a deeper taste. You could almost think it’s mixed with aged rum. It’s not. It’s the cassia bark.”

“We have two whiskies right now,” said Mitton, “a sweet corn whiskey and our Sunshine whiskey. The sweet corn was the original flagship. It’s a blend of fresh unaged corn whiskey and a seven-year aged corn whiskey. As the whiskey in our barrel house matured, we had an opportunity to improve upon that with the Sunshine Whiskey.” Sunshine whiskey is a blend of 4- and 7-year whiskey made with 11 percent rye. They add smoked Appalachian oak chips to the barrel, which Mitton says gives it a little more finesse. He mentions that Sunshine originally developed as a bespoke whiskey for Tampa Bay’s historic Bern’s Steak House.

“[Bern’s is] really high end, very well known. They’ve got the largest wine cellar in the world. It’s over 2 million bottles. … They came in and sampled our barrels and hand selected two of them. We blended them out individually, so it was basically the same process.”

The distillery is excited to release its first bourbon later this year.

“The biggest thing for us now is getting out that bourbon,” said Mitton. “It’s a higher rye, 34–36 percent. I think it turned out beautifully.”

The distillery has also been making major capital improvements. They’re not just installing bigger equipment, but more efficient and effective equipment. They just finished reconfiguring the distillery’s six 5,000-gallon fermenters and moving the condensers to make them more accessible.

“What we did was add a cooling tower and bought much smaller condensers,” explained Gardener. “We can double our production in the same amount of time.” The new custom cooling system will drastically reduce the time of temperature drop when mash comes off the boiler and they are currently installing two 64,000-gallon grain silos and a hammer mill.

“Having your own mill eventually pays for itself,” Gardener commented. “I think we’ll have the capability to do 10,000 pounds (per hour). It’s fast.” The distillery is also constructing a new 20,000-barrel warehouse on the expansive property, which once held both a timber and a steel mill.

Alongside production improvements, there is even more going on to enhance the customer experience.

“These are spirit safes,” said Gardener, showing off a large metal box with an opening at the top. “I believe it started in Scotland because the feds were a little different over there.” To keep alcohol from being dispersed before the government received its share, spirits in Scotland were locked away in special glass boxes after coming off the still. Distillers could see the product but weren’t allowed to touch or taste their own spirit until the taxes were paid. “We took that concept and built this box,” continued Gardener. “We then had a glass designer — this is what I’m excited for

— design a globe and a pair of hands out of glass. That is going to fit over here and we’re going to recycle liquid in this box to come through the orb and through the hands.” It’s designed to amaze distillery tour visitors, but Gardener can barely contain his own excitement to see the finished apparatus.

“It’s going to be cool,” he said rubbing his hands together.

Capitalizing on St. Petersburg’s well-established art scene, the distillery tapped into the local art community commissioning murals inside and out. That includes a large mural depicting an underwater shipwreck (complete with a giant octopus pilfering rum barrels) along 31st Street created by the art students at Jonathan C. Gibbs High School across the street. Mitton showed off the outdoor artwork along with the many other projects they have going on.

“Where we’re standing now is going to become a big open green space and park. We’ll have a stage for music. We go right up to the [Pinellas] Trail so we’re going to tie into that so you can visit us. Eventually, the other side of the garage there is going to be a boutique hotel.”

While the distillery’s equipment changes are driven by Floridians’ increased enjoyment of their products, the outdoor changes are about supporting the community they love.

“What we do is about passion,” said Mitton “but having that passion is meaningless if you don’t find ways to share with the community. That’s a big part of this build out. Our expansion is to find ways to interface with them and be a part of the community improvement.”

“One thing about St. Petersburg is we’re young, we’re unique, we’re diversified,” added Gardener. “We are the perfect destination to bring people together.” While he’s talking about the distillery, the sentiment applies to the entire city.

“That’s what life is about,” said Gardener. “Especially when you’re creating something beautiful. You want to keep doing those types of things.”