Maker Spirits Guy

How Lance Winters went from basement moonshiner to celebrity vodka distiller.

By Benjamin Tice Smith

When most of us want some tequila, we run to the liquor store on the way home from work. Lance Winters prefers heading to Mexico to find the best agave cactus and bringing it back to his laboratory in a 65,000-square-foot aircraft hangar on a dormant naval base on the edge of San Francisco Bay. Winters is a craft distiller at St. George Spirits, whose vast workspace has three large stills, numerous tanks, a bottling line, and many cases of high-octane, high-priced hooch, including the top-selling Hangar One Vodka.

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MASTER DISTILLER: ...

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