A former EBX Best Bartender conjures up an encyclopedic guide to spirits

In 2012, Nat Harry won the East Bay Express award for "Best Bartender in the East Bay." At the time an EBX article described Harry's presence at Berkeley's Revival Bar + Kitchen as, "Relentlessly adventurous, well-studied but never pretentious about it, and personable even at the bar's busiest moments." Twelve years later, Harry has long since stepped out from behind the bar.

Bartending is a physically demanding job. In addition to always being on call and the late-night hours, Harry eventually hurt their back. But they wanted to continue to be involved in the industry so they looked into retail work. For several years, Harry worked as a spirits buyer for Cask, a Bay Area liquor store. Currently serving as the director of education for the San Francisco chapter of the United States Bartender's Guild, Harry also just published their first book, Spirits Distilled: A Guide to the Ingredients Behind a Better Bottle.

Spirits Distilled takes an encyclopedic approach to the ingredients and production methods involved in making all those shimmering bottles of liquor that land on the shelves of neighborhood bars. The organizational throughlines are trifold: plant, place and production. If there's one overall takeaway from the book, it's that Harry wants to encourage the reader to "[s]hop for spirits with the same care and values you employ when buying your groceries."

The book was in the works for at least seven years. Harry's work at Cask led to visits abroad to different distilleries and their production facilities. When visiting Oaxaca to see how mezcal is made, Harry experienced a professional "Aha!" moment that also inspired the initial idea for writing the book.

Witnessing the labor-intensive process that went into making mezcal proved enlightening. "I got really into the agricultural aspect of it because the wild agave plants take so long to grow -- some of them up to 30 or 40 years," they said. Harry explained that agave must be harvested by hand. "The culture surrounding mezcal; there's such a connection to food," they said. As they continued to travel, Harry began paying more attention to the raw ingredients being used.

"I'd go and see sugarcane and ask, 'How long does that take to grow? How do you get that out of the ground?'" Harry said. They realized that consumers see the finished, bottled product without knowing very much about the agricultural processes that go into making them.

Running parallel to the restaurant industry's farm-to-table trend, Harry has had the fortune to witness the start of a farm-to-glass movement from liquor brands. "The bigger brands are treating it as a marketing trend," Harry said. "While the smaller ones are embracing it as a way of getting back to the way it [production] should have been before Prohibition, when farms were still so connected to distillation."

Spirits Distilled begins, unexpectedly, with a chapter on cherries, apples and pears. Later chapters cover the vast territories of grapes, barley, corn, rye and wheat, rice, agave, sugarcane, root vegetables and wood. "Initially we were thinking of leading with something that everyone knows, like bourbon, but we tricked you into learning about Kirschwasser," Harry said.

The book also includes informational sidebars, some of which -- such as "Older isn't better, and color doesn't signify age" -- debunk myths. Harry cites the example of Scotch whiskey to talk about the color of spirits. "They use sherry barrels as a popular way of aging it, which creates a dark amber, almost cognac color," Harry said. If the same spirit is aged in a bourbon barrel, it's going to have a pale golden color. "If they've both been in for 12 years, you're getting those colors from the vessel and the oak treatment. It'll have nothing to do with age."

Harry continued, "One of the rules for bourbon is that it has to be in a new charred oak container. The barrel treatment and charring is a big source of color." The chapter on wood points out that it's as crucial to the flavor profiles of spirit-making as the ingredients themselves. Harry added that caramel coloring is prevalent, too, in the production of Scotch whiskey, tequila and cognac. "But that's a whole separate conversation," they said.