Top 10 Distilleries in California
California was distilling fine spirits long before the craft boom gave the movement a name. The state grows wine grapes, citrus, stone fruit and agave; it sits beside the Pacific and reaches into desert and mountain; and its makers have always treated the still as a tool for invention rather than tradition. The result is the most stylistically diverse spirits landscape in the United States — alambic brandy in Mendocino, rye revived in San Francisco, single malt in a converted aircraft hangar, and agave spirits distilled within the Los Angeles city limits. These ten producers map the breadth of it.
1. St. George Spirits, Alameda (San Francisco Bay)
St. George is the spiritual home of American craft distilling. Founded by Jörg Rupf in 1982, it began as an eau-de-vie house turning Northern California pears and raspberries into crystalline fruit brandy, and it still operates from a vast former Naval Air Station hangar on Alameda Island. Under master distiller Lance Winters and Dave Smith the range expanded to the Hangar 1 vodkas, a celebrated Terroir gin, and an American single malt that helped define the category. A visit takes in the hangar, the copper pot stills and a tasting bar with bay views.
2. Charbay, Napa Valley
The Karakasevic family have distilled across thirteen generations, and Charbay carries that lineage into the hills above the Napa Valley. The house is famous for distilling finished beer — including hoppy ales — into idiosyncratic whiskeys, alongside brandy, vodka and flavoured spirits. Releases such as the Charbay R5 whiskey, double-distilled from bottle-ready Racer 5 IPA, show the maverick streak that runs through California distilling.
3. Germain-Robin, Ukiah (Mendocino County)
In 1982 Hubert Germain-Robin, descended from a Cognac family, partnered with Ansley Coale to make alambic brandy from California grapes in rural Mendocino County. Distilled in a genuine Charentais pot still from varietals like Pinot Noir, Colombard and French Colombard, then long-aged in Limousin and air-dried American oak, Germain-Robin brandy stunned critics who had assumed great alambic spirit could only come from France. White House dinners poured it; spirits writers ranked it beside aged Cognac. It remains the benchmark for American craft brandy and a reminder that California's first world-class spirit was distilled from grapes, not grain.
4. Anchor Distilling / Old Potrero, San Francisco
Born from the Anchor Brewing tradition on Potrero Hill, Anchor Distilling revived American rye whiskey when the category was nearly extinct. Old Potrero is made from a mash of 100 percent malted rye, pot-distilled and aged in oak, recalling the single-malt-style ryes that early Americans would have known. Anchor also pioneered Junípero gin, an early American craft gin that predated the wider boom by years. The project reshaped how distillers thought about historic mash bills, and its insistence on malted rye and toasted versus charred barrels became a quiet template for the revivalists who followed.
5. Lost Spirits, Los Angeles
Bryan Davis built Lost Spirits around a reactor that uses light and heat to chemically simulate years of barrel aging in days. It sounds like a gimmick until you taste the heavily peated malt and high-ester rum it produces. Reborn in Los Angeles as an immersive, theatrical distillery experience, Lost Spirits is California's most audacious technical experiment in accelerated maturation.
6. Greenbar Distillery, Los Angeles
Greenbar bills itself as the largest portfolio of organic spirits in the world, and it is the distillery that helped put downtown Los Angeles on the spirits map. Founders Melkon Khosrovian and Litty Mathew make organic gin, vodka, rum, whiskey and a range of bitters and liqueurs, and they plant a tree for every bottle sold. The urban tasting room is a fixture of the LA craft scene.
7. Sonoma Distilling Co., Rohnert Park (Sonoma County)
Sonoma Distilling Co. (formerly Sonoma County Distilling) makes whiskey the old-fashioned way, using direct-fire alembic pot stills and cherrywood-smoked grain. Its bourbon, rye and the distinctive Black Truffle rye have built a serious reputation for a small Sonoma County producer, proving that wine country can make characterful grain whiskey.
8. Spirit Works Distillery, Sebastopol (Sonoma County)
Family-run and grain-to-glass, Spirit Works in Sebastopol mills, mashes, ferments and distils whole organic red winter wheat on site. Co-founder Ashby Marshall leads a notably woman-driven team. The gin, sloe gin, barrel gin and straight wheat whiskey have earned a devoted following and a clutch of awards in the heart of the Russian River Valley.
9. Venus Spirits, Santa Cruz
Sean Venus left a career in food to open Venus Spirits on the coast at Santa Cruz, and his range reaches places few American distillers go. Alongside whiskey and gin, Venus makes blue agave spirits — an aguamiel and a Wayward Blue — distilled from imported and Californian agave, a nod to the agave heritage of the American Southwest. A cocktail kitchen sits beside the still house.
10. Spirit of disruption: Seven Stills & the urban wave, San Francisco
San Francisco's Seven Stills built a name distilling craft beer into whiskey — smoked porter into a chocolaty malt, hoppy IPA into citrus-laced grain whiskey — and brought a brewery-meets-distillery model to the city. It stands here for a whole urban generation of California makers who blur the line between brewing and distilling, turning the state's beer culture into spirit.
California in context
What unites these houses is range rather than a single signature style. California has no protected appellation for its whiskey, no centuries-old guild, no obligatory grain. Instead it has fruit for eau-de-vie and brandy, grain for whiskey, agave for Southwestern spirits, and a culture that rewards the new. The proximity of wine country matters: many distillers source casks, grapes and expertise from neighbouring wineries, and brandy here is taken as seriously as whiskey. That cross-pollination shows up in unexpected finishes — Cabernet and Zinfandel casks, brandy barrels, sherry-soaked wood — and in distillers who think like winemakers, talking about vintage, varietal and vineyard block. The state's farm-to-bottle ethos pushes many to malt their own grain, grow heirloom corn, or forage botanicals for gin from the coastal scrub. From the cool, fog-cooled cellars of the coast to the warm interior valleys, maturation varies enormously, and that variety is the point. Few places on earth let you taste alambic brandy, peated single malt and agave spirit all distilled within a few hours' drive, and fewer still pack so many distinct philosophies into one state.
Explore on the map
Use the interactive map to plot a California distillery route, from the Bay Area hangars to the brandy houses of Mendocino and the urban stills of Los Angeles. Pin the coastal cellars against the warm interior valleys to see how climate shapes maturation across the state. Tap any marker for the producer, town and signature spirits, and find California on the map to begin charting your own tasting trail.