Inside the Art-Filled World of Subtle Spirits
It started with the lilac and mulberry trees.
Joshua Thinnes, an acclaimed mind in the whiskey world and founder of San Francisco, CA-based Subtle Spirits, an independent bottling company, cut his teeth in the wine world. “I was a young kid in my 20s trying to be liked and respected by these wine industry veterans…I had a fire under my ass to learn and learn fast.” So he dove into the wine world headfirst, learning grapes and spending hours with winemakers and at tastings, searching for nuance. He found himself becoming more alliterative and more descriptive in speaking about wines, and this wine palate eventually led him to the challenge of whiskey.
All flavors, all connections, start at memory. For Thinnes, it was an afternoon tasting with Italian colleagues. “One of the oldest flavor memories I have is the smell of the Mulberry tree and the lilacs in my backyard from when I was a kid, two very different kinds of flavors, flower, and fruit…A mulberry is like a very small blackberry and smells less sweet, more green, and more bitter.. It’s more vinous and the fruit is small.” While tasting through the portfolio that day, Thinnes was transported back to this very spot in his childhood backyard, to the mulberry tree, and mentioned to the group what he smelled. Surprised that anyone would recognize this, the winemaker revealed that the wine was indeed named after mulberry. “That connected it for me. I realized that if you get good at tapping into these memories you can articulate things like tasting notes more easily because it comes from a real place.”
Each Subtle Spirits release is a unique blend with its own identity. A brand with no current standardized offering, Subtle approaches each release individually, from blend to story to artwork.
“If we were a regular spirits label, our goal would be consistency, consistency, consistency, there would be some sort of expectation that you get the same product every time, but that’s not the most interesting or inspiring thing to create.”
Thinnes is a musician himself, and he describes the approach to the Subtle Spirits product offering like an album; All of the tracks stand alone and represent their own time, style, and message, but taken on the whole they all have a very complete story to tell. Thinnes keeps a journal and finds inspiration in food and music and the unexplainable ways that the building blocks of life all come together. To get these ideas into the glass, he separates what he sees as the three main components of a release: The spirit itself, the title, and the artwork. It’s a process that takes time. “As a creative…it’s important for me to not get too hung up on making these pieces fit together right away.”
Reflecting on their recent release, Paper Trail, Thinnes recounts that this was perhaps the most improvisational approach to the process to date, but it started with the whiskey. Working through the barrel stock he had on hand, Thinnes found that while all of the whiskeys were fine in their own right and had their own profiles, when tasted side by side they were quite homogenous. – all of the bourbons tasted like bourbon, and all of the ryes tasted like ryes. To combat this and to begin to interpret these ingredients, while most of the barrels were left to continue aging, a few of the barrels were finished using freshly dumped wine casks from wineries in nearby Sonoma.
Over the course of a year, as the barrels continued to age and pick up more flavor, Thinnes pulled samples, blending batches in 2-4oz quantities at a time before finally settling on a blend greater than the sum of the parts. Something, as Thinnes tells me, was monumental. “I got beyond where I was going. It’s the best that I’ve put out all year.”
Paper Trail, whose blend is primarily rye, has amplified notes of the raisin and dried fruit components which Thinnes leans towards. It’s quite rich and sweet, nuanced, savory, and has a subtle spice to it. “Beyond the first ripple of the pond, it’s clear that this is not a typical bourbon/rye profile. It’s a rich dish…Paper Trail smells like a rick house…it smells dense and heavy, and sweet. You can feel the corn mash. But it also reminds me of my wine background. There’s a small portion of the rye used in this blend that was briefly finished in a sherry cask and I think it really pulled out the sherry quickly…Paper Trail is the perfect balance between what I like about whiskey and where I came from in wine.”
For the final piece of the puzzle, the artwork for Paper Trail was created by Bay Area artist Michael Beckler, who produces abstract mixed media works on shoji, a paper from Japan made from rice. “The piece was handmade for us and I just couldn’t get over that paper… We wanted some other type of limited, collectible aspect to the bottles, and it hit me on our way to meet with the artist that we should chop up the original and put the actual piece on the bottle.” So that’s what they did – Half of the original piece was cut to size and attached to the bottle to create a limited allotment of 55 bottles.
The art component of Subtle Spirits releases bears as much conversation as the spirit itself. Thinnes feels that the artwork ultimately speaks to the authenticity of the brand.
“The only way for me to do this authentically is to bring my entire self to the table and own the fact that I am not a distiller, nor a man with a rich family heritage of farming or production. I am an artist. I see things, I feel things, I notice things, and I connect things… So how do I bottle that? How do I keep the integrity of who I am, expressing my own creative spirit, all while shedding light on others’ talents, creations, and expression? The answer is art.
Art because we must. Art because there is no other way… Others can put pretty pictures on the label, but what sets us apart is the approach we take to creating each of these pieces. Like capturing a moment in time through a song or a poem, or a recipe that has been passed down through your family. This is the job of the artist. How do you capture those experiences that leave you particularly enlightened or inspired? I'm not sure, but I sure am going to try.”
Subtle Spirits is currently a California-only product, but limited quantities are available through these select online retailers: