Guy Rehorst founded Great Lakes Distillery in 2004 and began distillery operations in 2006, becoming the first drink distiller in Wisconsin since prohibition.
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Now he’s officially entering the nonalcoholic (NA) beverage market with Junipre Botanical Spirit — the first from the Sans line of Rehorst's new company, Boundless Beverages.
Junipre was modeled after Rehorst Gin, but has a bit of a different flavor profile made with juniper, ginseng, orange zest, cardamom, and more without the alcohol but maintaining a one-to-one supplement ratio.
After making spirits for about 20 years, Rehorst says taking on the challenge to make a quality nonalcoholic option was a fairly recent development as he noticed not only customer's changing tastes, but the need to expanded on a fairly small market.
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"I think the big kicker was when the pandemic started and having to close down half our business, I found myself with some time on my hands and decided to play around with the whole concept of nonalcoholic spirits and give it a shot trying to create my own," he says.
While there is some distilling involved in making NA beverages, Rehorst says there was still a big learning curve.
"Using water as a base for the spirit is extremely different and requires kind of changing your perceptions of how you're going to produce the product if you've been distilling a long time," he notes.
According to Rehorst, his original goal was to re-create his gin exactly, but with a water base. "I decided after a while [to] take a little turn away from that and decided I wanted to make the spirit a little more useful — not just be gin-like," he explains.
Junipre has many of the same botanicals as Rehorst Gin does, and the flavor profile even mimics the bite you get from alcohol using pepper extract. Rehorst says that not only are alcohol drinkers used to a little burn, but it also helps make a good cocktail.
Rehorst did his research trying a lot of NA spirits, but was often disappointed in the taste that products were trying to re-create.
"One of the problems I realized with most [NA spirits] is that they were either very weak in flavor or frankly didn't match the flavor of what they were trying to copy... For example, we're not calling this 'Junipre nonalcoholic gin,' we're calling it Junipre Botanical Spirit," he notes.
Rehorst experimented on the recipe over two years at Great Lakes Distillery, but to ensure that Junipre has no alcohol or floating yeast contamination from the distillery it's produced with a co-packer off-site. He says that making something without alcohol to protect it was "a whole 'nother world" to learn about.
"Because it doesn't have alcohol you have to be concerned about microbiology. You have to worry about things like salmonella, you have to worry about shelf stability, there's many things - frankly regulations from the FDA - that you need to be aware of," Rehorst notes.
Junipre is the first of what Rehorst hopes will be more NA beverages to come from Boundless Beverages. He says the best part about stepping into this realm has been the learning curve — and he wants to keep learning.
"We've been making award-winning distilled spirits with alcohol for many, many years and to start playing around with this, it was just a totally different ball game. We had to learn a lot of things ... and it was frankly a lot of fun to come up with," says Rehorst.
