When AMASS Master Distiller Morgan McLachlan set out to design our latest spirit, Riverine, the process began with botanicals, just as it always does. Then she went rogue, ditching the alcohol in favor of something a little lighter: water vapor.

Traditional spirits, like our Gin and Vodka, undergo a distillation process in which alcohol is used to extract oils from a blend of botanicals. With our Gin, that process begins with brighter botanicals, like citrus and California bay leaf, which go into our botanical basket. Meanwhile, earthier, richer botanicals, like Reishi mushroom and juniper, are macerated in alcohol for 18 hours.

From there, we place our spirit base in the kettle of a hybrid Carl pot still, and then run a long, lower-heat distillation where alcohol vapor is passed through a rectification column to soften flavors before joining the remaining botanicals in the botanical basket.

With Riverine, we did things differently. Each of our 14 botanicals is individually distilled in a proprietary hydrosteam distillation process. There, water vapor, instead of alcohol, is used to extract essential oils for a crisp, evergreen flavor profile. The result is a spirit that captures the freshness of the Pacific Northwest, the region where Morgan first forged her passion for plants.

Without the addition of alcohol, all the flavor comes directly from plants. Vibrant botanicals like sumac, sorrel, lemon, and apple are carefully layered along with earthy juniper and parsley. What you get is a complex spirit that is devoid of the dizzying effects that come with drinking a high-proof spirit. There’s none of the harsh burn you’d get from cheap alcohol, either. Instead, it’s smooth, nuanced, herbaceous, and endlessly mixable.

Basically, we took the best of booze and brought it to a non-alcoholic bottle.

Before you dive in, put our tasting tips to good use and learn a bit about the British Columbia island that inspired our first non-alcoholic spirit.

When AMASS Co-Founder and Master Distiller Morgan McLachlan was a child, she spent summers deep in the coniferous forests and alongside the rushing rivers of Vancouver Island.

“It was like Avalon,” she describes the terrain now, alive with flora and fauna such as elk, black bears, and mountain goats.

In that picturesque stretch of land plopped in the Pacific, Morgan became enamored with plants and the unique microclimates of the region she called home.

Vancouver Island, unlike the mainland of British Columbia with its harsh winters and frequent snow, has a mild climate. It's one of the warmest areas in Canada, and Mediterranean crops like olives and lemons thrive there because of it, as do sun-loving botanicals like sumac and sorrel.

The island’s rich, plentiful natural resources are why indigineous peoples have lived there for thousands and thousands of years. The Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, and various Coast Salish peoples all still reside on the island, and their cultures are deeply entwined with the bountiful nature the region has to offer.

Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw oral history says their ancestors came in the forms of animals. Origin myths tell the tale of seagulls, grizzly bears, and orcas emerging from the sea and forest before transforming into their human form. The Coast Salish peoples, too, have their own stories of shapeshifting between animal and human spirits. This profound connection to the natural appears in their cultures in other ways, too, like fishing, which historically was central to both the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw and Nuu-chah-nulth economy.

Today, nature remains at the forefront of social, spiritual, and commercial life on Vancouver Island. The 12,407 square miles of terrain that make up the island is broken up into seven regions, each with their own unique microclimate. South Island, which sits at the southernmost point of Vancouver Island, is a commercial hub home to British Columbia’s vibrant capital, Victoria. Other regions offer more quiet respite, like North Central Island with its alpine mountains and running rivers.

The Pacific Rim, which sits on the central western coast of Vancouver Island, is home to a temperate rainforest and boasts the largest rainfall in North America. The tallest recorded Douglas firs were found in this stretch of forest, swaying in the canopy alongside dozens of other species of coniferous “big trees” like western hemlock, Sitka spruce, and yellow cedar.

It was this particular microclimate that inspired our Co-Founder Morgan to develop Forest Bath. Craving the sensory comforts of her home province, she sought to capture the essence of Vancouver Island in a bath salt blend. The crisp salt of the Pacific pairs with the soothing scent of rain drizzling on the treetops of the island’s coastal forests for an immersive soak that transports you to the Pacific Northwest’s lush landscape.

Read more about how Morgan self-soothes with a long soak here, and then take a trip to Vancouver Island from your tub.

P.S. Stay tuned for another PNW-inspired product, dropping later this month.

Aside from the Christmas tree, the poinsettia – a red and green plant belonging to the Euphorbiaceae family – is December’s star botanical. And it looks like a star too, with its pointed crimson bracts that fan out in a distinct celestial shape.

The poinsettia is rooted, like most other botanicals, in lore and legend. The story goes like this: in 16th-century Mexico, a girl by the name of Pepita was too poor to afford a gift for the yearly Christmas celebration. Inspired by an angel, she gathered weeds from the roadside and placed them in front of the church altar. Poinsettias blossomed, and from the 17th century onward the plant was prized in Mexican Christmas festivities, its star-shaped foliage said to symbolize the Star of Bethlehem and its crimson color the blood of Christ.

It took several centuries for the plant to be officially recognized as a new species, until 1834 when it was listed by German scientist Johann Friedrich Klotzsch as the “Mexican flame flower” or “painted leaf.” It wasn’t until Joel Roberts Poinsett, a botanist and the first US Minister to Mexico, began shipping the plant back from Mexico to his greenhouses in South Carolina that it earned its lasting name: the poinsettia.

Since the early 19th century when cultivation of the poinsettia first began in the US, the industry has blossomed. That’s been in large part because of the marketing efforts led by Albert Ecke. In 1900, Ecke opened a dairy and orchard in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles and began selling poinsettias from street stands. His son, Paul Ecke, developed a technique in which two varieties of poinsettias are grafted together to produce a denser, fuller plant. Things really took off when Paul Ecke Jr., the third generation of the Ecke family, led an extensive marketing campaign to promote poinsettias during the holiday season.

He sent poinsettias to television stations to display on air from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and appeared on programs like The Tonight Show and Bob Hope’s Christmas specials. These publicity efforts coupled with the Ecke’s proprietary production methods allowed the Ecke family to effectively monopolize the plant and turn it into something that looks, well, very little like a naturally-occurring poinsettia.

In the ‘80s, university researcher John Dole discovered Ecke’s unique production methods and published them, allowing competitors to stand a fighting chance and adopt the same money-making practices. Despite this leveling of the playing field, the Eckes still serve 70 percent of the domestic market and 50 percent internationally, accounting for a large portion of the some 70 million poinsettias sold in the US alone every year.

These days, poinsettia production is a $25 million industry, a staggering number for a plant that’s only sold six weeks out of the year.

Plant curiosity piqued? Learn about the history of the Los Angeles Flower District here, or get to know the bad boy of botany Nicholas Culpeper.

At the corner of Wall and 8th streets in Downtown LA sits the heart of the Los Angeles Flower District. The perennial institution has been the standard supplier of fresh-cut stems for Angelenos everywhere since the early 20th century.

Available only to those up and awake in the sunrise hours between 5am and noon, this botanical cornucopia offers every commercially available cut flower under the sun, from snapdragons to marigolds. That, coupled with the low cost of admission ($2 on weekdays, $1 on weekends) spurs everyone from earnest lovers seeking Valentine’s Day roses to Instagram influencers in pursuit of anything deemed aesthetic to flock here in droves.

Like most Los Angeles stories, the LA Flower District has a young yet rich history, one that starts –  and truthfully, ends – with immigrants seeking to bring something beautiful, human, true to this desert city by the sea.

In the early 20th century, LA-area flower farmers drove their horse-drawn wagons into DTLA every morning to sell their flowers. The scene was starkly different than what it looks like now: the blaring horns and headlights that fill the 101 replaced with dirt and dust. There was no Eastern Columbia Building gilded and glimmering in the aquamarine light, telling time. And the Flower District that is now a sprawling mecca of buds and blossoms was just a couple wagons lined up along the side of the road.

A prominent carnation grower based out of Santa Monica named James Vaweter established the first dedicated flower market in 1905. It was on Spring Street, the west side. It would take a few years for the floral business to make its way East into the derelict streets of downtown, where it would stay and flourish for the next century.

The Southern California Flower Market, organized by local Japanese-American farmers, was the first to settle there. In a few years, European immigrants would set up their own shop down the street, called the Los Angeles Flower Market. In due time, both markets would relocate to the 700 block of South Wall Street, where they would expand and modernize.

Over time and out of simple necessity, these two standalone shops that were seemingly at odds came to be part of a mosaic of florists and nurseries that called DTLA home. Through the ‘90s, dozens of smaller flower shops migrated downtown to do business near the historic Los Angeles Flower District, blooming alongside these towering cathedrals of chrysanthemums. A ragtag community quickly formed, and today more than 50 vendors make up the largest wholesale flower district in the US.

Regardless of whether you’re outfitting an entire wedding reception or simply looking for a single pink peony to sit on your kitchen counter, the Los Angeles Flower District is the kind of place special enough to set your alarm for. Carve out a few hours to aimlessly stroll through its stalls, bargaining with vendors and getting lost in the sea of blossoms. Just a PSA: don’t forget to bring cash.

Conjure up an image in your head of Rome or Paris and it will likely look something like this: impossibly chic women wearing large hats, dining al fresco at sidewalk cafes, smoking cigarettes and sipping candy-colored tipples out of shrunken glasses.

What are they drinking, you ask? Allow us to explain.

The aperitivo – a bittersweet alcoholic beverage thought to stimulate your appetite pre-dinner – is, in many countries and cultures, a way of life. Known as aperitif in French, the word comes from the Latin amperire, meaning “to open up.” And that’s exactly what these low-ABV beverages do; they warm up your taste buds and prep your digestive system for a decadent meal.

Digestivi fall in the same camp, the after-dinner counterpart to aperitivi purported to settle your stomach after an especially indulgent feast. Much of this effect comes down to alcohol. As anyone who has ever had a drunken hankering for a late night bite can tell you, alcohol stimulates the appetite, meaning when you’re full and you drink, you will begin to crave food again. 

Aperitivi and digestivi couple that power of booze with good old fashioned herbal medicine. Most spirits, whether labelled as a digestivo or otherwise, began as elixirs. Stomach-soothing botanicals like ginger and cardamom were added to drinks to aid in digestion, and tavern keepers kept up with the tradition by lacing liquor with flowers and herbs to ease any adverse effects from a stiff drink.

The prevalence of these spirits has now stretched so far that it’s seeped into European drinking culture. Entire books, like Marissa Huff’s Aperitivo: The Cocktail Culture of Italy have been dedicated to the subject, and for good reason. Peruse any given sidestreet in Milan around golden hour and you’ll see cafes lined with people gathering for the liquid precursor to dinner. Come by a little later and you’ll see a similar scene, but with plates cleaned and votives and moonlight dappling the digestivi.

And that’s not even getting started on the sheer amount of varieties that abound in the dizzying world of aperitivi. There are the brands you know and love, like Aperol, Campari, and Lillet. These are the classic bottles that make their way into your summer spritzes and winter negronis, adding a delightful dose of something bitter, something sweet. And then there are others, like Fernet and Port, best taken neat as a post-meal potation.

The process of picking your poison, so to speak, is one that should not be rushed. It’s a deeply personal choice, and we’re not here to complicate matters by offering our opinions. So instead we’ll just sit here, sipping our AMASS negroni in peace. Cin cin.

At AMASS, we have a bit of a preoccupation with the occult. After all, our Chief Product Officer and Master Distiller is a practicing witch with a penchant for herbal remedies. So, when we heard about the Progressive Era witchy weirdos that were hanging around Portland in the 19th century, we needed to know more.

There are certain characters that the history books forget, women whose stories are buried under centuries and centuries of men in suits. Lucy Rose Mallory was one of those women.

Born in 1843, Lucy Rose Mallory was a psychic, a suffragist, a vegetarian, a devotee of metaphysical experiences – the kind of woman Portland Monthly once called “an internationally respected good vibes factory.” She was, in a word, an icon, and was born in Michigan before moving west with her father into the unbroken wilderness of mid-19th century Oregon. The Roses settled in a city in the Umpqua River Valley that would later be named Roseburg in honor of them.

As an adult, Lucy was probably known best as the wife of Oregon congressman Rufus Mallory. But her work – as a writer and editor, namely – has endured. For 30 years, she ran two periodicals printed under one cover – The World’s Advanced Thought and the Universal Republic. She wrote passionately on a myriad of topics: a small spider she had befriended, the power of collective positive thinking, her experience with astral projection as a child. Of the spider, Lucy wrote upon feeding it a dead fly,

 

“It soon became very friendly, and it would eat from my hand, and run all over my head and face, and it appeared to love me.” Life, it seemed, Lucy experienced as one big out-of-body experience.

Leo Tolstoy was such an ardent admirer of Lucy’s monthly magazine that he swiftly declared her the “greatest woman in America.” This was not an unpopular opinion. Across Portland, Lucy attracted the attention of advanced thinkers and workers, who were devoted readers of her magazine and attendees of her twice-weekly parlor meetings in which she led séances. What Lucy spoke became gospel, her musings on New Thought – the simple belief of mind over matter – championed by her league of loyal followers. She was the psychic friend to the city’s social elite, and the first to establish and maintain a free reading room in the city. For 30 years, she opened its doors to anyone and everyone who wanted to enjoy the rare books on spiritualism and philosophy that lined its shelves.

Her commitment to her community did not stop there. Back in 1874, the old slavery prejudice ran so strong in Oregon that 45 Black children were forbidden from attending the Salem public schools, as no white teachers would teach them. Lucy volunteered to instruct them for the three years it took for the opposition to end and for the children to be admitted into the public school system. The money she made sat in the bank, as she had no use for it.

In her free time, Lucy sat on the boards of associations and clubs like the Oregon Vegetarian Society and the Association of Artists and Authors. She was, perhaps most importantly, a lifelong member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and fought for the right to vote just as she fought for the right to education. She died in September of 1920, just one week after the ratification of the 19th amendment and two months before eight million women would rush to the polls for the very first time.

100 years later, the story of Lucy Rose Mallory, an otherwise forgotten figure, is important to remember and retell. She  was a woman of the people, an active advocate and celebrated psychic, a friend to both Tolstoy and spiders. If there’s a moral to her story, it’s this: be more like Lucy (and don’t forget to cast your vote tomorrow).

Traditional rules of etiquette have, for the most part, been retired. It’s difficult to imagine anyone other than my grandmother caring which fork I use, how I fold a napkin, whether or not I excuse myself from the table after dinner. But when it comes to drinking, there are certain rites and rituals that never faded out of style. Raise a glass. Share a toast. Clink. Maintain eye contact. Say cheers, and do it with feeling.

These are the things we do and have done for centuries, millenia, forever. But why? What is their cultural significance?

While the ritual of clinking glasses has evolved to become a means of connection among friends, it started, like most things do, as an act of self-preservation. The custom of touching glasses arose from concerns about poisoning, as clinking coupes and steins together jubilantly would cause each drink to slosh and spill over into the others’. Over time, as fears of contaminated cocktails waned, the ritual took on a new meaning.

According to the International Handbook of Alcohol and Culture, toasting “is probably a secular vestige of ancient sacrificial libations in which a sacred liquid was offered to the gods: blood or wine in exchange for a wish, a prayer summarized in the words 'long life!' or 'to your health!'"

So the next time you’re at a wedding and some drunken groomsmen stumbles up to the microphone to toast to the bride and groom, think of it this way: it’s not about how your cousin Steve was a total legend in college as much as it is a sacrificial libation to the gods.

Saying “cheers,” similarly, holds a deeper meaning. The phrase originates from the old French word chiere meaning “face” or “head.” By the 18th century, it was used as a way to express happiness and encouragement. Today, the phrase is entirely symbolic, a practice of camaraderie that is so routine it’s almost second nature. As the round of drinks hits the table, it’s expected before taking your first sip that you raise your glass, lock eyes, and clink clink clink.

It’s a tradition that transcends language and culture. Salute in Italian, skol in Danish, sante in French, cheers in English all mean roughly the same thing: I’m happy to be here, in this moment, with you. And even when our meeting places are digitized and we can’t share a drink IRL, these small acts of communion remain.

Cheers to that.

Freshly squeezed Florida oranges. A cedar closet. Gasoline. The whiff of your grandmother’s perfume, musked with age. Sweat mixed with cut grass. Sauce on the stove. Leather. The candy sweetness of waffle cones in an ice cream shop. A scent you can’t place but can feel coursing through you like a lightning bolt of recognition. A summer storm.

Smell – the good, the bad, the cloying, the intoxicating – is intrinsically linked to memory. It’s a romantic notion with scientific implications, as the reason we hold on so tightly to scent-fueled moments is simply because of our brain’s anatomy.

Scent starts out simple. Odor molecules travel up and through the nostrils, binding to receptors in the nose and transmitting a signal through the olfactory system. From here, things get more complicated. The main olfactory bulb transmits pulses to both mitral and tufted cells, which help determine odor concentration based on the time certain neuron clusters fire. These cells work hard to differentiate between similar scents, such as a lemon versus a grapefruit, and hold onto that data for future recognition. The amygdala, a part of the limbic system responsible for processing memory and emotion, also processes pheromone and allomone signals. These include everything from bodily excretions (sexy) to the smell of flowers.

So when I say smell is tied to memory, I’m not being corny; it’s a cold hard fact, backed and approved by cold hard science. And our olfactory impressions begin early.

In the womb, smell is the only fully developed sense a fetus has. In fact, it continues to be the most developed sense in a child until the tender age of 10, when sight takes over. It’s the reason so many of our childhood memories are linked to scent.

Even as the vision of my grandmother fades, I can still vividly remember the soap she used, how her clothes always smelled like mothballs, the way fresh garden basil seemed to linger in her kitchen.

Taste, similarly, takes on a heightened nostalgia. If you’ve ever been instructed to pinch your nose when glugging down a dose of cough syrup, you know that without smell, taste is a rather empty sense. When you eat, food molecules make their way back to the nasal epithelium, meaning the majority of spices and flavors we savor are actually being processed through our sense of smell, not taste. Is there any wonder why then, for so many of us, our sense of home is so tightly tied to the foods we ate and the scents we smelled?

Because smell is processed by the amygdala, smell and emotion are stored as one memory. A positive association with the smell of gasoline as a child translates into a lifelong love of the scent. A close encounter with a bonfire means you likely won’t be keen to smoky scents later in life.

Proustian memory, a concept that comes from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, speaks to this very phenomenon – with just a quick whiff or taste, we can instantaneously be transported back to another moment in time. It’s a powerful kind of time travel, and one that unwittingly guides our days.

A stranger’s cologne on a too-crowded subway car, sharp with vetiver and pine, can make us yearn for a grandfatherly kind of love. Thick steam swirling out of a Taiwanese restaurant can transport you to childhood days spent dawdling around while your dad worked the line, the hot spatter of fryer oil perfuming his clothes. Far less pleasant smells – menthol cigarettes, New York sewers, the chemical clean of pool chlorine – can have a similarly transformative effect.

This superpower is one we can wield intentionally, too.

When I was a kid, my mom applied lotion to my back every night. In dim purple light, she would put a dollop on my spine, the cold cream at once startling and then like home. It smelled like lavender, vanilla, her. And so now, on nights when I can’t sleep, I reach for the bottle. It lives on my nightstand, for ease in time travel. I can’t reach my own back, so instead I rub it in slow circles at the base of my neck until my stress has melted entirely and I am 10 years old again, sitting at the foot end of my mother’s bed.

That’s the power scent has; to transcend space and time and land us in a moment that feels like an embrace. It’s perhaps the simplest, most time-effective way to make our day-to-day lives feel a little more beautiful, our in-between moments a little more sacred. A ritual, if you will.

And the best part? It’s only a spray away.

Since the advent of alcohol, imbibing has gone hand-in-hand with unwinding. We mark the end of a day with a twist of a cap, the pour of a drink, the clink of ice in a glass. Happy hour, in particular, has become a designated time for us to meet up with friends and colleagues over drinks and half-priced appetizers and forget about the meetings, the deadlines, the banality of the workday. It wasn’t always like that though.

The term “happy hour” comes from American Naval slang dating back to World War I. In its conception, it referred to an allotted time on the ship when sailors could let loose, so to speak, competing in boxing matches and other foolhardy pursuits. Alcohol was not yet intrinsically linked to happy hour–the term instead referred, quite literally, to the one hour a day sailors got to kick back and make happy.

During Prohibition, the phrase was picked up to describe the underground speakeasy gatherings that often took place. Opinions differ on how the term became introduced into mainstream vernacular–some say it was a Saturday Evening Post article from 1959 that mentioned happy hour in regards to military life, while others cite a 1961 Providence Journal article referencing Newport policemen “deprived of their happy hour at the cocktail bar.” Regardless of how the expression rose in popularity, it was quickly co-opted by the service industry in the ’70s and ’80s as a way to draw in customers before the daily dinner rush.

The idea stuck, and now nearly 50 years later you can stroll into any chain restaurant on a Wednesday and order a $1 Mai Tai, so long as you show up before 6 pm. It’s a uniquely American sensation, the notion of getting drunker for less. But happy hour, despite its popularity among deal-loving Westerners, is not a universal phenomenon. In some places, offering discounted drinks is even prohibited by law.

“Colleagues are drinking as a means to understand and connect with each other. They’re searching for a deeper truth that is harder to come by within the confines of a cubicle, and the ritual of after-work nomikai gives them the time and space to do that.”

Imbibing in a post-work drink is not just about snagging a deal, though. In Japan, drinking is deeply ingrained in corporate culture, a way of breaking down barriers between bosses and employees outside of the daily 9 to 5. Nomikai, which loosely translates in English to “gathering to drink,” is a recreational aspect of work, but to say it is entirely optional would be to write off the intense pressures present in many Japanese workplaces. This attitude is slowly changing, thanks in large part to a drunk driving law that was stiffened in Japan in 2007 to prohibit driving with a blood-alcohol level above 0%. The advent of non-alcoholic beer and spirits shortly followed. But the desire to indulge in a post-work drink speaks to a larger social yearning that doesn’t seem to be fading, even as non-alcoholic options replace the standard boozy fare.

The term nommunication, a combination of the Japanese word nomu, meaning drink, and the English word communication, describes the phenomenon best–colleagues are drinking as a means to understand and connect with each other. They’re searching for a deeper truth that is harder to come by within the confines of a cubicle, and the ritual of after-work nomikai gives them the time and space to do that.

Drinking after work is not narrowly defined by a trip to the bar, however. At-home cocktail culture has been on the rise for quite some time now, with stylized bar carts becoming a fixture in living and dining rooms across the world. The uptick of craft distilleries and breweries has ignited a passion for drinking–and drinking well. It’s not just “cracking open a cold one” after a long day at the office–consumers are sipping natural wines, shaking up premium cocktails, and enjoying low-alc and even non-alcoholic spirits and aperitifs at the end of the workday.

For many, the intent to get drunk has escaped the equation and instead has been replaced with a desire to slow down and delight in the pleasure of drinking. At the end of the day, people crave that ritual, whether as a means to human connection or simply to feel connected to themselves. And despite a rather storied and sometimes complicated past, the tradition of the post-work drink is rooted in that connection.