A Closer Look at 10th Street Distillery’s California Coast Blend

Midwestern corn and sleepy Ohio riverbanks are odd pairings with the Pacific Coast’s wave-swept shores — but that is the premise of the California Coast Blend (42% ABV, $39.99), and it delivers. “California” is an unregulated adjective for whiskey, blend or otherwise, trying to make its name in a roomful of long-established and legally protected appellations. It’s defined at this point more by the spirit in which whiskey is made than the spirits making it up — and few embody that spirit more than 10th Street Distillery owners Virag Saksena and Vishal Guari. Former dormmates at the Institute of Technology in Delhi whose lives led to Silicon Valley, it was Saksena’s loss of a beloved 30-year single malt that provided the catalyst for their eventually founding the San Jose, California-based distillery.

Kismet

An amateur homebrewer and veteran businessman, Saksena saw a tempting solution in attempting to make a replacement. After several years of private study, it was a scotch special interest breakout group at an alumni group that found him reunited with Gauri, whose education and career in chemistry was the missing ingredient to Saksena’s vision. “We felt we had things to do and interesting perspectives to build these whiskies. There’s definitely an opportunity for a great American product in this space,” recalls Gauri of Californian whiskey offerings five years ago. But finding that opportunity meant identifying the aspects of distillation the duo could make distinctly Californian, and the malt itself held little promise. “The jury’s still out on how much difference [locally grained malt] makes in the taste of the whiskey,” says Saksena.

Aging, Temperature, Water and Microflora

Gauri and Saksena photo credit 10th Street Distillery

“There are different things which do affect the terroir, some which you can control and some which you can encourage. The first thing that affects how a whiskey taste is how it’s aging, what are the different temperatures and humidity which the barrels experience? Scotland, you have cold, humid temperatures; Midwest, you have hot, dry temperatures as do we here: but we have a unique Mediterranean climate. The days are hot, the nights are cool, and it has an interesting impact on how barrels age. It makes the angels a lot greedier,” he laments about the portion of whiskey spirited away by evaporation. “We lose up to fifteen percent a year.” The second thing is the water. “The local water is extremely hard calcium and magnesium-rich in San Jose. What grain can work well with this water?” Saksena goes on to explain that peated grain is acidic and works well with this hard alkaline water.

“The third thing is the microflora. When we actually ferment the wash, either you can just use the distiller’s yeast and say ‘this is what my whiskey’s going to be,’ or in our case, we opened the vats, let it experience the local microflora and it smells and tastes like that San Francisco sourdough, and last thing,” Saksena adds, regarding some new blends is aging it in local wine casks. “Rather than bringing in sherry casks from Spain, we’re trying to work with local vintners to take some of their casks,” he explains, “What we’re doing is we’re encouraging more of our local character to seep in… so now, just like you can’t make a San Francisco sourdough bread anywhere else, you can’t make this whiskey anywhere else.”

Building a Better Blend

That’s the story of 10th Street’s first few whiskeys, including their Peated Single Malt which won double gold in the 2019 NY World Spirits Competition, and their Distiller’s Cut, which won gold in the 2020 New York International Spirits Competition and forms a portion of the California Coast Blend. But of this subtle, sipping whiskey, there’s more to the story. “California Coast is a very unusual whiskey for us,” explains Gauri. “It was our first blend. I grew up as many of us did, thinking single malts are always sort of better than blends. They’re priced differently, they have more branding about them. But we’ve come to realize that you can create beautifully crafted products by blending things, taking our own single malts, and enhancing certain flavors — not necessarily reducing them but finding the right combinations that bring them out better and stronger.”

California Coast Blend

Saksena and Gauri began the Coastal blend with the best of their distinctly Californian gold-winning whiskeys: the Distiller’s Cut, with its vocal, peaty presence and the more mellow STR. The STR, which happened to win double gold at the 2020 New York International Spirits Competition (a habit with 10th Street’s whiskeys), takes its name from the shaved, toasted and re-charred barrels its unpeated barley malt is aged in: the result is a candied, creme brulée affair with a toasted nut finish. These two, with hints of the saline Pacific breeze still in their dregs, are joined with two light whiskies distilled along the Kentucky-Indiana border two-thousand miles east, in an old distillery not far from the coal-barge laden Ohio River. Locals still call it the old Seagram’s plant, though it’s now owned by the less romantically-named Midwestern Grain Products of Indiana. The distillery is perched atop a limestone-filtered aquifer with gentle soft water, in contrast to San Jose’s biting tap.

“California Coast is not a formal affair in any sense,” says Saksena. “When people ask us, ‘what can I add to drink with the whiskey?’ There are purists who say you can only use a little bit of water or ice, but our question is, ‘what do you enjoy drinking it with?’ Experiment, try different things out; you choose rather than people telling you what to do.” “We wanted to create something called California Coast because, in our mind, that represented California in some ways,” adds Gauri. “The coming together of different flavors, the bringing together of people together to California. It’s an easy-going whiskey.”

California Coast is subtle — it is a blend, after all. At 42% it’s an approachable whiskey but hardly softspoken. Its state-appropriate freewheeling nature is versatile; it makes for as good a highball with spritzer and grapefruit zest, as Saksena suggests, as it does an old-fashioned with homemade simple syrup and bitters. But it’s a shame not to enjoy at least a bit of it neat. Online, flavor notes read a bit like a jelly bean flavors meet English department cocktail menu: lime Altoids, vanilla custard, glazed doughnuts, then chardonnay, stewed stone fruits, heathered honey.

Tasting Notes

For me, 10th Street has a rather botanical nose, lemongrassy and lightly smoked, like a distant scrub-brush campfire with some sage tossed in. The palate is warm, caramely, raisiny but not fruity; it’s never a sweet whiskey, but simply warm. It may be the fact that Saksena had mentioned the famous sourdough microflora, but there is a little bit of that here — a bit of whipped honey on sourdough toast. The canvas of the light whiskey is present and welcoming, highlighting the single malts but not obscured by them. The peatiness of the Distiller’s cut comes through not so much as smoked earth but as petrichor. A deceptively subtle finish that vanishes into wisps into cinnamon bark, a blown-out match.

The funny thing about the blend is that it is subtle enough to have multiple interpretations, yet bold enough to allow all of them to be accurate; much like the Bay Area Saksena and Gauri thought of while blending it. This whiskey is the hot cloudless days, followed by cold fog, of the region; It is the rich botanical breeze of the coast. Wandering amidst it all is a warm, genial Midwestern whiskey that admires the flavor profile of the whiskey while adding to it.

On the Horizon

What’s next for the distillery? “For me, it’s still that 30-year old bottle of scotch I lost,” laughs Saksena. But with a bevy of new releases, including a potent port cask-aged peated single malt, the duo will likely sometimes even exceed Saksena’s memory of the lost bottle. If gold medals aren’t a strong enough indicator of that moment, the existence of the California Coast blend is. Saksena and Gauri set out to make an affordable agreeable whiskey that folks would want as a regular in their liquor cabinets yet fully embodied that ineffable California terroir — and they succeeded.