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For Dave Classick Jr., distilling is a combination of physics, art, history and heart.
Classick is the head distiller – and sole employee – at Essential Spirits Alambic Distilleries, an under-the-radar distillery tucked away in a small industrial area in Mountain View. His parents, David Classick Sr. and Andrea Mirenda, founded the business out of their Mountain View garage in 1996, moving the business in 1998 to where it continues to operate today.
Since his parents’ retirement pre-pandemic, Classick is continuing their legacy of producing small batch, handcrafted liquors. It’s a passion that his parents learned from a third-generation master distiller in France and one he hopes to pass down to his sibling’s children.
But the distilling industry is a fickle business, he explained, one that requires flexibility and adaptation. As consumer demand shifts and government regulations change, Classick is restructuring the business model of Essential Spirits.
“It’s adapt and survive mode right now, for, I think, many different places,” he said.
For decades, Essential Spirits operated primarily as a contract distiller, using its handmade copper alambic still to produce spirits for other companies. (Most notably, it developed the recipe for Tahoe Blue Vodka, although Essential Spirits no longer manufactures for the brand.)
Taking the ethos from Hewlett-Packard – where both Classick and his father worked for many years – of “Focus on where you add value, and partner with excellence where you don’t” – they decided to focus on the manufacturing of the spirit, while another party worked on marketing and sales.
“The idea was that we would grow with those brands as they became successful,” Classick said. “The reality is it’s just a tough thing to sell, particularly in California.”
California liquor laws are “byzantine” and still reflect the long-lasting impacts of Prohibition, explained Classick. California is a three-tier state, meaning that it mandates a strict separation of powers between producers, distributors and retailers.
This rule was originally implemented to prevent monopolies following Prohibition. Distributors aren’t often willing to serve smaller manufacturers like Essential Spirits, Classick said, and they typically take about a 35% markup on the product.
“Even if you’ve made a wonderful product, if you don’t have support on the distribution side of things, you’re not going to get shelf space, you’re not going to get interaction with customers, you’re not going to get placed in bars,” he said.
In addition to contract work, Essential Spirits produces its own rums, brandies and bierschnaps – but it is not allowed to sell them online, and it can’t sell its rum or bierschnaps at the distillery.
Essential Spirits operates under two different licenses: a brandy maker’s license (which allows the distillery to sell bottles of brandy but does not allow brandy tastings at the distillery) and the distilled spirits plant license (which permits tastings of spirits but not the sale of bottles at the distillery). Currently, Essential Spirits products are only available for purchase at Ava’s Market and Sav-More Food Store in Mountain View.
Many newer distilleries operate under a craft distiller’s license, which was created in 2015 and allows customers to buy bottles at the distillery. Classick plans to eventually apply for this newer permit, but notes that you can’t transfer permits – he’d have to surrender his current permit and reapply.
“That’s certainly helped (the spirits industry), because usually tasting rooms are one of the things where a, the manufacturer gets the most margin, and b, there’s a lot more personal interaction between the person that made the spirit and the person that’s drinking the spirit,” Classick said.
Shifting drinking habits have also disrupted the spirits-producing industry, Classick said. Last year, a Gallup survey found that only 54% of U.S. adults drink alcohol, the lowest percentage over a 90-year trend. Additionally, a KFF Health Tracking Poll published last year found that one in eight American adults use a GLP-1 (many people naturally lose the desire to drink alcohol while taking GLP-1 medications.)
“I’ve talked to friends that own liquor stores, and they said if they weren’t selling chips and sodas, they’d be out of business,” Classick said.
Instead, the industry is seeing a rise in low-alcoholic options and ready-to-drink cocktails (RTDs). Ready-to-drink cocktails have more than doubled their market share since 2021 and were up 11% in market share in 2025, according to a report published in February by DISCUS.
“Everybody always presumes that when times are tough, people are going to drink more,” Classick said. “It’s not really the case. The real statistic is they’re not willing to give up their alcohol budget until the very last minute, so the ratio of what they’re spending on alcohol to other things may change, but the amount that they drink doesn’t actually change, and that’s been consistent over time.”
Essential Spirits’ liquors had a brief stint at the bar of downtown Mountain View restaurant Scratch, but Classick said without a distributor, being an ambassador and showing up every two to three weeks, it’s hard to stay on the bar shelf.
“My main focus for the near future is going to be trying to get placed more locally, and then figure out how to drive consumer attention to the fact that there’s spirits being made locally, and it’s something that Mountain View can be excited about and proud about,” he said.
The first spirit the business produced was bierschnaps, made from brewing American-style pale ale, then distilling it. The 80-proof distillate can be sipped as an aperitif or mixed in a cocktail.
“It’s like an unaged whiskey that has had a little bit of hops added to it,” Classick said.
The newest product is the PurePear pear brandy, which was first made in 2008. Classick Sr. had read an article about a farmer in Lake County who couldn’t get enough pickers to pick pears off the trees in time for them to stay hard enough to make it to market, resulting in a surplus of pears that ultimately would have to be tossed. Classick Sr. asked the farmer for those pears, turning 5 tons of pears into brandy.
“We touched every single pear because we had to cut the stems off and any bruises off, and then crushed it, fermented it and distilled it,” Classick Jr. said. “They used to put stills on wagons and cart them by horse from farm to farm. Distillation used to be a way of preserving the physical labor efforts that you’ve put into your crop.”
In fact, anything that can be fermented and produce alcohol can be distilled, including apples, strawberries, plums and even artichokes, he noted.
What differentiates Essential Spirits from other distilleries is its copper alambic still, handmade in Bordeaux by a third-generation still maker whose great-grandfather worked on the Statue of Liberty.
The physical shape of each still plays a role in the character of the distillate it produces, Classick noted. For example, Essential Spirits’ alambic still has soft radiuses in the curves of the gooseneck, resulting in a medium body with a bit of weight on the palate, he said.
“It’s not viscous, but it has presence,” Classick said. “Things that are made on column stills won’t have any of that character. … It’l be sharp, it’ll be thin, it’ll have its own physical characteristics.”
Designed specifically for making fruit brandies, the alambic still does a double distillation in a single pass and doesn’t require the spirits to rest.
“Some spirits, even if they’re clear, they still let them sit in stainless steel for about three to six months before they bottle it to mellow it out, to take the sharper edges off of it, to absorb some moisture, some water molecules from the atmosphere,” Classick said. “We don’t have to do that with this still.”
Classick offers reservation-only distillery tours for groups of five or more ($40 per person). The space is small, and production has to shut down during tours. The nearly three-hour experience includes an explanation about the equipment, education on the spirits and a tasting.
Essential Spirits Alambic Distilleries, 144B S. Whisman Road, Mountain View; 650-962-0546, Instagram: @essentialspirits. While not open to the public, business hours are Monday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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