The West Coast’s First Naval Base Is Now A Whiskey Distillery

For her series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse is reporting a story about food and farming from each of California’s 58 counties.

If you stand on the edge of Vallejo’s Mare Island, on the mouth of the Napa River, and look out over the water, you can’t help but feel tiny.

To the right are imposing cranes and dry docks that look like the world’s biggest bathtubs. Two huge metal frames called gantries loom overhead.

Behind you is a beautiful and weird collection of structures: warehouses, grand Victorians and a number of empty brick buildings that look like they have stories to tell.

Since the beginning of this year, some of those buildings have been home to Redwood Empire Whiskey — the drink company’s new headquarters for distilling and entertaining.

Kunjan Joshi, Redwood Empire’s general manager, said that everyone who visits asks the same thing: “What was this place? What significance does it have?”

The short answer: it was the first Naval base on the West Coast, opened in 1854.

And during World War II, Mare Island was one of the busiest Naval facilities in the world. They built nearly 400 ships and repaired 1200 more. After the war, they built 17 nuclear submarines here.

“Now we’re here selling whiskey on the same spot,” Joshi said.

California bourbon today

The trees in Sonoma County inspire the distillery’s name, where the company began making whiskey 10 years ago. When it outgrew that facility, Redwood Empire bought out the Savage & Cook distillery on Mare Island in Vallejo and moved in at the beginning of the year.

Joshi joined the team soon after. Born and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, he came to Castro Valley as a teenager, then moved to the East Coast to play in a metal band — he still has a pierced lip and a skull ring.

Back East, he got a job at a distillery in Nantucket. “And ever since then, I’ve only been working in the beer, wine and whiskey world. I only drink on the job,” he said, laughing. “I don’t drink at home at all. I only drink at the job.”

In the distillery’s events space, Joshi pointed out the brick walls, original from the 1800s, and a concrete vault in the middle of the building.

“I was told this used to be where they kept a lot of old spy files during the Cold War,” Joshi added.

The next stop on the tour is the distillery, where Jeff Duckhorn, Redwood’s Master Distiller, explains how bourbon and scotch fit into the greater whiskey family. “Both bourbon and scotch are types of whiskey.”

Technically, it can only be called bourbon if it’s made from more than 51% corn and produced in the U.S.

“We would be a very small producer in Kentucky. Here in the state of California, we’re one of the largest.”

Californians have made whiskey since the Gold Rush, but craft bourbon has taken off in the last couple decades — with as many as 150 distilleries in the state.

So what is California bourbon today?

“I think that’s kind of the beauty of it for us is that we get to help define that,” Duckhorn said.

To make the grain mixture for their bourbon, Redwood Empire sources corn, rye, wheat and other grains from the Sacramento Valley, delivered by trucks weekly and sorted into three huge silos. They mill 10,000 pounds of it a day, according to Master Blender Lauren Patz.

“It’s almost like pastry flour when it comes out of there,” she said.

That “flour” is then deposited into what’s called a mashtun — which Duckhorn described as “a very sexy, large stainless tank. It looks kind of like an R2-D2.”

They then add water and enzymes, heat it up and cool it down to “create the perfect environment for the yeast to do what they need to do.”

The mixture gets fermented, distilled and then pumped into barrels, where it will age a minimum of five years.

Mare Island’s slow and steady renaissance

Redwood Empire is now part of what developers are marketing as Mare Island’s “Wet Mile” — along with a coffee shop, wine bar and brewery.

Local historian Mel Orpilla had several relatives who used to work in these buildings. He shakes his head when he imagines what they would make of these new businesses.

“You know, those old Filipino men, they were hard drinkers,” Orpilla said. “My dad and his brothers, they loved their whiskey. They loved their beer. But I don’t think it would have ever been part of their reality that Mare Island would turn into the Wet Mile.” 

Migrants came from around the country and world to work on Mare Island. Vallejo is still one of the most diverse places in the state.

“Diversity comes from the employees that were hired to work on Mare Island,” Orpiilla said. “So during the Great Depression, there was an exodus of people from the Deep South, mainly African Americans who came to work on Mare Island.”

There were Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma.

And, “Filipinos were recruited, also, to work in Mare Island,” Orpilla said, including his dad and uncles, who were barely adults when they moved here.

“And I always wonder how difficult it must have been for them to leave their family and their friends. In the Philippines, they were farmers and fishermen, and it was a hard life, and I’m sure that they thought they could do better here in America,” he said.

By 1932, Orpilla’s relatives were all working on Mare Island. As unskilled laborers, they’d be assigned to a shop in the shipyard.

“Shop 32 had a lot of Filipinos in it,” Orpilla said. They unloaded box cars, swept the shops, took orders. Whatever needed to be done, they would do it. And my father did that until the day he retired in 1972.

“But no matter what job you had at Mare Island, even if it was an unskilled laborer, it was a living wage. And these men [could] buy houses and raise families with that salary. They were civilian employees on Mare Island.”

“The Navy made the weather around here,” said Kent Fortner, the board president of the Mare Island Historic Park Foundation. “If you can imagine, up to 50,000 people worked on Mare Island and the town of Vallejo was only 70,000. So it was the economic engine. It was the governmental engine. It was everything around Vallejo.”

“And then suddenly that was all taken away,” Fortner said.

In 1996, the Navy base closed.

“Of course, the economy in Vallejo suffered because people were moving out. Businesses that relied on the people that worked at Mare Island had to close shop. Vallejo started changing dramatically,” Mel Orpilla said

Since the Navy left, Mare Island has grappled with environmental contamination. Clean up and renovation have taken decades longer, and been much more expensive, than originally anticipated.

But Orpilla believes in Mare Island’s slow and steady renaissance. Along with the Wet Mile, there are other businesses on the island: a university for health sciences, soundstages for films and manufacturers of modular apartments and boats.

“I sometimes wish I could go to sleep and wake up 20 years in the future,” Orpilla said.

For now, he knows what it’s like to celebrate Mare Island with the whole Vallejo community.

Growing up, he said, when a ship launched, his family and neighbors would gather across the Mare Island Strait, “watching it from that side as it slipped into the water after the governor’s wife or whatever dignitary cracked the champagne bottle to christen it.

“And I think what made it special is everyone in Vallejo has somebody that worked in Mare Island, and everybody was proud to be part of that effort. Even though they may not have directly worked on the submarine or the ship, it was still a pride that it came from Mare Island and our dads work there.”

“Now it’s sort of coming back through entrepreneurship, through efforts to retain history, to package history,” Kent Fortner said, “and just a whole new group of artisans that are coming to inhabit these amazing buildings that we’re standing around.”

Fortner should know. In 2017, he and a partner in the Mare Island Brewing Company began crafting beers in renovated, historic coal sheds on the island.

During Redwood Empire’s September launch party, the distillery’s patio, where ships were once built, was packed. Joshi took orders and served up signature cocktails.

“We stopped [accepting] RSVPs at 1,500. And we were thinking even if half of them show up, that’s still 6-700 people. But I feel like everyone showed up,” he said.

Attendees came from as far as Modesto and Cotati, but many were Vallejo locals like Cheryl Smith and Thomas Robinson. Smith enjoyed a citrusy bourbon cocktail called a Paper Plane and Robinson ordered a whiskey flight.

“I’m just getting ready to dive in,” Robinson said.

Robinson said that, as a local, he’s enjoyed the benefits of Mare Island’s transformation.

“When I was a kid back in the ‘90s and ‘80s, there was a guard at the front there,” Robinson recalled. “You couldn’t just drive on the island like that because this [was] a very strategic part of the U.S. Navy. “So now we’re able to come in and enjoy all the older buildings, the water, you can see all of the ferries from each side, and it’s beautiful.”