BOTTOMS UP: Owner-distiller Jake Lattanzi and his fiancée, Katie Szoke, are excited to see what this summer brings. (Photos by Jack Reynolds)
For anyone who has driven the Boulevard over the past few years, the sign on the building at 1305 Long Beach Blvd. in North Beach Haven was either a promise or a tease, depending on the day. LBI Distilling Co. has finally made good on it.
Owner and distiller Jake Lattanzi opened the Island’s first craft distillery a few weeks ago, but getting there took longer than planned, his motivation sustained mostly by conviction.
“Just belief, really,” Lattanzi said. “We knew once it happened, it would be a hit.”
The origin story is a classic one. Lattanzi grew up locally and eventually left for work in Pennsylvania. COVID brought him back to New Jersey, and a visit to a friend who operates a distillery in Mount Holly sparked an idea. As Lattanzi witnessed the technical precision, the hands-on process and the intricacies of coaxing raw ingredients into a finished bottle, he saw his opportunity.
The North Beach Haven establishment is off to a strong start.
“The beer trend had taken off and there was a brewery on every other corner,” he said. “But there weren’t that many distilleries out there. It was something on the rise.” He thought, “The Island definitely needs this.”
His conviction shaped the place from the ground up. The downstairs bar is intimate and dim, wooden barrels and nets lining a space that feels rooted without feeling kitschy. Lattanzi calls it a speakeasy quality: a place to sit down, lower the volume and actually taste what’s in the glass. Upstairs is a different experience, brighter and more open, built for live music and the kind of evening that buzzes louder as it goes on. The venue saw its first live music set already, and private events are in the pipeline through September.
What the bartenders pour into those glasses starts in the back of the house. Lattanzi describes a batch of rum, for example, as something that operates almost like a closed weather system: Molasses, water, yeast and nutrients ferment into what distillers call a wash; the wash moves into the still, where heat boils off the ethanol into vapor; the vapor rises through a column that functions like a miniature water cycle, condensing and recirculating until the most volatile, most desirable fractions escape to the main condenser, where they return to liquid and are collected. From there, it goes into a bottle Lattanzi has touched personally.
“I’ve put my stamp on all of them,” he said.
And small batch doesn’t mean inconsistent, as some tend to believe. “If you’re really paying attention, there is a lot more consistency than people might think. I take a lot of pride in making sure each batch is very similar.”
The elixirs bartender Sarah Possidel pours into the glasses start with house-made, small-batch vodka, rum and gin.
And because New Jersey’s craft distillery license permits only alcohol produced on site, Lattanzi has gotten creative with his menu items. His workarounds include house-made triple sec, scratch simple syrups and fresh-juiced ingredients. The cocktail menu rotates seasonally; the current list skews toward summer, with plans to shift toward ciders and darker flavors with the end of the season. Mocktails are on the menu, too. And for the espresso martini devotees, Lattanzi sources beans from How You Brewin Coffee Co., brewing the espresso fresh each weekend. Everything is hand made.
That same care extends to the business itself, which is fully family-owned. Lattanzi manages day-to-day operations and the distilling; family members provide the network and contacts that any new venture requires; his mother handles social media. It is, in his words, less a brand than a piece of community infrastructure.
“This place kind of has its own orbit to it,” he said about LBI. “Even if you go away, everyone seems to come back at some point.”
LBI Distilling Co. is open Fridays from 5 to 9 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 9 p.m., with Thursday hours coming as summer gets underway. The downstairs tasting room will stay open year ’round. Guests are encouraged to bring food; bottles and merchandise are available for purchase on site.
– Christina Scannapiego