Old 49 Distilling
OLD 49 Distilling was launched by David Glicksman and Aaron Fitzgerald in 2017, legitimizing a family legacy of distilling that began in the 1940s. What started with a US Navy contractor’s industrious efforts to give his compatriots access to better distillates has evolved into a modern-minded project based in Los Angeles that retains the earnest desire to meet the needs of the audience at hand, namely through two of its most charismatic spirits, Nat Kidder Vodka and Catalina Apéro.
Nat Kidder, David’s grandfather, worked as an electrical contractor aboard US Navy battleships in Pearl Harbor preceding Japan’s attack on December 7, 1941. (He and his wife narrowly escaped the melee, sailing back to California just days prior.) During his time in Hawaii, the sailors were drinking the Navy’s industrial alcohol—certainly not sanctioned for consumption—which had earned the notorious moniker “torpedo juice.” To mitigate the alcohol’s harmful effects, Nat fashioned a bootleg still out of scraps, and in his Honolulu bungalow, began rectifying his own potable high-proof spirit for the men. After leaving Hawaii, Nat continued to distill, turning his attention to whiskey, and after years of methodical experimentation, he declared the forty-ninth iteration of his recipe to be superior (the benchmark now memorialized in OLD 49 Distilling’s name). Nat attempted to open a distillery in Boston in the 1950s, but his dream was never fully realized. His family, however, embraced his motto from the war, “succisa virescit,” which loosely translates to “cut down, we grow back stronger,” and that spirit of resilience would bear fruit decades later.
While an idea to turn his grandfather’s story into a modern-day enterprise incubated in David Glicksman’s mind, he took a kindred path of hospitality, working in bars and restaurants in California (including La Poubelle in Hollywood) and Paris while earning his BA and MFA in Screenwriting. In 2008, David met Aaron Fitzgerald while playing hockey and a fast friendship began. Aaron, an Army veteran, seasoned cinematic stunt pilot, and member of Red Bull’s The Flying Bulls (a lauded team of pilots and technicians that oversee a fleet of historic aircraft), could well understand the appeal of Nat Kidder’s legacy and, with a shared vision for a fresh-faced and precision-minded brand, OLD 49 Distilling was born.
Once happily situated in LA’s Arts District, the team’s first production project was OLD 49 California Whiskey (built on the foundation of David’s nascent distilling experiments in a garage in Los Angeles’s Atwater Village, which fittingly, like his grandfather’s initial distillations, were not entirely above board). But while the small batch whiskey aged, extensive R&D took place to create a polished reincarnation of Nat Kidder’s vodka. Five years after the vodka’s debut, Catalina Apéro was conceived and rigorously tailored, inspired by David’s time in France and a desire to create a locally—and more mindfully—made alternative to Aperol to satisfy the Spritz craze that continues to glimmer in the national zeitgeist.
Each bottle of Nat Kidder Vodka and Catalina Apéro is adorned with a paper seal inspired by the 1949–1986 federal tax stamps once applied to spirits as an assurance of quality—a nod to the distillation standards that underscore the ethos of the brand—and the labels are locally screen-printed by hand; the typeface used for the vodka is reminiscent of the naval stencils originally used by Nat Kidder to mark his own bottles, a final nod to OLD 49’s marriage of past and present pursuits.
