INSIDE ST. AUGUSTINE
DISTILLERY
5 Years for the First Sip:
Written by Jessica Giraldo
Videography by Sebastain Reece
Photographed by Chloee Blair
Videography by Sebastain Reece
Written by Jessica Giraldo
Photographed by Chloee Blair
Before the clink of cocktail glasses resounded through its walls, the old brick building on 112 Riberia Street reverberated with the culture of Saint Augustine’s booming industry.
It once powered the historic downtown before transforming into the city's Ice Plant, where enormous blocks of ice kept produce fresh, chilled whiskey, and preserved seafood carried across Henry Flagler's rail lines.
After the need for ice blocks fell, the building gained a new purpose. Rather than erase its history, the founders of St. Augustine Distillery embraced it, restoring the space with the same spirit that previously defined it: making something by hand for the people of St. Augustine.
On the production floor, patience is as much an ingredient as corn or barley.
For Richard deMontmollin, Vice President of Production at St. Augustine Distillery, every bottle begins long before it reaches a visitor's glass. Developing a new spirit means making decisions today that won't reveal themselves for years.
Before he was crafting spirits, DeMontmollin was a bartender chasing a fascination.
“I’ve been in the alcohol beverage industry for a very long time,” DeMontmollin said. “When I started on this path, it was all service-based. It was like I was a musician and I needed some income, so I did what everybody else did. I got behind the bar.”
While others focused on beer and wine, DeMontmollin felt himself drawn to spirits, the bottles that appeared to hold a history of their own.
“They had this kind of regal appearance to them,” he said. “They shine, you know; they were up above everything else. They had labels that made them look like they were hundreds of years old.”
That curiosity followed him through 13 years behind the bar and eventually into owning his own establishment, Liberty in Tallahassee. It was there that he met Phil McDaniel, the founder of St. Augustine Distillery, who presented him with a project that would completely change the trajectory of his career.
At the time, DeMontmollin had been experimenting with home distilling for several years — creating spirits for himself and occasionally sharing them at weddings — but building a professional distillery was an entirely different challenge.
“I kind of just got out of Liberty. I had a broken foot at the time,” he recalled. “The first time I left the house in like a month and a half was Phil calling me up and saying, ‘I’m in town. Let’s get breakfast.’”
That conversation eventually brought him to St. Augustine, where he joined a team building the distillery from the ground up.
“Something that we wanted people to understand about us from day one is that we had no blueprint to work from,” DeMontmollin said. “We had to kind of create this out of thin air.”
Eight years later, that process of creation is still ongoing. For DeMontmollin, one of the biggest lessons has been accepting that skill doesn’t mean knowing everything.
“I talked so much about it that I got it tattooed on me,” he said. “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
The phrase turned out to be more than a personal reminder; it became a philosophy for how he approaches distilling. Every breakthrough, he explained, comes from inquisitiveness and teamwork rather than certainty.
“It can’t be from arrogance, it can’t be from pride,” he said. “It all has to be from a place where you’re like, ‘I couldn’t possibly know everything. What do you know? Let’s work together to try to come up with the best process.’”
On the production floor, that philosophy translates into patience.
“When you're in this business, you're living in the future,” he said. “There are things that I did to our bourbon four years ago that you won't be able to taste for another year.”
That long-term vision shapes every decision made inside the distillery. Instead of chasing fads or rushing new releases, the production team spends years refining recipes, learning from each batch before making another adjustment.
For DeMontmollin, patience is what makes the final product meaningful. One of his proudest accomplishments at the distillery was the creation of Reserve Rum, a premium recipe that took nearly five years of experimentation and refinement.
“It’s truly like a tear-inducing moment when you have worked on something for like five years of your life, and you finally hand it over to somebody for the first time, and they just rave,” he said.
DeMontmollin compared the process to building a curry. Individual ingredients may appear ordinary on their own, but together they create something considerably greater than the sum of their parts. For him, distilling is less about following a predetermined formula and more about discerning how each element contributes to the final experience.
Not every recipe needs changing, though.
“The gin is the only spirit in this building that has never changed recipe. I can't really find a way to improve it,” he said.
That careful balance between innovation and restraint has guided the distillery through award-winning releases, new recipes and years of experimentation, but DeMontmollin is quick to point out that those accomplishments belong to more than just one person. Every bottle represents the work of the farmers, production team and community members who contribute along the way.
“We’re always a constant project,” DeMontmollin said. “We’re moving on.”
For many businesses, growth is measured by expansion: more production, more distribution, more customers. However, for the St. Augustine Distillery, success has always been measured differently.
“We kind of have this ethos of deep, not wide,” DeMontmollin said.
Despite having the ability to increase production, the distillery intentionally remains below the industry’s craft production limit. Beyond that threshold, the business model changes dramatically; for DeMontmollin, staying small is less about limitation and more about preservation.
“We want to make sure that we’re in St. Augustine, we’re taking care of our people here first,” he said. “We want to rep St. Augustine and then, more importantly, Florida first, and then we’ll get outside of that when we can. But we don’t want to grow too big.”
This philosophy expands beyond the bottles themselves. Staying rooted in the community allows the distillery to retain the direct relationships that molded its identity from the beginning: educating visitors during tastings, supporting local events and creating spirits with the necessary patience.
Intentionality guides the distillery’s approach to sustainability. After production, 100% of their spent grain is sent to a local farm, where it becomes feed for cattle rather than waste. The cooling water is also captured and reused in the production process, allowing the distillery to operate as a zero-wastewater facility.
These decisions aren’t simply environmental initiatives; they reflect the same belief that guides their craft. For St. Augustine Distillery, creating more has never been the goal. Making something meaningful and making it responsibly is.
The most significant benchmark of St. Augustine Distillery’s success may not be found in its awards, production numbers or future plans, but in the people who continue to give the building its purpose.
For Amy Rubenstein, a member of the distillery’s retail team, that connection began before she ever worked there. She was a customer waiting alongside the community for the release of the distillery’s bourbon.
“I think the one thing you can’t take away from us is that we are the first legal bourbon distillery in the state of Florida,” she said. “The owners took the time and the resources to wait for the bourbon to mature and age the way it should.”
That patience, she explained, represents something larger about the company’s identity. If they were willing to do things intentionally with their first product, they would carry that same care into everything that followed.
Twelve years after opening its doors, St. Augustine Distillery remains what it has always been: a company built not only around what it creates, but around the community that helped create it.
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