New Scotland Spirits reinvigorates Albany’s cocktail culture
By James A. Peterson
Leave it to Jesse Sommer, the combatively loquacious founder of New Scotland Spirits, to turn his Tasting Room’s hours of operation into a political statement.
“[We’re open] 11am to 11pm, every day of the week,” he says, hand balled into a fist with index finger pointed skyward. “That’s every federal holiday. Yom Kippur. Christmas.”
Jesse, an Army veteran and self-anointed “Sheriff of Lark Street,” is militant about the revitalization of this historic corridor. Beyond opening his distilling company’s first brick-and-mortar location here, he’s also now a Lark Street resident. And this is the hill he’s dying on.
“If we have to operate at a loss 30 percent of the day, so be it,” he says of the Tasting Room’s 12-hour daily accessibility. “This is an investment in our neighborhood. It’s how you drive out the decay, how you start a trend. This [Tasting Room] is a declaration that Lark Street is open for business any time of day, any day of the week. We’re bringing back that turn-of-the-millennium Lark Street we all glorify. It starts with ensuring there’s always something to do here.”
By that metric, he’s off to a good start. As if spontaneously generated from a once darkened corner of the Lark Street/State Street intersection, the New Scotland Spirits Tasting Room emerged just four months ago to become Albany’s buzziest cocktail lounge.
Much of that is due to the influence of his business partner, Rosamaria Luppino, who’s proving that the company is as adept at crafting cocktails as it is in crafting their ingredients. And in so doing, New Scotland Spirits is providing a whole new justification for kickin’ it down in Center Square.
New Scotland Spirits donated $3 from the sale of every “Breast Cancer Cosmo” to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
“These are all original recipes,” Rosamaria tells me while preparing the bright pink “limited edition” specialty cocktail she designed to commemorate Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “We want to show people what drinks made with premium spirits should taste like, all while delivering an elegant, intimate, and historically immersive experience.”
For a business whose roots lie in the Albany County boonies (i.e., the Town of New Scotland), it wasn’t exactly foreseeable that a team known for hoofing their spirits Upstate-wide would know how to run a bar. After all, precisely none of the company’s principals have any formal experience in this arena.
But they’re not letting a little inexperience slow them down. Despite lacking any formal training, Rosamaria conjured every single one of the Tasting Room’s two dozen trademark cocktails, and the public response has been overwhelmingly auspicious. Rosamaria believes this is because, as a policy, all her ingredients are assembled from scratch.
“We don’t use mixes, and none of our recipes incorporate commercial products,” she says with no small amount of pride. “Customers watch our barkeeps muddle fresh fruits or herbs, or amalgamate our own simple syrup. That’s how we differentiate ourselves. We’re an authentic experience that isn’t being replicated anywhere else in the District.”
Rosamaria credits Jesse with pioneering the drinks’ provocative names and uproarious descriptions. “He made our menu a literary experience,” she says. “It’s fun watching people crack up as they read all the selections.” But she isn’t shy about declaring her authorship of the taste.
She’s known at the Tasting Room as “Queen Whiskey Rosamaria,” and is the genius behind the company’s signature concoctions.
“He handed me a bunch of drink titles and off-the-wall short stories, and said ‘here’s our menu!’ All of a sudden it was my job to make drinks that looked amazing and tasted even better than they looked.” Rosamaria says she began researching century-old cocktail recipes and styles while scouring mixology handbooks for inspiration. “Developing cocktails that breathed life into our branding was no small feat,” she says, handing me the bright pink drink. “But take a sip of that. I think you’ll agree it all worked out.”
Agreed indeed. If you haven’t been here in person, the venue photos you’ve likely seen on social media have no doubt led you to suspect that you’ve been missing out. Modeled after any number of the high-end Albany speakeasies which flagrantly operated in defiance of Prohibition a hundred years ago, the Tasting Room radiates charm, class, and dare-I-say debauchery. (If you know, you know.)
Yet the big news now is that the Tasting Room’s already audacious 11-to-11 operating hours may soon extend even further on either side, because Rosamaria is about to introduce food into their operation.
“It’ll be simple at first,” she says. “Coffee and homemade espresso, bagels, muffins in the morning, then flatbreads, parfaits, gourmet pretzels, cheese and charcuterie boards in the afternoon. We’re also about to start offering happy hour drink specials with snacks, except that we’re calling it the ‘Helderberg Hour’ here. And it’ll be the place to celebrate your daily escape from the office.”
[Editor’s note: “Helderberg” is the name of the New Scotland Spirits brand line, in honor of the mountain range on the western edge of Albany County.]
According to Jesse, the expansion of the Tasting Room’s offerings (both menu and time) is only possible because business has been so good. He believes that’s a function of the space itself.
Emma and Donovan selected the Tasting Room’s cozy, elegant ambience as the backdrop for their engagement photos.
Scott and Natasha, pictured here with Jesse, are the lovebirds whose relationship began at the bar during the Tasting Room’s first week of operations.
“I bet you’ve never once walked into a high-end bar that’s actually like ‘Cheers’,” he says, alluding to the hit 1980s sitcom. “The patrons are all talking to one another, they’re conversing with the bartender, they’re openly sharing gripes and desires, and the whole show is just one big family conversation among strangers who met at the bar. That’s what you have here.”
The Tasting Room is too small for private seating, he explains, while noting their deliberate choice to keep the Prohibition Era jazz soundtrack low.
“This is how you foster conversation,” he says. “We’ve amassed a solid group of regulars who’ve made these bar stools their second home, and we’re routinely attracting curious first-timers who end up just as engrossed in that ongoing conversation.”
“It’s why our patrons feel such a connection to this place,” Rosamaria adds. “In just four months, we’ve already had a bride and groom stage their engagement photos here, and we claim responsibility for being the place where two of our customers met the very first week we were open. They’ve been dating ever since, and still going strong.”
“Just like this Tasting Room,” Jesse says, seizing the last word. “We’re not going anywhere.”