By Matthew Shechmeister

VISITING A DISTILLERY can make you sentimental, even before you start drinking. Standing before the massive fermentation tanks, you look back on your relationship with hard alcohol, flashing through the good times and the so very bad, and you think, "It all started in a place just like this." Fortunately, nostalgia doesn't last long at Alameda's St. George Spirits (2601 Monarch, Alameda. 510-769-1601, www.stgeorgespirits.com), a small distillery that hopes to bring new excitement to our love affair with liquor.

The distillery has been doing its part by introducing the United States to European-style "craft distillation," the spirits equivalent of microbrewing. It's a Left Coast kind of project, and St. George's products can be found in restaurants and liquor stores throughout San Francisco and beyond, but the best way to experience the company's range of offerings is to visit the distillery. St. George's tasting room is open every week from Wednesday through Sunday, and $10 buys you one professional tasting glass, known as a grappa in the industry, that you can fill with a generous sip of each of the company's products (so be sure to pick a designated driver).

Founder Jörg Rupf brought the craft to the West Coast from the vicinity of Freiberg, Germany, where his family owned a brewery that supplied beer to the local market and distilled eau-de-vie, a fruit brandy, on the side. Initially, Rupf passed over the beer business for a law career in Munich, but while doing postgraduate work at UC Berkeley in 1979, he fell in love with the Bay Area. As Rupf recalls, "It inspired me to give up the law and do something that had meaning for me."

After a stint at a winery, Rupf decided to return to his roots and start making eau-de-vie from California fruit. He took advantage of a partial liberalization of laws governing the production of alcohol. "Before 1980," he says, "it was literally impossible for a small distillery to exist." At the time, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms required distillers to pay one of its agents to turn the stills on and off each day, an extra cost that only larger companies could afford. The climate today is better, but not ideal. "The business here favors the big guys," Rupf explains. For example, distillers may not sell their products directly, but instead have to convince distributors to buy and market them, a hurdle that favors the existing brands. That's a shame for consumers, because St. George distills some delicious spirits that shouldn't be missed.

Some of those flavors are the creations of Lance Winters, the master distiller at St. George Spirits, a man whose job is to get genies into bottles. Six years ago, Winters came from a microbrewery to St. George with hopes of learning the art of distillation from Rupf. He is now a co-owner of the business and remains eager to ferment just about anything he can find. "The sense of smell and the sense of taste are where you can get straight to a person's mind, there's no logic to them.... It's a cool path for communication," he says. Together, Winters and Rupf have assembled an impressive lineup that includes liqueurs, infused vodkas, whiskey, and several varieties of eau-de-vie, all costing between $20 and $45 a bottle.

The infused vodkas, marketed under the name Hangar One, range from the tropical, ease-inducing mandarin-blossom infusion to a raspberry one that smells like it was picked right off the vine. If you get inspired, bottles are available for sale at a store located adjacent to the distillery. The variety of flavors means most people will find something they like, and a visit to the distillery is a great way to try a little bit of everything.

Located in a former jet hangar (hence the brand name) on the decommissioned Alameda Naval Air Station, St. George is part of the base's slow transformation from military to civilian use. The door to the tasting room opens onto a cluster of hulking fermentation tanks and a gleaming, 15-foot-high whiskey still, where a staff of six full-time employees clamber amid jets of steam to keep the operation running. In addition to seeing the birthplace of their beverages, visitors pick up cocktail-complimenting trivia, like the fact that whiskey begins life as uncarbonated beer. Winters and Rupf hope such knowledge will give visitors a new appreciation for the subtleties of spirits. As Winters puts it, "We hope people are going to start drinking less and start drinking better." That's one way to ensure your relationship with liquor goes deeper than shallow encounters and painful mornings after.