Page 12 January 28, 2021 EL SEGUNDO HERALD
Rob Rubens from front page
adapted his business to help produce hand
sanitizer at the start of quarantine when producers
weren’t able to keep up with demand,
and he got a license to deliver alcohol. He
Jax, Top Dog at R6.
and his team look forward to an automated
bottling line and potential expansion. In the
future, he hopes to keep encouraging his
guests and his community to chase their
dreams, and he’s excited to serve cocktails
and interact again in person.
Outside of his work, Rubens is an adventurer.
He goes drag racing, sky diving, small
plane flying, and he loves to hike and travel
with his girlfriend and his dog, Jax, who is
a five-year-old Doberman and the resident
distillery dog.
As El Segundo’s first distillery, south bay’s
only distillery, and LA’s first bourbon, Rob
Rubens keeps education on the spirit at the
center of his work, with the heart of his great
grandfather’s enterprise driving him on. •
before they became distilling instruments
and tells of the “history and the love and
the romance” of the building there that had
withstood Hurricane Katrina and so many
historical events. From that moment on, Rob
wanted to be a part of this new community
and learn the trade.
“I want to do this, and do something more
tangible than handing out paper deliverables to
people,” he says. A friend of a friend taught
him how to home brew on his balcony, and
from there, he wanted to learn how to distill
it down to whiskey or vodka. Rob spent
his time visiting distilleries and breweries,
actually paying some people to let him work
for them and study their craft, like a reverse
paid internship.
About a year after this fateful tour, he
opened R6 Distillery, named for his great
grandfather and his five brothers. After about
nine months of looking for a property to call
R6 home, he came upon his current location
here in El Segundo, where everything seemed
to fit and work for his business. Inspired by
the entrepreneurship of his family and the
stories of the theater during the Roaring 20s
and the Prohibition Era, he made his dream a
reality and tipped his hat to his family history
by designing his taste room like a speakeasy.
“This could be 1920 Prohibition or 2020
Prohibition,” he jokes, noting that designing
this was perhaps foreshadowing that we’d be
in another kind of prohibition with everything
shut down right now during the pandemic.
At R6, Rob is very hands-on. He describes
his business as a small family-owned operation
and says that they do everything from
start to finish on location: milling, mashing,
fermenting, distilling, blending, bottling.
“I love the challenges that it presents, because
it’s never the same day to day in my
position,” says Rubens, from navigating new
laws and restrictions on the business side to
recipe development on the creative side. Their
cocktail director, who’s been in the industry for
a number of years, food scientists, and Rubens
himself, who has experience on the distillation
side, put their minds together to get the recipe
just right. Last year, he helped create a caramel
whiskey, as well as hard seltzers that are set to
be released this year. Currently, he is working
on absinthe. This component of fun, as well
as interacting with his highly dedicated and
super passionate R6 team, encourages him to
keep going with his business.
Rob produced LA County’s first locally
distilled bourbon. He talks about their two
main bourbons: Blue Corn Bourbon and their
R6 Bourbon. He describes the blue corn, a
seven-grain blend, as a “much more complex”
whiskey, while he says the R6 is a unique drink
and also a “gateway bourbon” to becoming a
bourbon lover, being reminiscent in the aroma,
nose, and taste to other high rye bourbons.
Pre-Covid, R6 catered to a wide array of
events and clients– anything from air force
promotion parties, to weddings, to memorial
services, Halloween parties, birthdays,
surprise parties, and happy hours.
He welcomed guests into his tasting room,
where he and his team could serve cocktails
and present high-quality spirits. If there’s one
thing he wishes people knew about spirits,
it would be the importance of opening your
mind. Many people, he explains, come into
his speakeasy and say they absolutely hate
vodka, for example “Open your mind to it,
and let us show you that you might like it,”
he says, going on to say that there is a huge
delta between a quality spirit and a lot of
what is out on the market. What you might
have tasted before may not be how that spirit
tastes across the board. He believes there is
a lot of room for people to convert to liking
drinks they might not have tasted otherwise.
When Covid hit,R6 does everything from milling to bottling on site. Rubens had to pivot. He
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