Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 3, No. 4 - January 28, 2021
Inside
This Issue
Business Briefs...................2
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................7
Classifieds............................2
Entertainment......................2
Hawthorne............................3
Huber’s Hiccups..................3
Lawndale..............................4
Inglewood.............................5
Legals.................................6,7
Pets........................................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
AM Rain
55˚/46˚
Saturday
Partly
Cloudy
58˚/45˚
Sunday
Partly
Cloudy
64˚/50˚
Lawndale Tribune
AND lAwNDAle News
Hawthorne Press Tribune
Featuring the Weekly Newspapers of Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lawndale
Longtime MLB Home Run King
Hank Aaron Dies at Eighty-Six
From breaking home run hitting records to breaking racial barriers, you will always be remembered as a true American hero. Photo courtesy SoFi Stadium.
From Old Vaudeville to Vodka,
Rob Rubens Raises Your Spirits
By Kiersten Vannest
The year is 1926. A grand vaudeville
movie palace opens in Joliet, Illinois,
right next to Chicago, to the tune of two
million dollars. “New Rialto Square is
One of Country’s Finest Theaters” reads
an opening day headline in the Exhibitor’s
Herald. Founded by the six Rubens
brothers, the Rubens Rialto Theater
opening week included twenty-foot-long
banners above Main Street, one hundred
custom pennants hung on trolly wires,
ten thousand stickers, a parade, three
bands playing in separate parts of the
city, fireworks, confetti, and a giant searchlight.
Three generations and about eighty-eight
years later, Rob Rubens took a trip to New
Orleans as a management consultant to speak
at a convention. On a whim, his sister-in-law
invited him on a distillery tour while he was
there. They went to the New Orleans Rum
Distillery, and Rob knew right then that his
path was about to change.
“I absolutely fell in love with the idea
of making spirits. [It was a] lightbulb moment,
totally.” He describes the New Orleans
Distillery as an “eclectic mix of European
tanks and equipment” that were once used
for perfume manufacturing long 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
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
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 See Rob Rubens, page 4