You buy a drink, they plant a tree. How Macon’s Longleaf distillery celebrated birthday
In an effort to celebrate a birthday and promote tree planting, Longleaf Distilling Co. agreed to plant a new longleaf pine tree for every cocktail sold Saturday.
The distillery sold 409 cocktails. Longleaf Distilling Co. already plants a pine tree every time a bottle of its spirits is sold, and Saturday’s celebration was just an extension of that effort.
“We believe in making spirits with a purpose. From day one, we’ve committed to planting a tree for every bottle sold,” said Sasha Rex, Longleaf’s marketing manager. “For our 2nd birthday celebration, we extended that mission by planting a tree for every signature cocktail sold during the event. It’s a fun, community-driven way to connect the celebration back to something bigger - the restoration of one of the South’s most vital and endangered ecosystems.”
Rex said that the longleaf pine forest was once the second largest forest system in North America, covering over 90 million acres from Virgina to Texas. Today, there are only around 3 million acres remaining due to logging, land conservation and changes in natural fire cycles.
Co-founder and owner, Will Robinson, said they picked Longleaf to be the name as a way for the distilling company to be representative of the South without any negative connotation.
“You can tell the history of the south through the history of the longleaf pine,” Robinson said. “It’s a really fascinating story that a lot of people aren’t really familiar with, and I really like the correlation of this mysterious, lost forest and lost tree, and spirits and distilling in the South.
“They have a very similar history. People consume spirits every day, but most people have no idea where they come from, how they’re made, or the history that’s behind them. It’s all kind of shrouded in mysticism.”
Naming the distilling company after longleaf pines serves as a tribute to the legacy of the forest and as a reminder to give back to the land that inspires their work, Rex said.
This year alone, Longleaf Distilling Co. has helped plant 85,000 Longleaf pine trees in collaboration with the Longleaf Alliance and Mercer University. Longleaf Distilling Co. funded 55,000 of those 85,000 trees planted.
The trees were planted on a 150 acre plot of land owned by Mercer University in Crawford County.
The land was bought years ago to build an observatory atop a historic sand dune on the site with a telescope gifted by an alumni member, but what to do with the rest of the land was undetermined. Professor Heather Bowman Cutway suggested they replant a longleaf pine ecosystem.
Longleaf pines are incredibly resilient, often living up to 700 years, and supporting one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the continent, according to Rex.
“(We’re) essentially building an entire ecosystem back,” Robinson said. “It’s going to be a teaching forest, so it’s not going to be farmed, but rather be sustainably burned.”
“We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished together, and this weekend’s event helps keep that momentum going,” Rex said.
Longleaf primarily makes clear spirits from vodka to gin to liqueurs. They offer a full cocktail menu and some finger foods along with tours and mixology classes too.
“We probably have well over 20 spirits in house at this point,” Robinson said. “Our number one seller is our vodka. It’s really good, and it has to be really good because it’s the base of our whole program that we distill in house. Our gin is made from that same base, and basically all of our liqueurs. We take a lot of care on that starting foundation and then building from there.”
The retail storefront, bar and production facility are in a renovated historic building on Second Street in downtown Macon, but the company sells its spirits in stores and restaurants across the state.
“We’re community focused. It would have been a lot easier and probably cheaper to just put up a metal building out in the middle of the country somewhere and go from there, but we wanted to be downtown,” Robinson said. “One of our core missions is to aid the redevelopment of downtown and keep us going on such a positive trajectory.”
