Charbay Distillery

Charbay Distillery is the Karakasevic family's craft spirits operation that traces its distilling heritage back 13 generations through a single Serbian distilling family lineage — making Charbay arguably the longest continuous distilling family in modern American craft spirits, with the current 13th-generation distiller Marko Karakasevic representing the unbroken family line that began with Miloslav Karakasevic distilling brandy in Serbia in the 1700s. The Karakasevic family emigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, and Miles "Mile" Karakasevic founded the modern California distillery operation in 1983 — predating St. George (1982) by months and making Charbay one of the very first modern post-Prohibition California craft distilleries.

The Charbay operation has historically run across two California locations: the original St. Helena (Napa Valley) facility associated with the Domaine Charbay winery operation, and the larger production facility in Ukiah (Mendocino County) where the distillery's main production has been concentrated through the modern era. The dual-location structure reflects the broader Karakasevic family business that combined wine production at the Napa property with brandy and spirits production at the Mendocino facility — a Serbian-distilling-tradition integration of wine and spirits production that's rare in American craft spirits.

The product range is genuinely unusual in the broader American craft scene. Charbay Whiskey Release I — distilled from bottle-ready Pilsner beer in 1999 and aged for over a decade — was one of the founding examples of whiskey distilled from beer, a category that's since grown into a meaningful sub-segment of American craft whiskey production. The expanded range covers Charbay Whiskey (multiple releases, each distilled from a different sourced beer base), Charbay Vodka (the brand's most-distributed product), Charbay Rum (aged in former American whiskey casks), Charbay Tequila Blanco, Charbay Brandy (the original family-tradition product line), Charbay Pastis (a French anise-based aperitif tradition product), Charbay Green Tea Vodka (one of the early American flavored vodka innovations), and a rotating range of limited bottlings tied to the broader family's experimental tradition.

The St. Helena and Ukiah visitor experiences offer two distinct touchpoints into the Karakasevic family operation. The St. Helena Napa Valley location pairs naturally with the broader Napa wine-country tourism circuit; the Ukiah Mendocino location offers a more rural, production-focused experience in the heart of California's North Coast wine and craft-beverage country. For visitors building a Northern California craft-spirits trip, Charbay anchors the heritage-and-tradition end of the modern California distilling scene that's grown up around the Karakasevic family's founding-era work.