The Family Jones, LLC

The Family Jones is the dual-location Colorado craft spirits operation that built itself around a single editorial idea: that a distillery should be a cocktail bar first and a production facility second, and that the people developing the bar program should be the same people developing the spirits being served in it. Founded in 2016 by restaurant developer Paul Tamburello and master distiller Rob Masters, The Family Jones operates a main production distillery in Loveland, Colorado (which began producing spirits in December 2016) and the visually arresting Family Jones Spirit House in Denver's LoHi (Lower Highland) neighborhood (which opened in October 2017 as Denver's first distillery-restaurant).

Rob Masters is the operational hinge of the brand. A Colorado distilling industry veteran who co-founded the Colorado Distillers Guild and has been distilling and consulting since 2007, Masters built the Family Jones technical platform around a deliberate cocktail-program first orientation: spirits developed with specific cocktail builds in mind, mash bills and finishes tuned for the way the bar program intends to use them rather than the way a neat-sipping tasting tradition would prefer. The Loveland production site handles the broader wholesale and distribution volume; the LoHi Spirit House operates a working still (a beacon-style copper still that sits prominently above the bar) producing one-off small batches that get used exclusively in the Spirit House cocktail program.

The flagship product range is built around named "Jones" family members, each representing a specific spirit category: Ella Jones (the bourbon), Atticus Jones (the rye), Juniper Jones (the gin), Annika Jones (the vodka), and Mo Jones (the rum). Each release reflects Masters' technical orientation — the bourbons and ryes are blended and finished for cocktail application; the gin and vodka are developed with the specific cocktail-program needs in mind. The wholesale distribution from Loveland has scaled meaningfully across the Front Range, while the Spirit House's one-off cocktail program operates as the brand's continuous research-and-development laboratory.

The LoHi Spirit House visitor experience is one of Denver's most distinctive cocktail-program-forward distillery stops — the still sits above the bar like a sculptural installation, the cocktail program treats the Family Jones range as a working palette with bartender access to the small-batch still for one-off limited drinks, and the kitchen-and-bar restaurant format takes the food-and-drink integration further than most distillery tasting rooms do. The location at 3245 Osage Street puts Family Jones walking distance from Mythology and a short drive from Leopold Bros and Laws, anchoring the LoHi end of the Denver craft-spirits cluster.