Meet the Collective | Justin Lavenue

Justin Lavenue got his start behind the bar when one day at his job bussing tables, the bartender didn’t show up to their shift. From there, he fell in love with the craft of mixing and mingling flavors, constructing drinks and serving guests. After learning the ropes and establishing himself in high-volume craft cocktail bars, Lavenue won GQ & Bombay Sapphire’s Most Imaginative Bartender 2015 competition in Las Vegas, NV, which landed him on the cover of the magazine, and was named one of Food & Wine Magazine’s “Best New Mixologists” of 2015. Fast-forward about 15 years from his first bartending shift, and Justin now owns and operates one of the world’s Top 500 Bars: The Roosevelt Room in Austin, Texas.

We sat down with Justin and asked about his years of experience in this industry and some takeaways he might have. He said what keeps him going is finding inspiration in different moments for flavor. “I think I find myself creating cocktails with the approach of really trying to have a drink tell a story. Whether it is a moment in someone’s life, or a memory, or a feeling.”

We invited Justin Lavenue into our Cocktail Collective to see how he would explore the flavors of Westland Flagship behind the bar. Lavenue takes his very ethos of looking to environment, moments, or particular feelings and brings it to this cocktail. Justin’s Signature Drink, Heading Southwest: “is inspired by that feeling of excitement that you get when winter is ending and you’re about to take your first tropical getaway to ring in spring.”

The Heading Southwest cocktail features Westland Flagship in combination with tropical and earthy tones, stirred and served on a large rock to enjoy open notes as the drink dilutes slowly. After years of experience with different ingredients and products, we learned from Lavenue that great drinks come from great ingredients. Westland Whiskey tells a very specific story of place in both ingredients and flavor. And on this front, Lavenue says, “Westland really reminds me of where it’s made in the Pacific Northwest. It not only has a beautiful composition of different types of barley and strains of barley to make up its character, but some of that is peated so you have this nice really maritime pine forest quality to it while at the same time having these really nice campfire toasted marshmallow creme brulee notes to it. It’s a really beautiful wonderfully balanced and wonderfully complex spirit.” The ingredients he uses ultimately are chosen to highlight these nostalgic feelings and tones and to tell the story of time and place, encompassing all of the nuances in taste.