The Craft Revolution Just Got Stronger

Helmed by Hollywood doyens Walton Goggins and Matthew Alper, Mulholland Distilling adds fuel to the explosion in independent spirits

- Jason Horn

“I drink whiskey with my friends, vodka with people I don’t know and gin with people I’m doing business with,” says Walton Goggins as he settles into one of the Mulholland Room’s vintage oversize couches. You probably know Goggins from Justified, The Hateful Eight, Vice Principals or Ant-Man and the Wasp, but the actor is also co-owner of Mulholland Distilling, a downtown Los Angeles–based booze brand that makes all three spirits. Friends, strangers and businessmen: Goggins has you covered.

The Mulholland Room, packed with shabbychic furniture and locally produced art, serves as the office and private bar for the distilling concern, which is the brainchild of Goggins’s longtime friend Matthew Alper. After more than 20 years as a cameraman (working on everything from Free Willy to The Avengers), Alper happened to meet a distiller at a party in North Carolina. As he tells it, the distiller observed, “Y’all drink a lot in Los Angeles, but you don’t really have a local spirit. Why is that?” That conversation took place in 2013. Goggins came onboard the next year, and by 2016 Mulholland had officially launched.