When Nate Luce was just out of college he did what many young and artistically inclined people do in their early 20s: he moved to New York.
It was the beginning of the 2010s, and the city’s food and cocktail scene was in the midst of a major revival that would, in turn, help reshape food and drink culture across the county. When he wasn’t painting or playing in a psych rock band or otherwise getting involved in the art scene, Luce had a job that put him at the center of one of the burgeoning trends developing in the city at the time: He was one of the early employees at Kings County Distillery, the Brooklyn whiskey maker that set the bar for locally sourced, locally made, small-batch spirits.
Kings County made its name on corn and rye whiskeys — aged spirits with no additional flavorings. But it was a mistake made on one 5-gallon batch of Kings County liquor that became the basis for Luce’s own very different endeavor in making booze.
“I think it was like one of their first tries to make rye whiskey that went awry, it got a little burned,” Luce said, “and then they asked us, probably three employees at the time, if anyone wanted to mess around with it.”
Luce took the spirit and steeped it with wormwood, anise and other botanicals to make absinthe, the infamous liquor that was the intoxicant of choice for generations of avant-garde French artists, writers and poets, and that was long illegal in the United States. It was not all that different from the absinthe he now makes and sells in Rockland under his own Luce Spirits brand.
“I’m not even really sure at this point where that idea came from, like probably just like many other fairly recent college graduates I had seen the posters on people’s dorm rooms of like the ‘green fairy,’” Luce said, as absinthe was often depicted in Art Nouveau-era advertisements. “I looked up some old recipes, and then just got fixated on the botanical side of things more than the actual mashing, fermenting, barrel-aging side of things. It sort of broke my head open.”
Absinthe wasn’t just the social lubricant of choice of Fin de siècle France; it was a drink that came out of an herbalist medical tradition which itself bled into pre-modern religious and spiritual practices. In making it for himself, Luce was drawing on all of that history and tradition.
For the past five years, Luce Spirits on Main Street in Rockland — a production facility and tasting room that has slowly morphed into a full-blown bar — has continued the polycultural exploration into the history and culture of so-called rectified spirits like absinthe, gin, aquavit and others that are flavored with botanicals. But over time the project has morphed in other ways, too, becoming not just a bar where you can now drink both small-batch absinthe and cheap, watery beer, but one of those much-vaunted third places where community can gather outside the spheres of work and home.
“We are hopefully some combination of your neighborhood bar, a dive bar, and a place that is making extremely small batch locally sourced botanical spirits,” Luce said.
While Luce Spirits has become a social center for Rockland’s art and queer communities (which have a significant overlap), it’s not just for any one group.
“Some of my favorite days in here are when there are twentysomethings who work at a gallery at the bar, and then a couple of tourists from the Midwest, and then a couple of sailors from one of the schooners,” Luce said.
Luce moved to Rockland seven or eight years ago, and was walking down Main Street one day when he saw a For Rent sign in the front window of the former florist shop at the far north end of downtown.
“I had always been like, oh, it would be fun to start a distillery of my own, but had lived in places in my 20s and early 30s that were prohibitively expensive,” he said. After seeing the sign, he thought, “I guess I might as well call the number, just out of curiosity, see how much it is.”
He found himself talking to an acquaintance, Amy O’Donnell, the owner of the old Sugar Tools in Camden who runs a seasonal antiques store in the Main Street storefront next door. She told Luce not only what the relatively affordable rent was, but also had advice about which nonprofits and other business organizations that he could talk to about start-up grants and other support.
Luce Spirits opened in 2021, not long after the lockdown period of the pandemic ended, but still in the very uncertain moments of taking the first steps back into public life.
“It did not feel certain that we would still be in existence however many years later at the get go,” Luce said. “You know, we’re here on the sort of beaten up end of Main Street. We have Sammy’s Deluxe, our lodestar neighbor here, but also empty storefronts all around us. Even when they do the Sunday stroll and they shut down Main Street, they shut it down like a block away.”
The rough edges of the space have been slowly smoothed out over the years, and Luce Spirits has become a canvas of a sort for various local artists, like muralist and arts educator Alexis Iammarino, who painted the clouds on one of the bathroom doors, and for Luce’s own paintings, too.
Recently, the local design duo Twin Interior helped give the bar a refresh, making it a bit cozier — especially in the front-window nook that can be closed off with a curtain — while keeping a certain scrappy sensibility. The decor is a combination of thrifted furniture, like a pair of oversized rattan chairs with drink holders in the arm rests that came from the ReStore, and artistic touches like the little live-edge wooden bar that wraps around a column in the center of the room.
In this way, Luce Spirits has shifted not only from tasting room to botanically accented dive, but from business into community art practice, too. While there was a time when Luce tried to keep his own art and Luce Spirits on separate tracks — one his work as an artist, one a business that supported him — it’s all melding together now in a way that feels both new and exciting.
Luce points to artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, famous for making a performance out of cooking and serving noodles in a gallery setting, and the sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark who founded the restaurant FOOD in SoHo in the 1970s along with Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard. FOOD was the kind of place where you could order the dish of the day and also see installation works, like the cherry tree that was planted in the basement during the wintertime and forced into bloom under grow lights.
Earlier this year, Luce Spirits started hosting a series of mini artists talks by residents at the new Ellis-Beauregard Foundation campus, which is just a short walk away, and also holds other more bar-like events like karaoke and trivia night.
Recently, the bar held a fundraiser party to help raise money for people who were affected by the fire at Robbins Lumber in Searsmont. Like many people in the Midcoast, Luce was thinking about how he could help, and landed on getting people together.
“We can throw a party that can raise a little bit of money, and also give people an opportunity to get some catharsis, you know, just like the communal experience,” he said.
Afterward, a friend of Luce’s who recently moved to the Midcoast from New York, where he had been a Club Kid, came up to him and said, “I was reconciled to saying goodbye to going out dancing when I moved up here,” Luce recalled the friend saying. “First of all, thank you for giving that to me. Second of all, I feel like I saw a part of you in this fully realized vision of this space with you behind the DJ table here — like I could see this was your art.”
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.