Last fall, a tiny sign appeared along Highway 1 whose name would likely be a mystery to all but the most discerning cocktail aficionados: King Floyd’s. The sign points up the driveway to the former Point Reyes Vineyards, directing delivery drivers to a large green warehouse overlooking Tomales Bay.
Inside, a small team produces and packages an array of award-winning cocktail bitters made from carefully sourced organic ingredients, each bottle with a mysterious figure in a threadbare antique suit and cravat peering from the label. He has piercing eyes, a scraggly beard, unkempt hair, and a crown perched atop his head, slightly askew.
His visage is meant to evoke the rough-and-tumble days of the Barbary Coast, the San Francisco red-light district born during the Gold Rush that bustled with saloons, gambling dens, jazz clubs, and brothels.
The bitters industry is dominated by one giant company, Angostura, which has been around since the 1800s. But during the craft cocktail renaissance of the last two decades, small batch, artisanal producers have emerged, and King Floyd’s has made a name for itself.
The brand is well known among “the upper-echelon, hipster mixology crowd,” even in tough markets like New York City, according to Jeff Burkhart, who has won 10 “Best Bartender in Marin” awards and writes a cocktail column for the Marin Independent Journal.
The serial entrepreneur behind King Floyd’s Bar Provisions is Lawrence Floyd Batterton, age 60, a once-and-future Woodacre resident whose first business, based in San Rafael, was called Orca’s Killer Ice Cream. Its products, cooled in chests packed with dry ice, were delivered around town, Good Humor style, via tricycles back in the 1980s and early ’90s.
“Orca’s went up like a rocket and down like a missile,” said Mr. Batterton, an amiable fellow with an easy smile whose blond beard shows hints of gray. (He overinvested in manufacturing equipment for Orca’s that, in hindsight, he knows he should have contracted out.)
After Orca’s went belly-up, Mr. Batterton scanned help wanted ads in a newspaper and landed on a role about which he knew nothing: materials manager for a vitamin manufacturing company called Tishcon Corporation. He hit it off with the owner, Deepak Chopra—not the famous one—and launched himself down an entirely different career path.
The job introduced him to the world of dietary supplements, and specifically to the global trade in botanical raw materials. Eventually, he branched off and built his own company—Batterton Brokerage—which sells natural health products to grocery chains such as Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Mollie Stone’s.
King Floyd’s is Mr. Batterton’s passion project. “I’ve put so much of my life into it—the past 10 years, and everything I’ve been able to drum up financially from the other business,” he said.
One of his earliest brokerage customers was Mitch Coven, a renowned clinical herbalist who is president and C.E.O. of Vitality Works, a manufacturer of nutritional supplements. Over three decades doing business together, the two men have become close friends.
The seed of the King Floyd’s idea was planted one fateful evening during a visit to Mr. Coven’s home in New Mexico, when he mixed an old fashioned for Mr. Batterton and squeezed in a drop of gentian root, a bittering herb long used in digestive preparations.
“I was like, ‘What are you putting in there? What’s that?’” Mr. Batterton said.
He went home and began reading and experimenting. The process of making bitters is essentially the same as for herbal tinctures: You take botanicals such as orange peel, cacao nibs, or cardamom, and grind them, soak them, or percolate them in a high-proof alcohol and water solution.
Mr. Batterton tinkered with ingredients and ratios for three years before putting his aromatic bitters on the market. “I took them around to bartenders and people with really good palettes and asked them to check them out,” he said. “You’re trying to get the balance right so that the Manhattan or old fashioned or whatever you’re making has the maximum flavor profile.”
The goal is to add subtlety and depth without overpowering the drink. “You want it to be a little complex,” he says. “A little essence of this, that, and the other.”
Mr. Batterton is easygoing and unpretentious. He dresses for work as though he might be heading to the local pub, wearing jeans, a King Floyd’s baseball cap and a black sweatshirt adorned with the company logo. His yellow Labrador retriever, Blue, follows him everywhere he goes, pestering him to play ball.
King Floyd’s makes 15 varieties of bitters, including its signature aromatic blend, which has 10 ingredients, and several single-strain varieties—cardamom, lavender, orange, Buddha’s Hand citrus, cherry cacao, plum, and green hatch chili.
The company sources most of its ingredients close to home. Many of its herbs come from Monterey Herb Company, the plums come from his neighbors, and he grows the chilies in has backyard in San Anselmo. He will continue to do so when he completes his move back to Woodacre, which is underway.
King Floyd’s sells other provisions, too: cocktail peanuts, bar salts and a line of non-alcoholic soda drinks with bitters, which are sold at the Palace Market and other groceries around West Marin. The bitters are on the shelves of the Old Western, Smiley’s, and Papermill Creek saloons.
Mr. Batterton has signed on well-known brand ambassadors, including Damon Boelte, a New York cocktail maven who co-hosts “The Speakeasy,” a podcast that is must-listening for hipster mixologists. Also on the team is Josh Burks, a local mixology giant who cut his teeth at Peri’s Silver Dollar in Fairfax.
Mr. Batterton’s experience in the supplement business has served him well in the bitters world, where he takes a science-based approach to his formulations, Mr. Burkhart said.
“Lawrence is gregarious and genuine, and he asks a lot of questions,” he said. “He has a genuine curiosity about the products themselves and how they’re manufactured—what makes them taste better, how they interact with each other.”
Mr. Batterton previously operated King Floyd’s out of a warehouse in Novato with a less-than-picturesque view of Highway 101. The view from his new hillside space is a major upgrade, with the bay glistening below and the Inverness Ridge across it. If he works late, the sunsets are spectacular. From time to time, if he forgets to close the gate, long-horned cattle from the neighboring ranch might wander into the bay doors of the warehouse.
King Floyd’s occupies just half of the cavernous space, which still has remnants of the late Steve Doughty’s wine business and other odds and ends, including a dusty Model J Ford that looks like it couldn’t drive anywhere. The walls are lined with racks of cardboard boxes, while plastic barrels full of extracts stand near a table. On a recent Friday, Huy Tran, one of the company’s employees, sealed tincture bottles and packed then into decorative boxes.
Just outside Mr. Batterton’s office, the team is slowly reconstructing its Novato tasting room. The bar is set up, and a pool table stands in the center. There’s an Elvis decanter on a shelf and an antique bicycle in the rafters.
King Floyd’s is renting the space from Chris Hulls, the Point Reyes Station tech entrepreneur who purchased the winery with some partners last year. Mr. Batterton signed a lease after learning about the warehouse from Jeremy D’Antonio, who manages properties for Mr. Hulls and his nonprofit Point Reyes Good Luck Fund. (King Floyd’s is a private tenant, not part of the fund’s portfolio.)
Mr. D’Antonio plays in the band San Geronimo, along with Darren Nelson, who designs the labels for King Floyd’s. One night, after one of Mr. Nelson’s shows, they sipped cocktails on Mr. Batterton’s boat while it was anchored in Loch Lomond.
“We started just kind of scatting back and forth about this seafaring character, this mystery man, who started a company in old San Francisco and traveled all around the world gathering herbs and spices from exotic places,” Mr. Nelson said.
They based the label design on a photograph that Mr. Batterton found in the bottom of a shoe box at a flea market in Fairfax. They made an exhaustive but unsuccessful attempt to identify the man, who had no idea he would one day become a craft spirits icon.
The pair knew their brand had arrived when they saw a bottle of King Floyd’s cherry cacao bitters on the set of a Saturday Night Live skit several years ago.
“I couldn’t have been more proud,” Mr. Nelson said.