Juniper Ridge Wilderness Fragrance Distillery Pop-up @ Fellow Barber

Oakland’s Juniper Ridge is packing up their California mountains-in-a-bottle distillery and bringing it to Brooklyn with a pop up shop, opening this Friday.

You may have seen the “Wilderness Fragrance Distillery” products at Franklin Street’s Alter Brooklyn, or at any one of NYC’s Fellow Barber shops; now’s your chance to experience the process that distills the essence of wild-foraged plants into their vaunted line of colognes, soaps, and incense.

All the right buzzwords—seasonal, small-batch, wild-crafted, foraged—back up the process that company founder, hiker, and gatherer Hal Newbegin explains with an impossibly evocative statement:

“I wanted to make things that were true to the plants and the places that they come from: real fragrance, a solid perfume that is a snapshot of a mountain meadow in the height of Cascade wildflower summer, a soap that smells just like a late season hike in the Northern Sierra, warm and bright fall sun with the smell of winter just around the corner.”

Newbegin’s summary of his company’s philosophy brings the above statement into less ethereal focus:  “We are the only company in the world extracting and formulating 100% real, plant-based fragrances. The only one. 100 years ago any of the big perfume houses in Paris could have made that claim. They used to work with real plants, but they gave it up a long time ago. We’re doing it the old fashioned way from start to finish.”

In addition to the on-site whiskey still used to produce their colognes, the pop up shop will feature a “transporter booth” in which people can experience Juniper Ridge hikes through film footage, real foliage, and fragrances. They’ll juice up the proceedings with record parties featuring Redwood martinis and an Old-Fashioned spruced up with their own Desert Sage.

“You never feel more alive than you do in the outdoors,” says Newbegin. “These Backpacker’s Colognes take you there.”

Juniper Ridge pop-up at Fellow Barber
Oct. 10 to Dec. 21
101 North 8th Street, Brooklyn

(718) 522-4959; fellowbarber.com