Best Path to Professional Happiness:

Brian Sammons

Brian Sammons' career path took a few turns, starting with a pre-9/11 job in CIA counterintelligence, followed by a law practice. Corporate life paid the bills but didn’t include a stipend of joy. With a dabbler’s interest in distilling, he opened Twisted Path Distillery (2018 S. First St.) in 2014. Dock 18 Cocktail Lab is its tasting room. With just one other full-timer, he does all the production and “a lot of multi-tasking,” he says. Keeping the small-batch focus is Sammons’ goal. Though he plans to expand the line (to liqueurs!), “I’m not aiming to be Bacardi. A happy result for me is not that I make something a lot of people like, but something that a few people love.”