Most distilleries build their identity around a grain, a barrel, or a hometown. LI Salted Spirits, tucked into a tasting room at 305 Railroad Avenue in Sayville, built its around a mineral: sea salt, harvested by hand off the Long Island coast and worked into nearly every bottle the distillery makes.

The distillery is the work of Dan and Heather Garbarino, who began selling their spirits commercially in 2021 before opening their Sayville tasting room to the public in July 2025. Dan Garbarino's background is in professional kitchens, not distilling, and it shows in how he talks about the product. "As a chef, I learned the importance of using just the right amount of salt to bring out the flavor in a dish," he has said of the approach, treating salt less as a gimmick and more as a technique borrowed straight from the restaurant world and applied to a bottle.

That philosophy runs through the entire lineup. The distillery's Salted Vodka starts as a potato vodka distilled ten separate times with sea salt worked into the process. Its Salted Whiskey is built from corn, rye and malted barley, aged three years in charred oak barrels that have themselves been rubbed down with sea salt before the whiskey ever touches them. A Salted Spiced Rum rounds out the core spirits lineup, cured with orange peels, vanilla and cinnamon alongside the salt. From there, the distillery bottles a run of canned cocktails, including Sea Foam, a Hard Lemonade, a DG Hard Ice Tea, the Sunfish, a Hard Rum Punch and a Hard Half & Half, giving the salted concept a lower-proof, grab-and-go version for anyone not looking to sit down with a full pour.

The salt itself is not generic. LI Salted Spirits sources it from Amagansett Sea Salt, a small operation that hand-harvests salt directly from the Atlantic off the East End, using traditional methods rather than industrial evaporation. It is about as local an ingredient as a Long Island distillery can claim, pulled from the same ocean visible from the region's beaches and worked into the whiskey barrels miles away in Sayville.

Sayville itself is not incidental to the story. Dan Garbarino's family has run food businesses in the hamlet for close to a century: his great-grandfather opened a grocery store there in the 1920s, his grandfather ran Garbarino Bros. Market from the 1930s into the 1960s, and his father owned Potbelly Deli from 1981 to 2002. LI Salted Spirits, in that light, is less a break from the family business than a continuation of it, run out of the same hometown, built around the same instinct for what makes food and drink taste right.

The spirits are now carried in roughly 40 wine and liquor stores across Nassau and Suffolk counties, and the Sayville tasting room is open to the public Thursday through Saturday for anyone who wants the story straight from the source, poured a few miles from the ocean the salt actually came from.