The Story
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As a curious teenager, she would rifle through her mother’s kitchen for face mask ingredients, mixing and matching recipes from her grandmother's “home remedies” book based on what was on hand in the cupboards.
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Years later, she earned her bachelor's degree in biological sciences from the University of California at Santa Barbara with the intention of entering the modern medical field. But the dogma of Western medicine never quite meshed with Jovie, and in 2010 she left the world of emergency veterinary medicine in San Francisco to learn how to tend bar in Portland, Oregon.
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This was where it began, as she earned her diploma in Holistic Health Practice at The American College of Healthcare Sciences while simultaneously bartending to challenge her shy comfort zone.
Jovie Hawthorn Browne is a creatrix, herbalist, bartender, and the founder of the Spirit Haus.
From 2016- 2020, though, she closed the shop to focus on growing her massive medicinal and culinary herb garden. Now in Springfield, she also spent this time honing the skills she had acquired as a bartender in Portland as she designed and ran the original bar program for George + Violet’s Steakhouse, poured absinthe and mixed innovative cocktails at Bar Purlieu, and begrudgingly lit Spanish Coffees on fire at Marche, just to list a few.
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While doing research for opening her own brick and mortar bar, she was inspired as she saw the food truck movement merging with the craft cocktail movement, and decided to single-handedly redesign and remodel the Spirit Haus Saloon Vintage Traveling Bar.
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The Spirit Haus Saloon's first wedding season was booking up for 2020, but with the arrival of COVID-19 and the massive losses that occurred across all walks of life, Jovie found herself unable to cater to the events industry in which she had spent a decade working.
At the same time, hits to the closed Rex Apothecary website reached new highs, as people frantically searched for natural ways to support themselves and their loved ones through a pandemic.
It only made sense to reopen The Rex Apothecary as Spirit Haus Botanicals and merge it with the Spirit Haus Saloon under one roof!
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Our mobile bar is licensed with Lane County as a Class-3 Mobile unit, which allows it to serve as a commercial kitchen for our ingestible offerings.
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Jovie researches, formulates, crafts, pours, and packages each item herself, down to designing and printing each product label. This provides a final seal that the crafter's hand went into each individual item, from start to finish, transferring the love, energy, and power of the artisan's intention directly to whoever uses it.
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The items that she crafts are from nature. And nature, like humanity, is constantly fluctuating and adapting as the wheel of the year turns.
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