OUR STORY

Jeff Warrin is dressed in stained white work pants, dusty boots and a well-worn broad-brimmed hat.

Tall and rangy, he has something of a cowboy saltmaker about him.

But he is an unlikely one. As an artist and filmmaker, he came to saltmaking with a curiosity about materials and process, and an inventor’s instinct for experimentation.

In 2021, while living in the seaside town of Bolinas, California, he began exploring different ways to evaporate seawater, building a small graduation tower packed with branches cut from apple trees.

By the end of that year, those experiments had moved to Tomales Bay, where he built and began operating a small saltworks for Hog Island Oyster Company, making salt on Tomales Bay.

The first batches made there tasted different from other salts he knew. They had an unusual depth and a pronounced, savory ocean character. Warrin became increasingly curious about what was different—not only about the way he was making the salt, but about the water itself.

It starts with the water

Point Reyes sits within one of the world’s four primary coastal upwelling systems, where persistent winds and the contours of the continental shelf bring cold, nutrient-rich water up from the depths. That water helps support the extraordinary productivity of the surrounding coast, from plankton and shellfish to salmon, seabirds and whales.

At the saltworks, seawater is collected on the incoming tide, as Pacific water moves into the bay from the Point Reyes coast.

Warrin believes the character of these waters carries into the salt—and that you can taste it.

Putting the wind to work

Point Reyes is not an easy place to make sea salt. The classic saltmaking regions of the world tend to offer long stretches of heat, dry air and dependable sun. Here, cool temperatures, fog and winter rain make conventional solar evaporation far less reliable.

But the coast does offer one remarkably dependable resource: wind.

That became Warrin’s key insight. Point Reyes might lack the conditions of a traditional saltmaking region, but its persistent coastal winds could be put to work as the primary engine of evaporation.

At the saltworks, he designed and built a larger evaporation tower from cast-off oyster production equipment and other repurposed materials, creating as much surface area as possible for moving air to act on the seawater.

Water is pumped to the top, spread across vertical mesh “sails” and collected below before beginning the trip again. With every pass, the wind removes a little more water. As the seawater concentrates, its mineral chemistry evolves along with it, gradually transforming seawater into a dense brine.  The answer was not to overcome the climate, but to make it part of the process.

Finishing over fire

The concentrated brine is transferred into a broad steel pan over a wood-fired brick oven.

What took days outside now begins to accelerate.

But the goal is not simply to boil away the remaining water. As the brine concentrates, different mineral salts begin to fall out of solution at different stages. By controlling temperature, timing the harvests and stopping before the brine is exhausted, Warrin can favor the clean, savory crystals he wants while leaving more of the bitter and metallic-tasting minerals behind.

He watches the surface, tastes the brine as it changes and harvests repeatedly rather than allowing the pan to simply boil dry.

There is no timer that tells him when the moment has arrived.

He watches. He tastes. Then he harvests by hand.

Learning from Master Saltmakers

Once the saltworks was up and running, Warrin became increasingly interested in how other artisanal saltmakers had adapted their techniques to the particular places where they worked.

That curiosity took him to Japan and Europe, to visit working saltworks and meet saltmakers.

In Europe, he finally saw in person the traditional graduation towers that had inspired his early experiments—structures where brine is trickled over densely packed branches and repeatedly exposed to moving air.

Japan offered a different kind of education. There, Warrin saw a far more nuanced approach to the same questions he had been wrestling with over his own wood-fired pan—how heat, timing and successive harvests could be used to control mineral balance, flavor and texture.

In August 2026, Warrin took full ownership of the saltworks and began operating it independently as Point Reyes Saltworks.

Tradition & transformation

The saltworks is part traditional craft, part kinetic installation and part alchemist’s laboratory.

It is here that the artist and the saltmaker begin to look suspiciously like the same person.

He is less interested in faithfully reproducing an old technique than in understanding why it works—and then seeing how far the principle can be pushed.

The finished crystals are delicate, irregular and unusually fluffy—more like fresh powder snow than either a hard flake salt or a conventional small-grain sea salt—with the savory, ocean character that first caught Warrin’s attention in those early batches.

Salt as practice

From the saltworks, the sun drops behind Inverness Ridge as the whole Point Reyes peninsula turns to silhouette. Below, the water shimmers in the last golden light while a salty breeze moves through the mouth of the bay, carrying a taste of tomorrow’s work.

Saltmaking began as an experiment, but over time it absorbed many of the things that had drawn Warrin to art in the first place: materials, process, repetition, observation, improvisation, and a willingness to follow an idea without knowing where it will lead.

Somewhere along the way, the distinctions between art, work and life began to blur.

What emerged was a practice shaped by weather, landscape, improvisation, and the work at hand.