Kings County Distillery

In a time when we are more defined by what makes us different than what makes us the same, Kings County Distillery’s brand achieves a duality not commonly experienced in today’s America. Kings County Distillery is the oldest and largest craft distillery in New York City. They are the first whiskey distillery in the city since prohibition, and like it’s co-founder, Colin Spoelman, it’s product is the influence of two disparate cultures. 

Colin is from Kentucky. Not the bourbon, bluegrass and horse racing part. He grew up in Eastern Kentucky in a small, conservative, Christian community called Harlan County. The church-goers of the town had a perception of alcohol based on an older form of morality. Thus, Harlan County was dry, with laws that date back to Prohibition. Colin had no idea that his town was any different from the rest of the country, but when he got to a drinking age (maybe not a “legal” drinking age) he figured out how to get what he was looking for. 

“My experience was going to the bootlegger, which was not unlike going to the drug dealer. You’d have to go to the drug dealers house and then to the bootlegger. They were two different people. With the drug dealer you had to play video games with them, hang around and chit chat. The bootlegger was an old guy who did not want to talk.”

When Colin moved to New York City, he got his first real taste of how the rest of the country viewed alcohol. New Yorkers found the concept of a dry county bizarre, and the bootleggers and moonshiners of his home state seemed like wild frontiersmen. They often assumed Colin must know a lot about bourbon, but the truth was that he did not. Bourbon country was removed from a lot of Kentucky and many wanted distance from the vices of drinking and gambling that bourbon and horse racing represented.

Colin Spoelman (left), David Haskell (right)

When he would visit Kentucky he would pick up some moonshine and bring it back to New York. At parties, he would whip out the plastic jug, and as he put it, “Everyone got much more enthusiastic and wanted to stay at the party that much longer.” It was a fun gimmick, but Colin felt there was something more to it. 

“People perceived moonshine as dangerous and illegal but I understood, without knowing everything that I know now, that it couldn’t be as dangerous as everyone let on, and that there was probably something interesting about it.”

He bought a hobby still online, and started distilling on the roof of his apartment building, which was not so much legal as it was absolutely not legal at all. With very little help from the internet at that time, and no prior experience in home brewing or distilling, Colin turned to books like Making Pure Corn Whiskey by Ian Smiley to help guide him with his new passion. As he tinkered with his recipe and technique, there were a few cultural shifts happening in America.

In his home state, the moral association with alcohol started to erode. Kentuckians began seeing industries like bourbon as something different and unique, and came to appreciate bourbon as something to be proud of. Simultaneously, the country at large was becoming more suspicious of big corporate products and more interested in things that felt authentic and made at a small scale. Things like artisan ketchup and the farm to table movement started to sweep through Brooklyn, and in this delirium Colin’s worlds began to blend. 

“Certainly moonshine, but even whiskey in general fits very well into that story. If vodka is something that’s all about branding and the commerciality of it, whiskey is very much the opposite of that. It has a lot to do with the maker's hand, and the distiller, the water and the conditions. There is a lot about whiskey that is not about celebrities and logos and advertising, which I think people were ready for, particularly in New York.”

He knew that if he could find a way to make the moonshine palatable, then he could sway the narrative away from the stereotype of moonshiners as ridiculous and salacious, and share it with the New York culinary crowd. Colin had been bouncing his ideas off of his old college roommate, David Haskell (now the co-founder of Kings County Distillery). David was a man with an entrepreneurial spirit that was able to help articulatethe move from a hobby to a legitimate business. The biggest obstacle was getting a license, which was very expensive and purposely designed that way to deter people from applying. Luckily, New York had recently created the Class D Farm Distiller’s License, which was affordable as long as you were willing to source at least 75% of your grains from New York farms and could conform to limits on how much you could distill in a single year (up to 35,000 gallons). Colin and David applied for this license and in 2010, Kings County Distillery was officially born in a 325 square foot warehouse in Williamsburg, the first whiskey distillery in New York City since Prohibition and the smallest commercial distillery in the country at the time. 

The intention in the beginning was not necessarily to make aged whiskey. Kings County’s roots were in moonshine and the concept of the business was built around it. They had set out to make a moonshine that defied expectations and they felt that they had succeeded. 

“It was delicious, like good silver tequila and it had this creamy bright corn note to it...When I was going about learning to be a distiller I would say, ‘Let’s make no compromises ever,’ ... and to some extent that’s carried through. If you take our white whiskey still to this day and hold it up to other white whiskies on the market, even commercial white whiskies, it’s very good.”

Kings County uses organic corn and rye from a farm in the Finger Lakes of New York. Their barley comes from Scotland and England and all of their grains are non-GMO. Their moonshine recipe is a high malt mash bill with only two grains; corn and barley. They use off-the-grain, open fermentation to allow for wild yeast and bacteria to give their whiskey a unique character. They distill using only pot stills, which are known for lending more flavor and mouthfeel to spirits, and despite the fact that pot stills limit the yield that one gets from the process, they still take narrow cuts off the still to make sure that product is the best version their distillate can be. 

However, despite Colin’s dedication to moonshine, David knew that “bourbon is where the market was” so they set off to try and find some barrels. They settled on 5 gallon barrels from The Barrel Mill in Minnesota. Craft distillers often choose smaller cooperage than the industry standard (53 gallon barrels) for a handful of reasons. With a smaller barrel, there is more interaction between the spirit and the wood over a shorter period of time, which can help you get a better tasting product out a little faster.

There are a lot of elements of aging that cannot be sped up, but for a young company trying to keep the lights on, this can help. In the early days it also took them three full days running six stills simultaneously for sixteen hours a day just to fill a 5 gallon barrel, so the idea of doing anything larger than that just seemed too daunting. Nevertheless, their journey in making bourbon had begun, and with their moonshine as the base, they knew they had a great start. Kings County’s premise was that great unaged whiskey makes great aged whiskey, and as they started building their product and brand, they better understood the industry and their place in it. 

“If you got under the hood a little bit you realized that for all the brands that were out there, when you got into where everything was distilled, it was disappointing because you had this impression that the Master Distiller had some influence over the product, or if it was a family distillery that somebody had some amount of influence on what was done, but you realize it’s all done by marketing companies and global spirits entities. They controlled nearly everything, and even if they didn’t control it, then it was a small brand who was purchasing the whiskey from one of these other people. In fact when you went to taste everything it all tasted kind of the same, so unlike something like scotch where there really was a fair amount of variation brand to brand there just wasn’t in bourbon, and people were pretending that there was. It was this emperor has no clothes moment where you think there is something different between these two things but [when you] actually put them in front of you, pour the glass, they taste substantively the same. One of them costs $60 and the other costs $30, and you’re an idiot if you buy the more expensive one, which was usually the one with better marketing and more bottle appeal.”

From an early stage, Kings County committed to only sell spirits they made themselves and they looked to play up the duality of their influences, while simultaneously rebelling against what they felt was wrong about the way commercial whiskey was being sold to the public. The bottles, free of the traditional bells and whistles of the ornately labeled and packaged “top shelf” brands, had nothing but a thin white label with their name and “Moonshine” or “Bourbon” written on it, with a simple screw cap top. This lack of overt branding was meant to create a mysterious and alluring presentation, not dissimilar to the plain plastic jug you might find in rural Kentucky, refined to appeal to the appetite of a Brooklyn sensibility. The idea being that if you wanted to know more about it, then you’d have to look it up, or better yet, open up the bottle and taste it.  All that said, it wasn’t easy getting the brand off the ground.

“Back then was kind of about embracing the Moonshine aspect of it because we didn’t have any aged whiskey and when we did have aged whiskey it was very young, and people back then were much more ageist about things, because you’re talking about things that are one year old next to things that are twelve years old for $40. Now, we don’t live in a time where you can get twelve year old bourbon for $40 anymore, so that’s another one of those cultural shifts that has happened, but there just wasn’t a whole lot of economic incentive for people to pick up the product other than it was nice to support a neighbor, and that’s sort of how we built the business.”

As the business slowly grew, they moved from that small 325 square foot warehouse to the 120 year old Paymaster Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Colin decided to write a book called The Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining. To research that book, he returned to Kentucky and visited every distillery in the state to wrap his mind around the scale of what they were doing. It was then that he realized that moonshine and two year old 5 gallon barrel whiskey was not going to grow the business, so he returned to Brooklyn and decided that existing plans to scale up needed to be much more ambitious than he had been planning. 

“We were always setting aside whiskey for longer aging, but you really need to produce more than you need so you can age your surplus and you always have stuff waiting in the wings. That was the moment five years ago when we really laid those plans which are just now over the last year coming to fruition ... There was a conscious moment where we looked at the scale and said, if we’re going to participate in the story of craft distilling we can’t just stay at a rinky-dink, neighborhood distillery scale."

The company upgraded from stainless steel 8 gallon stills to larger copper pot stills from Forsyths in Scotland and last summer (2019), added an even bigger still from Vendome in Kentucky. Like many craft distilleries, in order to compete with and differentiate themselves from the major Kentucky distilleries, Kings County has had to experiment and innovate, which can be a challenge. They wanted to make something that was unique and different, but still recognizable to the consumer who had been conditioned to expect a certain flavor profile from American whiskey. Rather than push to be something wholly different by using unusual grains or methods, they have stayed true to themselves by drawing inspiration from history and spirits that they love to create whiskies that are a melting pot of cultures and traditions, without making any compromises on quality. 

Kings County, to their knowledge, is the original creator of Peated Bourbon, which is to say the first American distillery to use peated malted barley in a bourbon recipe. They have since gone on to make a Peated Rye, which won the 2020 Innovation Award from the American Craft Spirits Association. They make an American Single Malt, made from a combination of regular malted barley from the UK and peated malted barley from Scotland, aged in their used bourbon barrels to bring out some of those sweet notes. They were also one of the six original founding members of the Empire Rye movement, which has sought to define and give purpose for New York distilling by reviving a historical style of Rye Whiskey. Their Empire Rye along with their bourbons have earned double gold medals at the San Francisco World Spirit Awards, and Kings County was named Distillery of the Year in 2016 by the American Distilling Institute. 

Kings County Distillery is on the verge of releasing a 7 year old version of their bourbon. It would be the oldest bourbon made outside of traditional Bourbon Country. Though Colin believes that their uncompromising approach and deep passion for traditions has allowed for them to consistently put out authentic, high-quality whiskey from day one, he must admit that as their whiskey continues to age and grow, and their story along with it, there is something inherently special about it.

“There is this unspeakable aspect of whiskey, just knowing that you have this liquid that is special in a way that you only know. You could taste it I suppose ... but the truth of the thing is the age of the whiskey sort of goes beyond all that, and it doesn’t matter what it tastes like, because it’s old and it’s special and maybe a little mysterious, and that’s what I love about whiskey.” 

Just like a fine old whiskey, Kings County Distillery has changed a lot over the last ten years, but at its core it has always been balanced on the shoulders of two seemingly contrasting cultures. However, as is the case with moonshine, the perception that those cultures are so different may be misleading. 

“Kentucky’s great contribution is vice. It’s disrespect, immorality, and a sort of approach of lawlessness, rule breaking and stubborn orneriness. If there is any trait associated with Kentucky it’s orneriness, so I hope to have brought that to the whiskies that we make. If there is anything that comes from New York, which has an elitist culture, it’s that unyielding commitment to go the extra mile to make something truly great and not compromise. And they’re sort of two ways of expressing the same thing. If you’re ornery you’re probably ornery because you believe something and you want it to be done that way, so I think that’s kind of where they meet in the middle.” 

Kings County Distillery began as a story untold, with a Kentucky Moonshiner in a Brooklyn apartment. Their early branding a subtle tease to learn more about the mystery inside the bottle. Now with a decade worth of experiences and a warehouse full of aging whiskies, this ornery devotion to their uncompromising craft tells a deeper story. One that truly represents America in the blending of cultures and traditions, and one that is as rich and complex as their spirits.

TASTING NOTES:

Moonshine (40% ABV)

Nose: Corn, Grapefruit and Peaches

Palate: Very soft and delicate mouthfeel with citrus notes of orange peel fading into dried apricots with a short and dry finish. 

This is exactly what they hoped to create. A moonshine that defies expectations. Like a less harsh tequila this is very tasty and easy to drink. 

Straight Bourbon (45% ABV)

Nose: Vanilla, Caramel, Chocolate Brownie, Apricots

Palate: Soft, but peppery up front. Slight hint of vanilla in the mid palate which turns to cinnamon and black pepper with hints of leather on a dry medium to long finish. 

This bourbon is robust and complex for something so young. It’s not as sweet as you may expect a bourbon to be, but there is nothing offensive about it and it gets good flavor from the oak. 

Bottled in Bond Bourbon (50% ABV)

Nose: Brown Sugar, Ginger Bread, Cherries

Palate: Buttery mouthfeel, still peppery up front but it quickly softens with rich vanilla, caramel and chocolate notes. Still some leather with some cherry on a longer finish. 

The flavors are not radically different from the straight bourbon, but the mouthfeel is softer and more refined, and the flavors really sing on this one. A great bourbon. 

Peated Bourbon (45% ABV)

Nose: Brown Sugar, Allspice, Vanilla

Palate: Very soft, and peppery up front that dissolves into a sweetness mixed with smoke that reminds you of something like barbecue ribs. The finish is short with some lingering smoke and ash.

This is very easy to drink, and definitely interesting how the smoke plays with the sweeter elements in the bourbon. 

American Whiskey Made from Peated Malt “Single Malt” (47% ABV)

Nose: Peat Smoke, Nuts, Orange Citrus

Palate: Decent heat with roasted almonds up front, vanilla in the mid palate and campfire smoke accompanying a short finish. 

This whiskey has a beautiful color to it. Darker than a traditional Scotch single malt, with hay leaning towards gold with amber hues. It’s heat and sweet barrel notes give it a real presence that makes it recognizable as Kings County Distillery despite being a different style.