Kings County Distillery is Redefining American Whiskey

“My approach was I’ll just do it. And I’ll figure it out,” says Colin Spoelman, co-founder and distiller of Kings County Distillery in New York City’s Brooklyn Navy Yard. “By excluding the commercial side of the business, and focusing on ‘do it by sense, do it by taste’, I ended up with a very different approach and product.” And figure it out he did. Kings County Distillery, which crafts 10 artisan whiskeys including bourbon, a peated bourbon, an Empire Rye, and a coffee whiskey, has been twice named Distillery of the Year and garnered numerous accolades since its inception in 2009.

Redefining American Whiskey

The distillery, New York City’s oldest, has become known for producing whiskeys that expand the genre. Spoelman says they took the opportunity of being in a melting pot of cultures. “Let’s take a broad expansive view of whiskey,” he says, “and make it in the American tradition, but with an international appreciation and outlook.” That means using mostly American ingredients and borrowing methods from Scottish and Irish whisky traditions, like using pot stills instead of columns.

Spoelman employs a hands-on sensory approach to the brewing process, which he says distinguishes Kings County’s products from those of big producers, who he feels have made scalability and efficiency decisions that comprise their ability to craft by sense. Most use column stills because they produce a higher volume.

Though using pot stills is more labor intensive and expensive since the spirit must be distilled twice, Spoelman uses them to achieve a buttery, rich texture, and specificity of flavor since they allow more of the original oils to pass through distillation. He compares it to the difference between expensive velvety ice cream and an icy budget brand. “That richness allows more and better flavors to carry through. That ensures better, more flavorful distillate from the outset, which ends up making even better flavors as time goes on.”

Kings County Distillery founders Colin Spoelman and David Haskell

From Hobbyist to Distiller

Spoelman, who founded the distillery with college pal David Haskell, was influenced by his upbringing in dry Eastern Kentucky surrounded by bootleggers and moonshine. It was quite a different culture of alcohol than the one he found upon moving to New York City after graduating from Yale University with a BA in theatre and architecture.

He began moonshining for fun “to connect to this culture that I come from and as a sort of intellectual exercise,” Spoelman says. Frustrated by the mythological commercial spirits marketing touting the idea of a family distillery when in fact many brands were owned by large corporations, they decided to open a distillery focused on “actual tradition” making whiskey as a moonshiner in Eastern Kentucky would.

“I intrinsically understood by being a hobby distiller, that there was this whole other world of flavor that could exist for American whiskey that nobody had ever tasted. That got me very excited about the possibilities,” he says.

Kings County Distillery chocolate flavored whiskey

Focus on scale and efficiency has prompted a consolidation of the American bourbon industry; a dozen very large industrial distilleries have dominated the flavor profile of the last 30-plus years. “Our whiskeys tend to have more foodie flavors: chocolate, cinnamon, molasses,” says Spoelman, “whereas commercial whiskeys have more spicy, oaky, leathery characteristics. That’s pot distillation, low barrel entry proof, and a rigorous blending team all working together.”

Two Ingredient Magic

While respecting brewing traditions by using processes and equipment from the 1800s, Spoelman bends them a bit by using only two ingredients (grain and water) instead of the conventional three, or peat, which is more common to Scotch and Islay whiskies in particular. But his high malt mashbill borrows more from Scotch whiskey than is traditional for bourbon. Seeing an opportunity for creativity even in restricted categories like bonded straight bourbon, he’s shocked by how few distillers “really deviate from this sort of bumpers that Kentucky tradition has set on bourbon,” he says. He adds, “It’s important to emphasize that the tradition that we are using is a pretty legitimate one, and one that maybe is hard to recognize if the world of commercial bourbon is the one that you know best.”

History & Tradition

Kings County Distillery’s historic building

Fittingly for a distillery built on history and tradition, its location in Brooklyn is steps from where the Brooklyn Whiskey Wars of the 1860s took place. The 8000-square-foot distillery and tasting room, the gatehouse to the yard, were both built in the late 1800’s. Soldiers’ names from the 1920s-40’s are carved in the building’s brick. “It gives you a beautiful sense of history that is a little antithetical to like New York City’s culture of novelty and sort of trends in fashion,” Spoelman says. “What’s the next thing, who’s the next sort of new bright young thing? Whiskey is, in a way, the sort of very opposite of that cultural direction.”

Clearly, the history of whiskey is very important to him and Haskell; they’ve also written two books: Kings County Guide to Urban Moonshining and Dead Distillers, A History of the Upstarts and Outlaws Who Made American Spirits. The family tree of bourbon whiskey they created was a hit.

“One of the great things about making and selling whiskey in New York is that your customers are your neighbors,” says Spoelman, who enjoys developing relationships with them and New York State farmers who supply most of their grain (malted barley comes from Scotland). One of their newest products is a blended bourbon, designed to be more affordable and accessible, and the best whiskey Spoleman says they’ve made, is a seven-year bottled-in bond which exemplifies the challenges of crafting something that takes years to hit some unspecified perfection. He says it’s part of a cresting wave of “really beautiful whiskeys” they made almost a decade ago.

Looking Ahead

A restless creative spirit who previously worked as an architect, Spoelman was interested in whiskey making and in building something more than just a brand. Looking to the future, he wants to continue to do what they set out to do: innovate, evolve, and be creative. “To some extent, it is don’t mess up, keep doing what we’re doing,” Spoelman says. “And we will appreciate that cresting wave, which will continue to crest and crest and crest as time goes on.”