Growing up in Harlan, Kentucky, Kings County Distillery Founder Colin Spoelman did not experience much of Kentucky’s bourbon culture. In fact, he grew up in a “dry county,” or a county where alcohol sales were completely forbidden. Spoelman’s early experiences with beverage alcohol involved visiting the local bootlegger, Maggie Bailey. When he left to attend Yale and finally settled in Brooklyn he discovered a completely new drinking culture. It was a desire to combine the culture of his youth with the culture of his adopted home that set him on the path to create Kings County Distillery, and now 16 years later the Brooklyn distillery has surpassed one million bottles sold.
“I look back on those million bottles as a gift because the industry has been going through so much change and Kings County has been the same company for those 16 years,” Spoelman says. “We've introduced new products and we've increased our distillation capacity and we've added warehouses and we've opened a tasting room and all those things in that intervening time. But it's really the same brand as it ever was and the same people behind it and we're all still committed to the founding idea, which is to take ideas from distilling cultures around the world to remake American whiskey in a different way than what has happened in Kentucky and Tennessee for the last 100 years.”
As a young adult landing in New York City after college, Spoelman began to realize how different metropolitan life was from the culture of his youth. Suddenly there were bars on every corner and people went out more than they stayed in.
“I understood that there might be an opportunity to bring some of that Eastern Kentucky culture into New York through moonshine, getting a still off the internet and practicing in my apartment, not with an intent to start a craft distillery or a brand or anything like that, but really just to make spirit and understand how that worked, but then only later coming to the conclusion that the only way to keep doing this hobby was to get a license” he says. “Lo and behold, it was sort of easy to do that all of a sudden in New York State.”
A major factor in the decision to start a distillery came when The Village Voice, a local newspaper, came knocking wanting to do a story about moonshiners of Brooklyn and Spoelman realized if a newspaper reporter could find him that easily, so could the government.
“There were a few of us that I got to know by doing this, and I just thought that would be a terrible idea, especially. I mean, he promised not to use names, but I was just like, no, this is not a good idea."
Before long, Spoelman was in a lawyer’s office gathering intel on what it would take to start a distillery in Brooklyn. One of the first obstacles was the lawyer’s belief that bourbon could only be made in Kentucky, which was quickly dispelled with a phone call to the TTB.
While Kings County Distillery was the first legal distillery in New York City to open since Prohibition, Spoelman says that the legal framework from early distilleries prior to Prohibition was fully intact.
“New York has been around for so long that there were all these provisions for distilleries that had been on the books from the 1800s, and there was a class and use type,” he says. “It all worked out to open up and then we started with Moonshine, and that was surprisingly successful. That was in the era when Moonshiners was first on TV and it was the beginning of the discovery of American whiskey for a lot of people. To understand that moonshine was the beginning of bourbon was novel to people. To be able to grow with the cultural conscience around whiskey was part of what worked for us.”
Rather than starting off with gin or vodka, Spoelman says that Kings County has always been focused on making whiskey and on pushing American whiskey culture forward. One of the ways he and his crew have done that is to be instrumental in defining a sub-category of rye whiskey called Empire Rye.
“It was really Nicole Austin when she was at Kings County, she had been to an ACSA convention with some of the other New York distillers and they all came back and said we're going to do this collective project where we rededicate rye whiskey for New York State and we will abide by a series of rules that we set out for ourselves. They were rules that made sense for New York distillers based on this farm distiller license that most of us had.”
In 2015 Kings County filled their first barrels of Empire Rye, which is a rye whiskey with a minimum of 75 per cent New York state-grown rye in the mash bill which is entirely produced from mashing to bottling at a single distillery within the state and which is distilled no higher than 160 proof and barreled no higher than 115 proof and which is aged in a charred new oak barrel for a minimum of two years. Kings County released the first batch of Empire Rye in 2018 as a yearly release, but now it is one of the distillery’s flagship products available year-round.
One of the most surprising developments Spoelman has seen since those early days of moonshining in his apartment is the shift toward accepting non-distiller producer brands, but now he believes the focus of whiskey geeks is shifting back toward favoring the craft producers and appreciating the work that goes into a bottle of whiskey from a craft distiller.
“I was shocked at how even after people understood what MGP was and even after people understood what sourcing whiskey is, there were still big brands that were invented in 2018, 2019 that just landed at precisely the right place to go on and become 50,000, 100,000 case brands. I would have thought this might have tracked more like craft beer, where there was much more of an emphasis on authenticity and authorship and the values that you bring to this age-old tradition. As the market has contracted, people are maybe less interested in the next sourced brand, they've gotten jaded. And now the market really does feel like it is the time for craft distillers.”
Whiskey fans, he says, are more focused than ever on building collections, and those collections seem to be shifting more toward authenticity. And that is where Kings County Distillery’s ethos fits right in.
“One very simple way to put it is that it's bourbon made like Scotch,” Spoelman says. “We’re using multiple barrel formats, pot stills, open fermentation, focusing on ingredients. We're trying to be what a small-scale family distillery would have been like in the 1800s. Every brand has hung their credibility on that story, but very few brands can actually embody that idea. My hope was always to build the brand that people wanted to be, the small batch, the handmade, the old tradition, old recipe. That is really what Kings County is. People get very caught up in geography, which I understand being a Kentuckian in New York, I see how people would get hung up on geography and all the cultural implications of making something in Kentucky or making something in New York City. But really, at our core, we are a grain to glass whiskey distillery that's focused on both creativity and tradition in equal measures.”
Kings County has just become one of the first distilleries to be certified by the American Craft Spirits Association as a Certified Craft distillery, which means that it is independently owned and operated and produces fewer than 750,000 proof gallons per year. Spoelmen led the charge to create the designation so that consumers could reliably determine the provenance of a spirit.
