Colin Spoelman
“From the Appalachians to the Big Apple”
Colin Spoelman was born in 1979 in rural, conservative, Harlan County, Kentucky, a place better known for coal mining than for glossy bourbon tourism. Ironically, Harlan County was a dry county for much of Colin’s upbringing, which meant that buying alcohol was its own informal economy. Spoelman has described how people in his town would quietly go to the local bootlegger, an old gentleman who quietly sold white liquor out of his house. Harlan County’s culture of underground alcohol sales sat juxtaposed right in the middle of a church-centered community, and Spoelman has said that the moral rules about alcohol versus the everyday reality of people still finding a way to drink shaped how he thought about whiskey long before he ever figured out how to make it.
As a teen, Spoelman left Kentucky and attended boarding school in Tennessee. After high school, he went to Yale University, and there he studied architecture and theater, and he graduated in 2001. College degree in hand, young Spoelman moved bravely to New York City and cycled through a set of jobs: fundraising, then temp work, a brief stint in the film industry, but then eventually jobs at some architecture firms. However, as Colin put it, “The career I had trained for felt aggressively dull and repetitive.” By then, in his early twenties, living in Brooklyn, and doing a job he hated, Spoelman realized that whiskey was a sort of way to deal with bouts of homesickness. So he began bringing unmarked jugs of moonshine back from Kentucky to share with friends in the Big Apple. He noticed something interesting: people in New York were utterly fascinated with the idea of real Appalachian moonshine; illegal, mysterious, and story-heavy. The actual liquid, unfortunately, often wasn’t very good and sometimes tasted more like nail polish remover than clean spirit, but instead of discounting the hooch, Spoelman studied it, learning how to distill it himself and developed the drive to make something better. Soon, he quietly set up a still in his Brooklyn apartment and read instruction books, teaching himself to make good corn whiskey.
What began as an underground hobby quickly turned into a plan. Spoelman and Yale roommate David Haskell started talking seriously about making whiskey in the open. After all, in 2009, New York State had just created a relatively affordable craft distilling license. So Spoelman and Haskell raised about $30,000 from friends and family and located a tiny 17x18 space in East Williamsburg; in 2010, Kings County Distillery was officially launched. The timing mattered. In the early 2010s, whiskey sales were rapidly accelerating nationally, and there was a growing market in New York for both unaged “white lightening” and young craft bourbon.
From the beginning, Spoelman insisted that Kings County Distillery have a clear identity: it would be a whiskey distillery only, and nothing else. Spoelman was explicit that the point was to make honest, flavorful American whiskey, first moonshine and unaged corn whiskey, and then bourbon, rye, single malt, and other traditionally grain-based whiskeys. And with that move, legal whiskey returned to New York for the first time since Prohibition. In its early days Kings County was sometimes referred to the smallest commercial distillery in America, but by 2014, Spoelman and Haskell were filling around 1,000 barrels annually and had plans to double that volume.
Along the way, Spoelman became not just a distiller but a public voice for American whiskey history. In 2013, he co-authored the books, “The Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining: How to Make and Drink Whiskey,” which explains small-scale distilling and American whiskey culture in plain terms. He followed that book with “Dead Distillers, a historical look at the often chaotic, sometimes violent past of the American whiskey business,” and later, “The Bourbon Drinker’s Companion, a distillery-by-distillery travelogue of American whiskey.” Meanwhile, in June of 2014, Colin married his wife, filmmaker Ry Russo-Young; the couple now share two young sons, William and Arthur and split their time between his New York distillery and her Los Angeles film career.
Colin Spoelman built Kings County Distillery the same way he built his first architectural drawings, line by line, mistake by mistake, until the vision sharpened. And though his foundation was poured in Kentucky, his skyscraper is firmly rooted in Brooklyn, and keeps rising steadily into the future. Now a respected distiller, husband, father and business partner, Colin Spoelman never stopped being an architect; he just changed what he was building.
Sources:
Yale Alumni Magazine, “A career in moonshine: An alum opens New York City’s first whiskey distillery since 1920,” Nov/Dec 2014, yalealumnimagazine.com
Vogue magazine, “From the Source: Learning How to Make Moonshine in Brooklyn,” October 22, 2013, vogue.com
Kings County Distillery official site/About Us, kingscountydistillery.com
Youtube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbTJkxaOx9k
Drinking Vessels, “Bourbon Fact and Fiction…”, January 19, 2021, drinkingvessels.com
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee
