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Great Jones Distilling Co. Is Bringing Whiskey Making Back to Manhattan

Manhattan

For whiskey followers making a drop in the Big Apple, now there’s a reason to visit Manhattan beyond its tons of whiskey bars. Great Jones Distilling Co., is said to be Manhattan’s first legal whiskey distillery following Prohibition, and also it’s one and only active whiskey-making operation, which opened in August 2021. The distillery’s dining establishment, the Grid, serves recipes featuring Great Jones’s whiskeys– a bourbon, a rye, and a four-grain bourbon made with corn, malted rye, wheat, and also barley– as the main component.

The 28,000 square-foot, four-story space is the creation of Juan Domingo Beckmann, whose household owns Jose Cuervo tequila– together with Bushmills, Stranahan’s, Tin Cup, and also Pendleton whiskies. The distillery has a 500-gallon copper pot still, housed in a two-story chamber perched on flooring that was reduced by 5 feet to comply with city statutes.

No grain milling or bourbon aging occurs at the distillery– barrels are delivered to Black Dirt Distillery in Orange County, New York, which Cuervo’s international arm, Proximo Spirits, got in 2018. While the Manhattan-made spirit ages upstate, Great Jones’s bourbons and rye, which were distilled at Black Dirt, are offered at the present store.

Building a distillery in Manhattan created unique difficulties..

“The six-year construction journey overcame rigid city regulations, centuries-old fire codes, and a global pandemic,” notes project manager Andrew Merinoff. But the struggle was worth it, says head distiller Celina Perez, who has worked at Black Dirt and Owney’s Rum in Brooklyn. The spirit coming off the still at Great Jones “has a lot of very floral notes, a lot of citrus,”

Perez adds. “We’re running it on the cleaner side before we really start to play around. But having that artistic freedom to go out on a limb and have experimental grain bills is pretty extraordinary, especially on a still that’s so multifaceted.”

The still itself is affixed to 2 20-foot columns. One side has 12 plates for making vodka, “which I’m not sure we have any plans to do but is always an option,” Perez says.

On the other hand, “our whiskey column has eight plates in it…so we have the ability to make whiskey that is very clean at 160 proof. We also have the ability to cut out the column completely and just do a pot distillation, run it through a pot three times, and do something more akin to a scotch. We have the technology to manipulate the product to a very specific taste, depending on what we want in the final product.”

That versatility permits Perez to push the bounds of taste in various directions.  “I’ve been working on new product development, so I have various bourbons and ryes all ready to go,” she says. “We’re still in a startup year—we’ve only been producing here since July,”and also the international supply chain dilemma, combined with a national truck chauffeur shortage, has developed logistical difficulties.“But once we get stuff like that figured out, I’m definitely going to start making some cool bourbons, first off, and then after that, ryes.”

H/T Whisky Advocate

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