Whiskey made in the old headquarters of temperance.

FEW Spirits makes whiskey and gin in Evanston, Illinois, which the company calls a suburb just north of Chicago. The company describes itself as “a grain-to-glass distillery since 2011,” working from a building in an alley that it calls an old chop-shop. Its founder and distiller is Paul Hletko. The Daily Northwestern, the Northwestern University student paper, reported on 28 September 2011 that city officials had welcomed the opening of FEW, and that Hletko was a former lawyer who had moved to the city in 2003.

The setting is the point of the story. The same report described Evanston as a community that had been dry for more than a century and as the former home of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The Whiskey Wash wrote in January 2019 that Evanston was founded as a dry town and that Hletko had to work through changes to the city’s alcohol, zoning and fire rules, with many trips to city hall, before he could distil there. The company’s own history calls Evanston “the seat of Prohibition” and the headquarters of the temperance movement.

The name has two readings, and the sources give both. The Daily Northwestern reported in 2011 that the name, written F.E.W., refers in part to the initials of Frances Elizabeth Willard, the suffragist and president of the WCTU. In 2019 Hletko told The Whiskey Wash that the match with Willard’s initials was “sheer and total coincidence,” and that he liked the word because it suggested something small, rare and high-end without having to say so. At its opening the distillery made a white whiskey and an American gin, the student paper reported.

An 1893 fair on the label and a rock band on the limited editions.

FEW built its look around a second piece of local history. The company’s story page sets the brand between two moments: the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, also called the World’s Columbian Exposition, which it describes as the golden age of pre-Prohibition whiskey, and Evanston’s later role as the centre of temperance. In December 2023 the history site worldsfairchicago1893.com described FEW as offering “a full line of Columbian Exposition whiskeys,” and noted that the label of a small-batch rye called Cereal Killer shows a scythe-carrying figure in front of the fair’s illuminated Administration Building.

The packaging dates from the first year. The Dieline reported on 3 February 2012 that FEW had hired the designer Wilburn Thomas to develop the brand and design its label set. The article described die-cut paper labels with silver foil-stamping and embossing, applied by hand to bottles that were individually numbered and signed. The company today speaks of its “signature rectangular bottle.”

Limited editions brought in other artists. FEW’s product pages say the label of All Secrets Known, a bourbon made with the band Alice In Chains and first released in 2019, was designed by the artist Justin Helton at the band’s request, and that the psychedelic label of Brainville Rye, made with The Flaming Lips, came from Helton’s Knoxville studio, Status Serigraph. The company has since grouped its music releases into an Icons of Rock collection that also includes Motor Oil, made with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and a bourbon made with The Smashing Pumpkins and brought to strength with tea from Billy Corgan’s Chicago tea shop, Madame Zuzu’s.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all American craft distillers: Koval, FEW, Westward, Stranahan’s, Garrison Brothers, Kings County and Copperworks. They sit at different points in the trade, from founder-run distilleries to names that have passed to larger drinks groups, and they make different styles of whiskey, from bourbon and rye to single malt.

One category in particular has been defined only recently. In December 2024 the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) announced a standard of identity for “American single malt whisky,” effective on 19 January 2025, in response to petitions from several distillers and the American Single Malt Whisky Commission. Under the rule, such a whisky must be mashed, distilled and aged in the United States; distilled entirely at one US distillery, to 160 proof or less, from a fermented mash of 100 percent malted barley; stored in oak barrels of no more than 700 litres; and bottled at not less than 80 proof, the TTB says. The word “straight” may be added for whisky aged at least two years, and labels have a five-year transition period. VinePair reported in 2019 that the commission’s founding members, when it formed in 2016, included Copperworks, FEW Spirits and House Spirits Distillery, listed with its Westward single malt.

A craft whiskey’s identity is usually carried by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind it may have changed hands or grown beyond where it started. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirits are made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a founder’s distillery to a Kentucky family company.

FEW has changed hands while keeping its founder. It became part of Samson & Surrey, a spirits company that Heaven Hill’s release describes as founded in 2016 by the former Bacardi executives Robert Furniss-Roe and Juan Rovira. On 1 February 2022 the Kentucky distiller Heaven Hill announced that it had acquired Samson & Surrey, naming FEW Spirits among the brands included alongside Tequila Ocho, Widow Jane, Brenne, Bluecoat Gin and Mezcal Vago, together with their production facilities. Heaven Hill said Samson & Surrey would continue as an independent division led by its founders. WhiskyCast reported the next day that the deal included the FEW distillery in Evanston and that Hletko would remain with the company. Heaven Hill has owned FEW since 2022.

The range today, as listed on the company’s site in October 2026, runs from a straight bourbon and a straight rye to bottled-in-bond editions, a single malt smoked with cherry wood rather than peat, and Cold Cut, a bourbon brought to bottling strength with cold-brew coffee. The brand’s web address is fewspirits.com.

For a design guide, FEW Spirits shows how a distillery can turn local history, a temperance town and a world’s fair, into a consistent label system, and then hand a limited edition to an outside artist without losing the frame. Compare Koval, the organic distillery in Chicago’s Ravenswood, and Tequila Ocho, which joined Heaven Hill in the same Samson & Surrey deal. For this guide we use exposition blue, silver foil and paper white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep FEW Spirits’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.