From a tiny East Williamsburg room to the Navy Yard.

Kings County Distillery makes whiskey in Brooklyn, the New York City borough whose county name it carries. It was founded by Colin Spoelman and David Haskell; English Wikipedia, citing The Wall Street Journal in June 2010, gives 2009 as the founding year, and says production officially began in April 2010 in a space of about 330 square feet. The company’s own history pictures the two founders in East Williamsburg in 2010. Bedford + Bowery reported in 2014 that the distillery opened in April 2010, when Haskell was also an editor at New York magazine.

Spoelman had been thinking about making and selling spirits since moving to New York in 2005, Distiller, the magazine of the American Distilling Institute, reported in 2016, and the pair experimented for a couple of years before going commercial. Changes to New York’s licensing of small distilleries made the business possible: Bedford + Bowery noted that a “farm distillery” licence was introduced in the state in 2009, and English Wikipedia ties the founding to those changes in state law.

The move that shaped the brand came in 2012, when the distillery relocated to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, according to English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times. Its home there is the Paymaster Building, which the company dates to 1899, and it installed copper whiskey stills made in Scotland. In 2016 it opened a bar and tasting room in the Gatehouses at the yard’s Sands Street gate, English Wikipedia says, citing Grub Street; the company dates the gatehouse buildings to 1896.

The range began with an unaged corn whiskey sold as moonshine and grew into bourbon and other aged whiskeys. Bedford + Bowery listed in 2014 a bourbon, a moonshine and a chocolate whiskey made with cocoa bean husks from Mast Brothers, the Brooklyn chocolate maker, alongside a Scotch-style whiskey still in barrels.

A plain flask, a metal cap and a paper band.

The packaging is the brand’s signature. Distiller described it in 2016: all of the company’s spirits were bottled in a glass hip-flask bottle with a simple metal screw-top and a slim paper band for a label. The magazine called the combination otherwise generic, yet immediately recognisable and synonymous with the distillery, and recorded that the American Distilling Institute had given Kings County a Gold Medal for Excellence in Packaging in 2014.

The small size was part of the design from the start. The distillery began by selling its whiskey in 200ml bottles, because its early production was so small, English Wikipedia says, and only later added larger 375ml and 750ml bottles, according to the same article and the company’s own history.

The founders have also written about whiskey’s past. Spoelman and Haskell proposed a book on American whiskey history, Dead Distillers, which Bedford + Bowery reported in 2014 had been picked up by the publisher Abrams; the same report linked Spoelman to an earlier book, A Guide to Urban Moonshining: How to Make and Drink Whiskey, published in 2013. Bedford + Bowery also recalled that Brooklyn had a nineteenth-century distilling history, including the “Whiskey Wars” in which a revenue agent was killed in 1872.

The distillery also keeps a small museum of New York distilling history, which it calls the Boozeum.

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.

A New York whiskey that helped write a New York standard.

Recognition followed quickly. The American Distilling Institute named Kings County its Distillery of the Year for 2016 and gave Colin Spoelman its Bubble Cap Award, Distiller reported; the same year its Oat Whiskey won a gold medal and Best of Category for alternative whiskey at the institute’s judging of craft spirits.

Kings County also helped define a regional style. It was among the six New York distilleries behind Empire Rye, WhiskyCast reported in October 2017 when the first certified whiskeys were introduced. The standard, owned by the Empire Rye Whiskey Association rather than set by federal rules, requires at least 75 percent New York-grown rye, at least two years of ageing, and production at the distillery that bottles it.

In March 2026 the distillery announced that it had sold its one millionth bottle of whiskey, The Spirits Business reported. To mark it, Kings County drew 500 hand-numbered bottles of a four-year-old Straight Bourbon from the millionth-bottle run, made, the magazine said, from New York organic corn and English Golden Promise barley, and placed a symbolic millionth bottle in its Boozeum. The company describes itself as an independent craft distiller, and Spoelman says Kings County has always made the whiskey sold under its name from New York grain.

The name needs a little care online: Kings County is simply Brooklyn’s official county name, and many unrelated businesses share it. The distillery’s own site is kingscountydistillery.com.

For a design guide, Kings County Distillery shows how far an unbranded-looking container can go: a plain hip flask, a metal cap and a narrow paper band, kept long enough to become the mark itself. Compare Koval, the Chicago grain-to-glass distillery, and Westland, the Seattle single malt maker. For this guide we use Navy Yard brick, still black and paper band with a monospaced typewriter face, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kings County Distillery’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.