A gin-and-whiskey distillery on Portland’s Distillery Row.

Westward is the whiskey brand of House Spirits Distillery, which English Wikipedia, citing the Portland Business Journal, says was founded in Corvallis, Oregon, in 2004 and moved to Portland the following year. WhiskyCast names Christian Krogstad as the founder and reports that he left the company in 2022; Shanken News Daily described him in September 2018 as the founder and distiller and Thomas Mooney as co-owner and chief executive, and the company’s own announcements have since styled Mooney as CEO and co-founder. The distillery sits in Portland’s Central Eastside, among the cluster of small producers that English Wikipedia calls Distillery Row.

For most of its first decade the business was better known for gin than for whiskey. Its flagship was Aviation Gin, which English Wikipedia, citing the Portland Business Journal and The Kitchn, says made up most of the distillery’s production in 2012. Alongside it came a Krogstad Festlig aquavit and Volstead vodka. A new and much larger distillery and tasting room opened in November 2015, The Oregonian reported, and a second tasting room had opened at Portland International Airport in 2013, Portland Monthly reported.

The turn towards whiskey came in late 2016, when House Spirits sold Aviation Gin to the New York company Davos Brands, The Oregonian reported on 17 November 2016. Willamette Week reported the same day that whiskey by then accounted for about half of the distillery’s output. From that point Westward was the company’s main brand, and the business would later trade under the Westward Whiskey name.

Northwest barley, ale yeast and a faceted bottle.

Westward is an American single malt: a whiskey made at one distillery from malted barley. In a November 2020 release published by Craft Spirits Magazine, the company described it as made from Pacific Northwest two-row barley, brewed with an American pale ale yeast, double pot distilled and matured in new, charred American oak barrels. That brewing step is the brand’s main story: the whiskey begins, the company says, much as a Northwest ale would.

The same release announced a complete redesign of the range. Westward’s new visual identity and packaging, the company said, were developed with the branding agency Pearlfisher, and Mooney described it as the end of a project that had taken two years. The company said the cuts and edges of the new custom bottle mirror the mountain ranges of the American Northwest, that the new angular label is meant to echo the region’s peaks, and that the phrase “True Northwest”, which it calls a rallying cry for its distillers, now appears on the bottle. A new logo and a new website were part of the same change.

The redesign arrived alongside the range’s third permanent expression. The original single malt and a Stout Cask version were joined by a Pinot Noir Cask, finished in French oak casks that had held Willamette Valley Pinot Noir; the company named Bergström and Suzor Wines among the wineries it worked with. That whiskey spends up to two years in the wine casks and, like the original, is bottled at 45% alcohol by volume, the company said. Two years earlier, Shanken News Daily had described the original as a whiskey without an age statement, blended from spirit made with Pacific Northwest barley.

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 Diageo-backed stake to independent ownership.

In September 2018 Distill Ventures, the drinks accelerator backed by Diageo, made a minority investment in Westward, Shanken News Daily reported; the deal covered the Portland distillery and the Westward brand, and Mooney and Krogstad kept majority ownership and ran the business independently. The investment was meant to expand the distillery’s capacity and take the whiskey to international markets.

That arrangement did not last. In March 2025 Diageo said it would stop bringing new brands into the Distill Ventures programme and reduce existing investments, VinePair reported. On 6 April 2025 House Spirits Distillery, trading as Westward Whiskey, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a Delaware federal court, English Wikipedia says, citing The Spirits Business, citing overproduction and weaker demand, WhiskyCast reported. In October 2025 the bankruptcy court approved the sale of most of the company’s assets, including its intellectual property, equipment and stock, to Aqua Ardens, a group of private investors that had financed the company through the process, VinePair reported, adding that Mooney would stay on as chief executive and that one of the group’s principals, Luis Fernando Leal, had sat on Westward’s board since 2011. Willamette Week reported the sale the same month. The whiskey is still made in Portland.

The name needs a little care online. Westward is easy to confuse with Westland, the Seattle single malt distillery, and with the Australian whisky Starward; the brand’s own site is westwardwhiskey.com.

For a design guide, Westward shows how a Northwest single malt turned a brewing story and a mountain landscape into a faceted bottle, an angular label and a two-word slogan. Compare Westland, the Seattle single malt house, and Stranahan’s, the Denver single malt. For this guide we use malt copper, fir green and basalt with an angular sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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