Brokelyn

Shopping for the locavore on your holiday list has been a pretty easy task recently, though one item had long been missing from BK’s offerings: hard booze. Brooklyn is home to coffee roasters, great breweries and a budding wine culture, but you used to have to leave the confines of the borough to find the stiff stuff. Until earlier this year, that is, when King’s County Distillery became the first licensed distillery to open in NYC since prohibition. Now, the distillery’s batches of moonshine are available at several liquor stores ($20 for a 200 ml bottle), while its first batches of bourbon can be purchased ($23 for 200ml) directly from the headquarters in East Williamsburg. Read the rest of this entry »

Kings County whiskey

If you drink in Brooklyn, you may have heard: We’re about to get us some distilleries. This Sunday, Aug. 1, marks the grand opening of two of Brooklyn’s new crop of hard-liquor houses: Kings County Distillery in East Williamsburg and Breuckelen Distilling Co. in Sunset Park. And to show you what they’ve got, the new factories are offering free (and almost free) opening-day tastes of their Brooklyn spirits. Kings County Distillery (35 Meadow St.) is giving free quarter-ounce tastes of whiskey from noon to 4 p.m.; and Breuckelen (77 19th St.) is offering three quarter-ounce tastes for $3 from noon to 6 p.m., along with distillery tours. Our thanks to the skint for the tastings tip.

Tom Potter loves getting you drunk, and he will at New York Distilling Co.

You knew we had some breweries, maybe you knew we had a winery, and now it looks like Brooklyn will have the holy trinity of booziness: hard liquor distilleries. Say it with me now: “Brooklyn Whiskey.” It just sounds right, doesn’t it?

The Daily News reports today on three distilleries planning to open this spring—the first of their kind in Brooklyn since Prohibition, according to the Daily News. The first of the featured new booze factories is Breuckelen Distilling on 19th Street in Sunset Park, opened by Brad Estabrooke, who quit a fancy sounding financial services career in favor of making gin for locavores (huzzah!). Read the rest of this entry »