Industry City Distillery in Brooklyn, NY

We are building a distillery from scratch.

Because it's a challenge, because it's a chance for us to improve on one of the oldest endeavors of mankind, because it brings together science and art and engineering in a way that makes us giddy, and because the process is really fun.

To create the kind of spirit we would be happy to drink and proud to share, we can’t follow in the footsteps of distilleries before us.

We are bringing together ideas and techniques from industrial, craft, and scientific distillation to engineer and build our own specialized equipment and develop our own unique process.

Industry City Distillery is the newest venture of The City Foundry, a research and design group focused on improving small-scale manufacturing processes through the blending of science and art.

Building and operating a distillery requires a diversity of talent. We’ve assembled our team from all over the country: a printmaking biological engineer and science nerd; a machinist with a bent for sculpture; a code-wrangling graphic designer and fabricator; a yoga instructor turned business manager; an environmental scientist and rock musician; a hard-drinking commercial salmon fisherman and a whole lot of yeast.

• Max
• Rich
• Dave
• Zac
• Peter
• Alex

The kind of massive, specialized infrastructure required to meet the exacting technical standards of our distilled products doesn’t come cheap.

So we’re building it.

• MIXING SYSTEM ALMOST DONE
• FERMENTATION LINE TESTING
• STRIPPING STILL DONE
• FRACTIONAL STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The City Foundry’s 6000sqft space holds not only the distillery but everything needed to improve our process and grow our business, including a machine shop, a biological research lab, a design studio and onsite printing press, a business office, and a public space for tasting and events.

The folding of research, development and production together under one roof allows us the distinction of being the only distillery in the last century with all process equipment, including our stills, built in Brooklyn.

As much as we would love to share all the amazing photos we have of this system, we are in the process of securing patents and we’ve been advised to keep this under wraps until we have better protections in place. Sorry.

We take fermentation VERY seriously.

The process we have developed to create the fermented product for our distillation (wash, for those in the know) is like no other in the industry. The design emerged from our need to minimize, at every stage, the introduction or development of unwanted flavor components in our wash. Our process ensures that no outside contaminants can grow in the wash and that none of our yeast can escape the fermentation system.

Out of millions of strains of yeast, we've decided on one for our process. Collected from beet fields in Europe, they are specifically adapted to using beet sugars. We breed the yeast in our lab and put them through a yeast boot camp to condition them for duty in our fermentation system.

Clean, clear, sugar solution goes in, and clean, clear alcohol solution comes out. No settling tanks, no filtration, no need. Happy yeast and great ingredients make a delicious product; before our freshly fermented product ever makes it to the still, it's good enough to drink.

You can't have spirits without distillation.

The first step in our process is a steam powered continuous stripping still. By introducing a small, constant drip of wash into a steam column, we are able to concentrate or "strip" our wash without scorching or over-boiling - an area where traditional distillation methods tend to impart unpleasant flavors. The use of a stripping still also provides huge energy savings - it draws about as much as a drip coffee maker and reduces both the length and energy consumption of our final distillation run. From our stripping still the product is collected and prepared for the next stage of distillation.

We think copper stills are beautiful, but they don't deliver on a number of points we believe to be critical to the production of a great vodka. We run small batches of the steam distilled product through a high separation fractional distillation column we developed specifically for this product. This system allows us to separate all the chemical components of our product and selectively remove or include them one by one. Fractional distillation is a process usually reserved for industrial and laboratory products - industries that rely on the precision and repeatability of their systems and the purity of their chemicals. Fractional distillation allows us an unprecedented level of control over the final composition of our vodka.

We are currently testing our two production stills. As soon as we have them installed and producing we’ll be able to share more. Give us your information at the bottom of this page and we'll keep you posted.

Liquor companies tend to spend a disproportionate amount of money on their bottles - vodka in particular is often a product differentiated more by what it's in than what it is.

For us, the bottle is arguably the least important part of our product. It needs to contain and protect our alcohol, tell you what's inside, and perform both functions as efficiently as possible. It still needs to hold its own on a shelf of million dollar marketing budgets, but that's the kind of challenge that gets us up in the morning.

We have our permits, we have our bottles, and we're readying our letterpress for the first big label print run. Stay tuned for photos of the printing, labeling, and bottling process.

We are 81% done

And finally have something to put here:

Purchase online here or see a map of our current NY area retailers.

We're adding new retailers every day. If you give us your information above, you'll be the first to know when and where we have a bottle on the shelf.