The waterfront of Brooklyn Heights painted by William Guy Wall in the early 1800s.
Hallowed Ground
Two hundred and fifty years ago, our distillery was a mud flat along the banks of the East River, a swampy carveout called Wallabout Bay. Our former neighbor, Philip Livingston ran a distillery over in Brooklyn Heights. His cousin Robert was part of the Continental Congress and was one of five on a committee to draft a document giving a political justification for independence from the British monarchy. But at the last minute, Robert was recalled, and sent cousin Philip in his place. Philip travelled to Philadelphia and voted to ratify the document. He signed next to a brewer from Boston, Samuel Adams, another cousin to a committee member.
The document, adopted unanimously, launched a nation, but Brooklyners faced a stiff rebuke. One month later, gun battles broke out in the farmland and wagon roads that then constituted Brooklyn. The Congressional army fought hard at Battle Hill in what is today’s Green-Wood Cemetery, but retreated to Livingston’s home in Brooklyn Heights. Washington’s army was quickly surrounded with their backs to the harbor. By a stroke of fortune (or divine providence), a thick fog allowed Washington and some 4000 troops to retreat to Manhattan silently by water, unnoticed by their aggressors, avoiding significant losses. But the city was too valuable as a target, Washington would retreat to New Jersey by the end of November, leaving the young nation’s largest city in British control.
A drawing of the original Prison Ship Martyr Tomb on Hudson Ave in Vinegar Hill.
The Prison Ships of Wallabout Bay
With their new autonomy, British troops began rounding up prisoners of war, declared patriots, and their allies and placing them aboard prison ships in Wallabout Bay. The prison ships were miserable and men were shot for minor aggravations, or died of illness or malnourishment with meager rations. In all sixteen ships were filled up with prisoners of war, and most estimates place the death toll at 11,500 souls, more than died in the entire conflict from traditional fighting.
Their bodies were thrown overboard or buried in shallow graves on the mud flats of Wallabout Bay. Eventually, their remains were collected and stored in wooden barrels in a makeshift ossuary on Hudson and York avenues, about 850ft north of our tasting room. A dedication read:
"Portal to the tomb of 11,500 patriot prisoners, who died in dungeons and prison-ships, in and about the City of New-York, during the Revolution.”
With the bodies cleared, the young government built a shipyard for its newly formed Navy, the most sophisticated vessels of war imaginable for at least another century.
Livingston’s “Country Home” in Brooklyn Heights
Distillers, Patriots, and Loyalists
Livingston’s home in Brooklyn Heights became a hospital for wounded troops, and his distillery made juniper beer to fortify the British army during the conflict. As late as the mid 1800s, there were stories of Heights residents finding the bones of amputated limbs in their rose gardens. After the war the distillery manufactured Anchor Gin for Hezekiah Pierrepont, whose son would build a rural cemetery on high point of Battle Hill, Green-Wood.
Green-Wood Cemetery, founded by Henry E. Pierrepont, son of distiller Hezekiah Pierrepont (and resident of Livingston’s former home in Brooklyn Heights).
The wooden ossuary on Hudson Avenue grew dilapidated over time, so the bones were transferred to stone caskets, now housed in Fort Greene park below a purpose-built obelisk dedicated in 1902 and designed by the firm that was simultaneously working on a plan for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The Navy Yard stopped building ships in 1966 and is now owned by the City as an industrial park, but Fort Greene park remains, the first public park in Brooklyn.
An Aspirational Ideal
The 250th anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence comes at an odd time in our history. What should be a moment of unity and celebration feels fraught and complicated. We are still wrestling with the promise of the founding ideal and all the ways in which it falls short for so many.
Still, I think it’s possible to mark the occasion by remembering not just the atrocities of the Prison Ships, but the colonial program in general. Livingston was a slave trader and the colonial economy was inextricably linked with human bondage, a program that would be outlawed in NY state only in 1827.
As I wrote in the Bourbon Drinker’s Companion:
When the British colonized the American continent, they established triangular trade. West Africans were enslaved and shipped to the Caribbean to grow sugarcane and refine it into molasses, which was shipped up to the distilleries of the early American cities to get distilled into rum. Many nineteenth-century Americans believed that the United States was founded on twin evils, and that abolition and temperance were the absolution to the original sin of the American project. The Civil War and Emancipation, and then later Prohibition and repeal, were landmark moments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history meant to address that sin, and yet we as a nation are still grappling with it, all these years later, continuing to reckon with vice and virtue in ways that remain unresolved.
Excluded History
It’s an often forgotten fact that distillation played such a significant role in the colonial economy (they don’t dwell too much on the exploitation of cheap rum in elementary school, for obvious reasons). And yet, it was an important early industrial product, one that relied heavily on exploitation at each turn.
We have had a long and complicated history with booze, as Americans, and there have been so many ups (and so many downs), it’s hard to take this moment in context within the long arc of booze history. It is ironic that Americans are drinking less in 2025, apparently because of novel information that alcohol isn’t good for you. Alcohol is bad for you? Tell an American from 1919, when they voted to ban the production and sale of all of it, a task so insurmountable, it required a constitutional amendment. Not that public health improved during Prohibition.
We have seen this all before, time and again.
Freedom, Temperance, and Liberty
I grew up in a Dry County in Eastern Kentucky, where until recently, Prohibition was still in effect. Dry counties in Appalachia (and other parts of the country where they remain) offer no particular model for public health advocates. No one is clamoring for more of them, and they present no particular benefit to the public good. Most of America (red and blue) have been moving to more sensible (and permissive) rules around booze.
The premise of the American project is that virtue and vice should be left to an individual's choice. This is not Libya, where alcohol is banned. It’s not Dubai, where drinking is forbidden except in International hotels. This is not Sweden, where a government monopoly controls the sale of alcohol. This America, but even the right to exercise a social vice seems fraught and politicized.
Booze plays a key role in conflict resolution and cultural exchange. It’s why it’s associated with eras of enlightenment and discovery, whereas periods of religiosity and conformity are associated with temperance. Alcohol has been a force for social lubrication and unification, which is why news of decreased consumption is worth unpacking. Coupled with decreases in fertility rates, and increases in social isolation, there are cultural changes afoot that go beyond partisan politics of the day.
All the more reason to look back at what America has been (and what was lost to get here). A drama that has played out as much in Brooklyn as anywhere else over the 250 years. I don’t think it’s impolitic to mark the occasion with remembering, memorializing and reminding ourselves of the complexity of the struggle to get here. But also a question as to who we want to be as a nation, then and now. And what role whiskey, ironically, might play in it as much in 1776 as now.
Bluestone Caskets in the present-day tomb of martyrs under Fort Greene Park.
Home-grown at Heart
We are an American business, making American whiskey. We hang the American flag on the distillery floor because it’s an essential part of what makes us different from scotch whiskey, from Irish whiskey. Some might view that as a provocation. Brands are expected to espouse a political philosophy these days. For our part, we are inalienably a New York City brand, built off the diversity, energy, and ambition of this city. But we are also a brand with Appalachian roots, to which I ascribe a fiercely independent streak.
Populism is a vague political philosophy and a trivially broad brush. But there is a prevailing narrative that populism has led to major political victories on the right and left, for Appalachians and for New Yorkers. While I’m not going to comment on politics of the day, I got interested in whiskey because I felt that American whiskey (at least) had become too industrialized, too corporate, and frankly too homogenous. I wanted to believe that whiskey making is a form of art, and not a mere commodity to be traded and branded. But the world of whiskey had almost fallen victim to a cynicism that the customer wouldn’t care or tell the difference if brands made whiskey where they said they did or what went on behind the scenes.
Whiskey and Communion
The whiskey boom of the past 15 years proved that people did care, and the opportunity to connect over whiskey brought a lot of people together. Even during the pandemic, people found a hobby in collecting, tasting, and enjoying whiskey. Within beverage alcohol, whiskey is somewhat resilient because of this capacity to debate, to savor, to consider. As a particularly potent beverage, it forces the drinker to slow down, take stock, and deliberate on the quotidian nature of life itself.
If people are doing less of that, it’s a missed opportunity. Especially with the rise of technology. And I don’t mean specifically AI, which seems to dominate a lot of conversations, but we’ve been dealing with a fair amount of algorithmic homogeneity that assumes (or presumes) to predict what a person will care about. Technology is taking away social moments from real life and posing them in a canned world of algorithmic media and artificial intelligence, which amounts to a thinning of culture and the reduction of discourse and the promotion of the banal and mindless. At best, it’s taking away variety and creativity, and at worst it’s taking jobs, pushing society into a more stratified form than ever before, something that is surely behind the so-called “populist” politics. When I was growing up, it was common for one parent to work while the other did the work of the home. Now I know very, very few families that can live that way. We’ve devalued work, devalued child-rearing, and created more busywork passing along tasks like retail checkout to consumers rather than employees.
The Pope (of all people) has specifically compared AI to colonialism. And as we, as Americans, ponder why we started our own rebellion against colonialism in the first place 250 years ago, we should look at those age-old grievances quite closely for what they might say about our times. The Declaration begins with a statement of equality, a statement of rights, and a statement about consent.
A Declaration for Our Time
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.
I’m not advocating for the overthrow of the government, nor am I suggesting class warfare against tech overlords (maybe a little bit). If America, on its quest to be a freer, fairer, better place is waylaid by isolation, homogeneity, and cliche wrapped in an algorithm, then let me be among the patriots who go down trying to inject idiosyncrasy, variety, specificity, into our discourse. And to do so in the spirit of conviviality, hospitality, and dare I say, curiosity.
Maybe you, like me, have taken the occasion of the 250th anniversary of America to re-read the Declaration of Independence. There is a lot in it about humanity. Even the very first sentence:
“When in the course of human events…”
When independence, or really freedom, is threatened (by government, by systems of economic exploitation), we come together to assert our humanity, which seems a fairly potent act of rebellion.
A Modest Proposal
Rebellion? For one, you have the power to shut the thing off. You have the power to choose to go out and live in the world, take advantage of hospitality and conviviality and the pleasure of a neighbor’s company. Let me make a modest proposal: Drink whiskey. Do it with your neighbor and your community and your family and friends. Slow down, put the phone away. If the next revolution begins with whiskey, I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’m here for what comes after. Sometimes, to have Independence, you must declare (and assert) your humanity.
So on this 250th anniversary, I will toast to three eras: to the revolution and the Prison Ship Martyrs who died asserting their independence, to the present, where we chose again, every day, to be our most human selves, and to the future, wherein we see the fruits of the choices our better selves have made, and the whiskey we distill today fills our glass, a product of agriculture and time, reduced and matured to its best self.
May we all have the same for our own, best selves.
