The entire Gibson clan— Keith, Nicole, Dan, Susan

Like many New York City-area residents, husband and wife Dan & Susan Gibson were traumatized by its events of September 11, 2001.

With their daughter experiencing this close-up and their son soon after inspired to enlist for military service, they exchanged their Westchester Cty. picture-perfect life from where Susan ran an outdoor nursery and Dan had commuted to his Wall Street office, and in 2002 bought a 450-acre farm upriver in Ghent. “We needed to do something different. My son, Keith, and I always wanted land where we could hunt and fish on.” The Gibsons soon purchased registered Black Angus cattle when one of his finance clients had approached him to raise a fully grass-fed cow because he’d thought his children’s autism had been caused or exacerbated by the food they’d consumed. They expanded their herds, having them butchered to be sold at farmers markets.

Beef Before Bourbon

“I realized that half of what we butchered was ground meat but the restaurants in our area were too glad to pay only $.99/lb. from Sysco rather pay more for ours,” said Dan with Susan adding, “we also couldn’t find a restaurant in town then that served cleaner meat and we’d wanted some place we could take our grandkids,” so in 2011 they bought a pre-existing diner on Hudson’s main street of Warren that was under foreclosure. Having been inspired by Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and via their mutual presence at Manhattan’s Union Square Farmer’s Market a friendship between them ensued. The Gibsons opened their Grazin’ Diner as A Greener World’s first fully animal welfare-approved restaurant in the world serving not only their 154 grass-fed and -finished Black Angus but 90 or so pasture-raised Tamworth, Old English Spot, and Berkshire pigs; eggs and meat from over 1000 chickens, and vegetables farmed organically in tunnels. “All the animal flesh served at Grazin’ Diner is raised on our small family farm that adheres to the highest animal welfare standards—that’s us!” exclaimed Dan admitting that maintaining a dairy business was unmanageable.

With so many things keeping him busy and so much work to do on the farm, Keith was drawn to distilling because, “I love whiskey!” As an archer he’d made his own bows, as a competitive target shooter he’s built his rifles, and when he took an interest in blacksmithing he built a forge and worked that for six years and now uses those skills to fix things around the farm but “creating and working with a distillery is too expensive to walk away from, I’m having too much fun to do so anyway, and our business is now starting to depend upon it.”

Once he’d experimented with his own-built distillery he asked his wife Nicole if they could mortgage their house to purchase and build a commercial microdistillery. “To comport with state farm licensing law we couldn’t have my parents share in its ownership until we were able to take over the diner. The impetus for us doing this was to diversify our businesses so as to offer greater financial security and control through the vertical integration that our state’s licensing structure allows our family.” Assisted by his childhood friend Alan ‘Ham’ Hamilton, Keith’s learned solely from trial & error while using the ADI Conference and its workshops as learning resources, “a gold mine of info, it’s so helpful and interactive.”

Charged with ordering botanicals for his first gin run, Nicole had shorted him 6 lbs. from seven of coriander for what turned out to be a ‘happy accident’ preventing them from making too soapy of a gin despite what the ADI forum participant ‘Odin’ had recommended. They’ve considered using wildcrafted botanicals from their farm with Nicole once using mulberries to good effect as an experiment and have made small batches of pear and a barrel-aged peach distillate from their trees.

Viking Field Corn and Organic Barley

For his whiskies he uses 3-year air-dried Missouri oak barrels, sources his organic Viking field corn from a 6-acre satellite property (“it’s a naughty pleasure of mine to distill corn since we never feed it to our cows, not even the cobs or husks”), has a lease with Stone House Milling for its equipment, and acquires his organic barley (25% of his whiskey grain bill) from a small farm in the Finger Lakes area which is then malted by Hudson Valley Malt. In season they make a whiskey infused with blackberries they pick themselves. A regular item is its Maple Whiskey made with their own-distilled whiskey dumped into barrels that have been used once for whiskey, given to a friend to age his maple syrup in for a year, then returned for a year’s aging to create his Maple Whiskey.

The shed distillery is outfitted with three 400-gallon fermenters along with a 300-gallon mash tun and stripping still affectionately referred to as Bertha. “We use no plates allowing the vapor to pass through for our whiskies,” he said of his Affordable Distilling machines emphasizing his appreciation for the greater contact with copper in eschewing this and acquiring 55 gallons of raw spirit from a 70-gallon run with very tight cuts. “It’s my organic corn, and I want people to taste it.” He’s never carbon- nor chill-filtered a spirit only, “distilling, proofing, and bottling,” except for filtering for char and sugar sediment in his whiskies. The young married couple uses a simple and efficient 4-bottle hand bottler, trying every recipe before its decided upon for commercial production, with Nicole developing the cocktail recipes for its new bar at the Hudson diner along with the bottles’ labels. Flavored vodkas may be in the works if they someday find the time, but as with all their products—even the Maple Whiskey—there’ll be no added sweeteners or colorants.

To conform with NY State Farm Distillery License allowing their Unburdened spirits brands to be sold at the diner (open 8am-9pm daily), ownership of it shifted to Keith and Nicole in 2021 when they altered it to include a bar. According to chef Landon Powell diner items with spirits finding their way into it include the vodka-sautéed mushrooms to top a burger, vodka reduced into its steak sauce as a way to elevate its aromatics, and cask Bourbon finding its way into the house bbq sauce. “If someone comes in and orders a tomato soup, burger and a Bourbon we can assure them that all the tomatoes in that rich soup come from our organically-grown sheltered garden, and that the organic corn going into that Bourbon was grown by the distiller—me—who also may be the guy cooking your burger, and that the beef it’s made with was from my family farm,” smiled Keith. “How does it get any more cool and hyper-local than that?!”

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Since 1991 New York resident David Furer's work with spirits has included stints managing Chicago's Midwest Int'l. Spirits Exposition and BTI's World Spirits Championships; writing and editing for Sommelier Journal, Santé, Germany's Der Whiskey Botschafter, the UK's harpers; and judging for Concours Mondial du Bruxelles. He's also an Advanced Sommelier with the Court of Master Sommeliers, and has managed bars in London England.