
Distilling has always been collaborative. Cognac, Armagnac, grappa, and many other spirits have long depended on itinerant horse-drawn stills that travel from vineyard to vineyard. Established distilleries have long leaned on contract distilling to supplement their business. Creativity had a role to play in some of these interactions, but their relationships have generally been more transactional than collaborative.
But today, there is another type of distiller who isn’t content to send in their specs and call it a day. Many ambitious, highly skilled, and creative distillers can’t afford to build their own facilities, but are looking for a larger creative collaboration as they build their brands. These nomadic distillers intentionally partner with other distilleries — often a wide range of them — to run the pumps, fill the still, and make the cuts themselves on somebody else’s equipment and facility. They are building out their own labels by collaborating with distilleries across states and even internationally. It’s a model that’s been common in the wine and beer industries for years, perhaps best exemplified by Mikkel Borg Bjergsø who founded Mikkeller Beer explicitly to collaboratively brew across the world. And now, a new crop of nomadic distillers is emerging with their own projects.

From Austria to Tennessee
In 2016, Florian Kuenz, distiller at his family distillery Kuenz Naturbrennerei in Austria, traveled to North Carolina to study smoking grains. On that trip he met Colton Weinstein, a budding distiller who founded Liba Spirits with Devon Trevathan. Weinstein and Kuenz hit it off to such an extent that Weinstein and Trevathan asked if they could launch Liba Spirits with a gin made at Kuenz Naturbrennerei. Trevathan says that they wanted to make their first spirit in Austria “because it was a really beautiful place to go, it is probably the most picturesque distillery run by the 12th generation of the same family.”
That spirit of creativity and freedom animates a subset of distillers who don’t have a physical distillery to call their own. They are nomadic distillers who, because of prohibitive start-up costs and a desire for creative freedom, collaborate with established distilleries to make a variety of spirits across the world. Absent the millions needed to establish their own distilleries, these nomads are creating brands and distilled expressions that highlight ideas and ambitions that might not have otherwise made it.
Today, Trevathan and Weinstein’s Liba Spirits is based in Nashville, Tennessee, where they make Terrativo, a bourbon-based aperitivo at Corsair Distillery — because bourbon is the state’s native spirit and they wanted to try something new. Along the way they have also made a botanical rum called Lafcadio Rum at Porchjam Distillery in New Orleans, Louisiana, “because it’s one of the few states in the U.S. that has sugarcane growing.” Rum made from local sugarcane molasses combined with rich local botanicals made complete sense to them. It’s this creative range that defines their approach.

Grain Obsession
Rob Easter was steeped in the world of music and coffee when he became obsessed with whiskey and founded Workhorse Rye in San Francisco. He was most focused on expressing the unique flavors in grain in his whiskeys. “I hate shitty bread,” he says, and “being exposed to Pizzeria Bianco and then eating at Tartine in 2011” really focused his attention on the identity of individual grains. He felt that “no one was treating [grains] with respect” in distilling and has been focused on doing exactly that ever since.
Easter’s sub label, MODERN ANCIENT GRAINS, is devoted to expressing the flavors of tiny production corns from Oaxaca, California, and Arizona. Easter says that “just like winemakers will grow the types of grapes they want to work with, we grow our heirloom corns ourselves to then give to our farmers for further growing.” He is so focused on this mission that he even helps the farmers he works with pollinate experimental corn batches by hand. There is a huge political aspect to his devotion to these crops. Easter is keenly focused on sustainability and avoiding the commodification of ingredients so that his grains express the identity of these crops, which he ties back to the memory of how his great grandparents’ farm was ruined through chemical fertilizers.
Easter has always had to bootstrap. He launched Workhorse Rye by trading labor for distilling time at a facility in the East Bay. Thirteen years later, he has a silent investor, but he’s had to hustle for everything, and has been distilling at facilities in LA, Tucson, Sonoma, and elsewhere. While he officially launched with $10,000, friends and family have contributed labor and money, and he’s always worked to support the distilling business. His most succinct advice for anyone who wants to start on this path is: “Don’t expect anything to be linear. I worked the census in 2020 because it was a job that worked in my schedule.”
The Hustle and Flow
Alex Clark co-founded Fort Hamilton Distillery in Brooklyn, New York. Their first products were experimental, like a cacao-infused rum, but they shifted to barrelling whiskey in 2016 because it “became apparent quickly that aged whiskey was a better business model.” He started distilling because of love for New York rye, a speciality of the area that doesn’t include any corn. Financing the project with his bartending gig, Clark connected with the nascent distilling scene in New York City. He found distilleries that had a little extra space and convinced them to let him start “squirreling away barrels in their distillery.”
He describes the essence of nomadic distilling just like a pop-up restaurant that uses a commercial kitchen to make its food: “Kitchens are expensive. You own the kitchen, I’m the cook,” says Clark. “I guess if you have $5 million, you figure out how to spend $5 million. If you don’t, you figure out how to get it done.” Adjusting to the situation means turning the flexibility of contract distilling into “a serious advantage that the other people don’t necessarily have.”

As Fort Hamilton has evolved, so has the distillation operation. Today Clark continues to distill whiskey out of another operation — Taconic Distillery in New York’s Hudson Valley — but he does all the blending, aging, and bottling in Fort Hamilton’s Industry City location in Brooklyn, where he also distills a gin and has a tasting room. He describes it as hard work and a combination of disciplines. “Oh my God, if you want an easy life, this isn’t it,” he says. “If you want an interesting life, this is it in spades.” And above all the daily tasks, the deliveries, the packaging, the sales calls, the conversations with journalists, is the overriding goal: making more whiskey in more barrels so that they have more product for the future of the company. He says, “Our superpower was making more whiskey happen. It’s the hardest thing because it’s negative cash flow. The more you make, the more negative cash flow is required.”
How to Make It as a Nomad
Clark, Easter, and Trevathan are all blunt about just how difficult it is to make a business out of this type of distilling. They mention a number of small side deals that make things happen, like contract distilling for clients or barrel partnerships where a partner pays for the barrel and they split the product or cash. Even small things can be issues. For example, Easter says that even the “samples you’re expected to give away are huge percentagewise.” And then there are the potentially business-ending stories: Mary Bartlett, co-founder of Future Gin, didn’t receive notice that the distillery they were using had closed until two weeks after its closure. She remembered that situation was more stressful than launching Future Gin because they already had product in markets and then had to go through the TTB approval process again, just like a new product.
Still, everyone agrees that the freedom is worth the work. “I’m glad that we didn’t have someone investing because it’s certainly not money for nothing, they’re waiting to recoup that investment that they made. I’m glad to have had the time where someone wasn’t looking at us, breathing down our backs because it took us a while to figure out if this was a solid way forward,” says Trevathan. She notes that planning is key: If they had known then what they know now, they might have been able to create a much more defined business plan and work with investors. But, at least for Liba, it took the experience of making and selling their spirits to really get them to where they are now.

The very flexibility that this sort of distilling allows is both a blessing and a curse. Trevathan says that, with almost 3,000 distillers in the United States, “maybe people can fill in the gaps to do something like this to create something novel.” Since they work on the margins of the business, they are always subject to the push and pull of established distilleries so the temptation, and frequently, the plan, is to eventually expand into their own space. Fort Hamilton has its own small facility now but still collaborates with its longtime partner Taconic for their whiskeys. There are even distillers who have made the move away from a permanent facility exactly because of that flexibility. Morgan McLachlan used to operate the Spirits Guild in Los Angeles, where she launched Amass distilling. Today she works with other distilleries and says that, while she misses some things, like being able to do R&D quickly, she now has the time to focus on more aspects of her business, especially sales and marketing.
But every single distiller that I talked to about being nomadic leaned into creativity as the argument for continuing on this path. Established distillers also seem to get something from the relationship beyond the purely remunerative, because these are all very creative collaborations. Perhaps when combined with the incredible creative output of this sort of distiller, there is space for more of them in the distilling ecosystem.