It has been decades since you could get a gin and tonic or a whiskey sour mixed with spirits distilled in New York City.
That will change this spring, when two new distilleries, The Shanty, also known as the New York Distilling Company (79 Richardson Street, Williamsburg) and The Breuckelen Distilling Company (77 19th Street and 3rd Avenue, Sunset Park), are set to begin bottling rye whiskey and gin for the first time since Prohibition.
For The Shanty’s Tom Potter, it is a dream that was rekindled only after he retired from brewing award-winning beers at The Brooklyn Brewery for the better part of two decades. Over the past five years, he had been working at a food-related nonprofit and kayaking on rivers out West during his vacation time, when he discovered a string of small distilleries in towns nearby.
