Copperworks Distilling Company

Copperworks Distilling Company is the Seattle American Single Malt producer that's quietly built itself into one of the most respected modern American craft whiskey operations on the West Coast — and the distillery whose 2018 American Distilling Institute Distillery of the Year award put Copperworks on equal editorial footing with Westland in the broader Seattle American Single Malt scene. Founded in 2013 by Jason Parker and Micah Nutt in Seattle's downtown waterfront district at 1250 Alaskan Way, Copperworks occupies a production facility and tasting room with views of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains — one of the most visually striking working-distillery locations in any American city.

Parker's professional background is editorially significant. Before founding Copperworks, he served as the founding brewmaster of Pike Brewing Company (Seattle's pioneering Pike Place Market craft brewery, opened 1989) and as a longtime production veteran in the broader Pacific Northwest craft-beer industry. That brewing-tradition technical background directly shapes the Copperworks production approach: a brewer's discipline applied to single malt whiskey production, with the same emphasis on malt selection, mash control, and fermentation precision that defines high-quality craft brewing.

The technical signature that distinguishes Copperworks is the use of Pacific Northwest brewer's malted barley sourced from regional malting operations — much of it from Skagit Valley Malting and other small regional maltsters — rather than commodity distiller's malted barley. The mash bills are essentially brewer's mash bills adapted for distillation, producing a meaningfully different starting fermentation than most American distilleries achieve. Hopped pale ale-style mash bills feed some of the more experimental Copperworks releases (the Single Hop Single Malt Whiskey program uses hopped beer wort as the distillation base, a category Copperworks helped pioneer in American craft distilling).

The product range covers Copperworks American Single Malt Whiskey (the flagship), Copperworks American Single Malt Whiskey Release Series (rotating limited expressions), Copperworks Single Cask Single Malt, the Single Hop Single Malt Whiskey program, Copperworks Gin (a botanical-forward gin built around Pacific Northwest foraged ingredients), and Copperworks Vodka. The 2018 ADI Distillery of the Year recognition has been followed by multiple competition wins through the early 2020s, putting Copperworks alongside Westland and Westward as the editorial top tier of West Coast American Single Malt. The Alaskan Way visitor experience runs through the working production floor and the waterfront tasting room — one of the most architecturally distinct craft-distillery stops in Seattle's tourism economy.