Hudson Valley Distillers, LLC

Hudson Valley Distillers is the Columbia County, New York craft operation founded in 2014 by the Yozzo and Moyer families — childhood friends Thomas Yozzo and Chris Moyer (who became fraternity brothers at Bloomsburg University in 1990 and started planning the distillery together around 2009) — on a small apple orchard and farm property the families purchased in July 2013 and named Spirits Grove Farm. The distillery occupies a converted historic barn attached to four acres of working apple orchards in Clermont, New York (Germantown postal district), with the converted-barn distillery, an on-site tasting room, and the surrounding orchards integrated into a single working farm property in the heart of the Hudson Valley apple-growing region.

The Hudson Valley apple-orchard setting is editorially integral to the brand identity. Columbia County and the broader mid-Hudson Valley region were one of the most important commercial apple-growing regions in pre-Prohibition America, and Applejack (the apple-brandy spirit) was one of the dominant American spirit categories of the Colonial and Federal eras — produced largely from Hudson Valley apple orchards before being almost entirely displaced by Kentucky bourbon and Midwest grain whiskey in the post-Civil War distilling consolidation. Hudson Valley Distillers' applejack program is one of the few modern American operations producing applejack from the same regional apple-growing tradition that defined the original category.

The product range covers Spirits Grove Vodka (the flagship — distilled from local Hudson Valley grain, winner of the American Distilling Institute's 2016 Best of Class Vodka Award), Spirits Grove Gin, Hudson Valley Distillers Applejack (the apple brandy program produced from the on-site orchard's apple harvest), Spirits Grove Bourbon, Spirits Grove Rye Whiskey, and a rotating range of seasonal limited releases tied to the orchard's harvest calendar. The applejack in particular has become the brand's most editorially distinctive product — one of the few legitimately farm-orchard-sourced applejacks at commercial scale in the modern American craft spirits scene.

The Clermont/Germantown visitor experience runs through the converted-barn distillery, the on-site tasting room, and (in season) walks through the four-acre apple orchard that supplies the applejack program. The Columbia County location puts Hudson Valley Distillers within the broader mid-Hudson Valley craft-spirits cluster alongside Hillrock Estate Distillery (in nearby Ancram), Taconic Distillery (across the Hudson in Dutchess County), and the surrounding Hudson Valley wineries and farm-to-table restaurants that anchor the regional weekend tourism economy north of Manhattan.