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…