New York Distilling

New York Distilling Company is the Williamsburg, Brooklyn craft spirits operation founded in 2011 by Allen Katz, Tom Potter, and Bill Potter as one of the founding-era reference points for the modern New York City craft cocktail-distillery scene. Located at 79 Richardson Street in Williamsburg, the distillery occupies a converted industrial space in the heart of the Brooklyn craft-beverage district, with the working pot stills visible from the on-site cocktail bar (The Shanty) that operates as the brand's public-facing tasting room and one of the most-respected cocktail programs in New York City.

The founders' backgrounds anchor the brand's identity. Allen Katz is a longtime cocktail professional and educator — a former director of mixology at Slow Food USA and a fixture in the New York City cocktail scene through the 2000s and 2010s. Tom Potter and his son Bill Potter previously founded Brooklyn Brewery in 1988, giving New York Distilling a direct family lineage into the broader Brooklyn craft-beverage industry. The combined founder backgrounds — cocktail-program serious from Katz, brewery-and-fermentation experience from the Potters — produce a distillery operation that's editorially closer to a working cocktail-program R&D lab than to a traditional distillery tasting room.

The product range covers the Dorothy Parker American Gin (the flagship — a juniper-and-American-botanical-forward gin named for the New York-era poet and Algonquin Round Table member, designed specifically for American cocktail applications rather than the British gin-and-tonic standard), Perry's Tot Navy Strength Gin (a 114-proof navy gin), Chief Gowanus New-Netherland Gin (a Dutch-style barrel-aged genever-influenced gin), Ragtime Rye Whiskey (the rye program — one of the early Empire Rye category members), Mister Katz's Rock & Rye (a small-batch rye-based aperitif that revives a pre-Prohibition cocktail-ingredient category), and a rotating range of seasonal limited cocktail-program releases.

The Williamsburg visitor experience runs through The Shanty — the on-site cocktail bar that operates with full New York Distilling product range, a serious bartender team, and one of the most genuinely-curated craft-spirits-forward bar programs in NYC. Tours move through the working production floor adjacent to the bar, and the integrated production-and-bar format means visitors can see the still and order a cocktail built on its output in the same evening. The Williamsburg location puts New York Distilling at the center of one of the most concentrated craft-food-and-beverage districts in any American city, walking distance from a deep cluster of bars, restaurants, and other Brooklyn craft producers.