Ransom Spirits, LLC

Ransom Spirits is the Sheridan, Oregon craft distillery whose 1997 founding makes it one of the very oldest modern American craft distilleries — predating most of the broader craft American distilling boom by over a decade — and the operation widely credited as the editorial reference point for the modern American Old Tom Gin revival. Founded in 1997 by Tad Seestedt in Yamhill County, Oregon (the Willamette Valley wine country region southwest of Portland), Ransom Spirits operates from a working farm property that includes the distillery, an on-site vineyard, and an estate-bottling program — making Ransom one of the very few American spirits operations to combine distillery, working agricultural farm, and bottled wine production on a single integrated property. The Old Tom Gin revival is the brand's most editorially significant project. By the early 2000s, Old Tom Gin — the historic sweetened-gin category that dominated mid-19th-century American cocktail making and was the foundational ingredient in the Tom Collins, the Martinez, and dozens of other pre-Prohibition cocktail templates — had been functionally extinct from American shelves for almost a century. Seestedt collaborated with cocktail historian David Wondrich (the author of the seminal cocktail-history reference "Imbibe!") to develop a historically accurate Old Tom Gin recreation, launching the Ransom Old Tom Gin in 2008. The release essentially single-handedly revived the Old Tom Gin category in American cocktail p…