At this moment in 2022, it’s hard to imagine that in the United States at the turn of the 21st century, there were long-standing distilleries in Kentucky making bourbon, some in Tennessee doing their charcoal-filter thing, and little else. Monongahela rye, Pennsylvania’s signature, was a thing of the past. Abandoned industrial brick buildings remain as memorials and tributes. Maryland rye, as a category, was also a chapter in history books.
In the very early 2000s, a few enterprising folks were tinkering with fruit distillation, making brandies inspired by their ancestral lands, like Marko Karakasevic, owner and operator of Charbay Distillery, in California, whose family traces its distilling roots back 12 generations before him. Nobody could have predicted that, two decades later, there’d be whiskey made and aged in every state.…
