King's County Distillery in the Brooklyn Navy Yard is New York City's oldest operating whiskey distillery, founded in 2010 by Colin Spoelman and David Haskell. The Peated Bourbon combines two American whiskey traditions that have never before met — bourbon's corn-dominant mash bill and Scotland's tradition of peat-smoked barley. The result is a bourbon with a smoky character quite different from anything else in the category.
The peat-corn combination is the innovation. Where most peated American whiskeys use an all-malt base (creating an American single malt rather than a bourbon), King's County uses peated malt alongside corn, producing a whiskey that legally qualifies as bourbon while carrying genuine peat smoke. The pot still distillation — unusual for bourbon — adds a texture and weight that column-distilled bourbon lacks.
King's County Peated Bourbon is a fascinating experiment in category boundaries. It challenges the assumption that bourbon and peat are incompatible, and the quality of the execution — smoky yet sweet, novel yet drinkable — suggests that the category has room for more exploration. A Brooklyn original in every sense.
