In the popular imagination, whiskey has long been seen as a manly drink, for the same kinds of arbitrary reasons we dress baby boys in blue and baby girls in pink. However, not only is there plenty of whiskey history demonstrating the baseless nature of that belief, but some people hold that women tend to have better palates than men, making us better equipped to detect the nuances of fine spirits. In any case, women today are making up an increasingly large share of whiskey drinkers and playing a still small but growing role in the industry as distillers.
Here’s a sampling of distilleries with production headed up by women:
Delaware Phoenix
Delaware Phoenix is a one-woman show based not in the state of Delaware, but in Delaware County, New York. I got the chance to try distiller Cheryl Lins’s corn whiskey last year; she also makes a bourbon, a rye, and a wheat whiskey aged in used barrels. Lins is a whiskey geek in the purest sense, a self-taught mad scientist who first started distilling when satisfying a nascent absinthe habit after ordering bottles from Europe got too expensive. Delaware Phoenix spirits are a little hard to come by outside New York state, but you can order online, assuming the whiskey you’re after is in stock.
Michter’s
Michter’s, the well-branded resurrection of a shuttered Pennsylvania distillery that may have been the oldest in the nation, has been selling mysteriously-sourced whiskey since the label was acquired by Chatham Imports, and has since introduced spirits distilled off-site under Michter’s supervision. In 2015, when the company opened its own distillery in Shively, Kentucky, they brought on Pamela Heilmann—who was, at the time, running Beam’s Booker’s plant, the world’s largest bourbon distillery—as master distiller. The first product from the Shively plant is slated to hit shelves around 2020. Heilmann isn’t the only woman with a high-profile gig at Michter’s: Andrea Wilson, the distillery’s vice president and distillery manager, supervises barrel procurement and aging.
Spirit Works Distillery
The all-female distilling team at Spirit Works Distillery in Sebastopol, California, came together by accident, but it’s been a happy accident. “It’s happened to work out this way,” said former head distiller and co-founder Ashby Marshall in an interview with Cheers. “[People] get excited when they find out it’s an all-female production team.” Lauren Patz, Marshall’s one-time apprentice, now heads up distillation. Whiskey is a relatively new addition to the wine country distillery’s lineup; you can find their straight wheat and straight rye whiskeys in Sonoma County bars and retailers, as well as online.
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Castle & Key
This Frankfort distillery at the former Old Taylor site hasn’t dumped its first barrel yet, but their production team is headed by former Brown-Forman wunderkind Marianne Barnes. Before co-owners Will Arvin and Wes Murray got in touch with her through LinkedIn, she was the heir apparent to Woodford Reserve master distiller Chris Morris, with whom she’d trained as a master taster. Doors are expected to open later this year.
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