“The whole point of building this company, from day one, was for this ‘Jaywalk Rye,’” says Darby Mitchell. A quiet and reserved consultant, she had been hired at a time of movement for the small, quixotic New York Distilling Company, which was at the time literally re-locating itself out of its home in Williamsburg and deep into the warehouses of Flushing Avenue. She had always enjoyed rye, she said; perhaps more importantly had been a longtime friend of Allen Katz, described in Punch as “the modern face of New York City’s distilling scene.” Mitchell describes the company as a passion project for Katz, who had enlisted the backing of Tom Potter, the Park Slope maven who once ran Brooklyn Brewing. 

“Allen was like, I really want to understand what were our forefounders drinking,’’ relays Mitchell. She described the endeavor as involving a trip “to Cornell” to find rye seeds native to the state, but that were no longer being grown, for reasons inherently unknown, but perhaps related to the lingering questions surrounding the lack of biodiversity in an industrially farmed world. All that were left now, at any rate, were these seeds, which Katz had decided to invest in. “There were three varietals, only one we could get to grow,” says Mitchell.  Those would be the seeds they would be growing.

It was special, at least in a literal way. “It had literally not been grown in 250 years,” she says. When it was bottled, finally, for the first time, Katz told the New York Times: “This is the rye we have been dreaming of for 13 years.”  

The rye itself tasted warm and earthy, ancient in an earnest way. “A little bit musty at times, though balanced nicely between sweeter impressions of deeply caramelized toffee and nebulous herbal/floral notes,” reported one reviewer in Paste. “It was exponentially smaller,” says Mitchell about the rye itself, pointing to an illustration that showed it, small and bullet-like, dwarfing a majestic plume of “conventional” rye. On the walls, in Instagram-friendly neon reads the message: Some Rules Are Meant To Be Broken. Breaking rules is inherent to the idea, says Mitchell. Jaywalking and all that. 

While dreaming of this particular, rule-breaking rye, the group has come up with a gin, sold under the name “Dorothy Parker,” taken after the Algonquin Round Table regular. “It’s fast and easy to make,” says Mitchell, about the gin. “It’s probably in every major cocktail bar and high end restaurant in Manhattan.”

About Parker, Mitchell says she was a “literary rebel” and an “absolute daredevil.”

Paving the way to Bushwick wasn’t easy. They had picked up a disused retail space, a warehouse perhaps used to house cheap purses, more recently a popular mural space that had been utilized recently by Disney to promote the National Geographic brand ; moving in one of the larger gin distilling machines — the beloved “Bernadette” — demanded blasting a hole through the ceiling. New sunlights. Everything look and felt newly painted. 

Initially, Mitchell said, they envisioned building out a bar and restaurant. Later, Mitchell decided to start hosting pop-ups, led by a chef who “lived in my building” in Long Island City —  whose shuttered “M. Wells Steakhouse” attracted a significant audience to Bushwick, and raves in the food blogs. The company has tried to make some go of running tours of the place, though it  hasn’t been worth it to operate the place as a running bar. When I ran into her, Mitchell was all talk of tariffs. 

“It’s already impacting us. No glass manufacturer in the U.S. will take our projects, we’re too small. We probably are ordering in the hundreds of thousands of pieces of glasses. They’re not doing custom glass like this,” she says. She lifts a bottle of the Jaywalk brand whiskey; a gorgeous vertical glass tube, made in the shape of the stop sign. Imported from China, she says. 

Shortly after, the company would be quietly sold to the consortium of British private equity operators who also run the Scottish “Glen’s Vodka,” among other liqueur brands. Terms of the deal were undisclosed.  

“Getting settled into Bushwick [required] understanding what the vibe is here and what would attract people. For instance, there’s a cement plant next door, so it probably would not have been ideal to put something on the roof. It’s a different vibe than Williamsburg, obviously,” said Mitchell. 

The New York Distilling Company is located at 573 Johnson Avenue.

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Photos taken by Michelle Maier.