The founders of Industry City Distillers are five young guys with beards and a lot of toys, but no background in liquor. Yet they have created what is without a doubt the most unique distillery in Brooklyn, a borough that is collected a new liquor-maker every few months.
Like the specialists gathered together in a glossy heist films, the quintet partition themselves into areas of expertise. Peter Simon, a former yoga instructor, handles the marketing and administration. Rich Watts is in charge of design, copywriting and printing. Watts' corner of Sunset Park industrial building ICD calls home is dominated by a printing press. Zac Bruner is the resident machinist. His area resembles the room where you reported for shop class in high school. Zac designs anything made of glass or metal that the other guys ask for. If you need a custom gizmo for the still, or a special gimcrack for the fermentation tank, he's your man. Dave Kyrejko is what any conventional distillery would call the master distiller. He devised the company's original fermentation and distillation processes. Max Haimes, assistant distiller and jack of all trades, helps Dave turn out the distillery's initial product.
That product is vodka. ICD began distributing its spirit to New York liquor stores in April. That would seem like an end game to most businessmen. Not these guys. As I write these words, the bottle was called "No. 2." But by the time this article hits the street, however, it's probably sailing under the name of "No. 3" or "No. 4." You see, Industry City vodka—like everything at Industry City—is a work in progress.
