The first whiskey distillery to open in Manhattan in over 100 years, Great Jones Distilling Company, is now up and running in NoHo, offering fans of dark liquor the chance to knock back a few glasses in a space that celebrates every aspect of spirit-making.
Fitted snugly into an 84-year-old building on Broadway, Great Jones’s new distillery is more than a still and some tall tanks. Founder Juan Domingo Beckmann, who also serves as the chief executive of Jose Cuervo, has packed the space with four drinking and dining areas, two kitchens, a gift shop, an experiential art piece, and countless fixtures reminiscent of both prohibition-era Art Deco and the raw elements of an active workshop.
“You never lose sight of the fact that we’re in a manufacturing zone,” project manager Andrew Merinoff told Gothamist. “We’re not ashamed to manufacture--we’re proud of it.”
Great Jones’s pride in being the only active (or at least the only known and legal) whiskey-making operation in Manhattan was hard-earned. The 28,000 square foot distillery took over four years of planning and construction to complete, and over 6,000 different floor plans were considered along the way. During the course of negotiations with city officials, Merinoff discovered that some of the building codes governing whiskey-making in Manhattan were still written out by hand, and over the 2020 holidays construction crews coordinated with the MTA to install underground pipes between passing subway trips.
“If it’s an agency in this city, we’ve worked with them,” Merinoff said.
Visitors to Great Jones will have the choice of enjoying their rye and bourbon offerings in either the main restaurant, an upstairs tasting bar, or the basement-level speakeasy, which literally rumbles when subway trains pass by on nearby tracks. An additional third floor lounge, featuring a rack of tapped barrels that make it possible to blend different bourbon styles into personalized, one-of-one bottles, will be used for private events.
Of course, the reason for all of Great Jones’s hard work (and all its different spaces in which to drink) is the whiskey-making happening on site. In its distilling room, they boast a 500 gallon copper pot still attached to two 28 foot columns. The still is housed in an explosion-proof room, and it all sits on a floor that was lowered five feet to abide by city ordinances.
No grain milling or whiskey aging takes place on site—the barrels are shipped to Great Jones’s Black Dirt Distillery, where the four-year aging process will take place. This means that the whiskey currently on offer here was actually distilled upstate, and visitors won’t actually be able to drink any of the Manhattan-made stuff until sometime in 2025.
“Most distillers don’t have the luxury of doing this,” Merinoff said of the long-term barrel aging plans. “We knew we were going to be here for the long run, we knew this wouldn’t be a short-term project.”
On one of the hourly distillery tours that take place between 12:30 and 4:30 p.m., visitors will learn all about the New York-sourced ingredients used to make Great Jones whiskey, along with the high demand for whiskey stills, and just how difficult it was to convince manufacturer Vendome to install a second, entirely deconstructed still, in the building’s gift shop. After moving through the still room, tours wind their way through the upstairs tasting bar, through a psychedelic art experience (really) dubbed ‘Alchemy,’ and ultimately end in the subterranean tasting room.
Great Jones Distilling Co. is located at 686 Broadway in Manhattan, and is currently open Wednesday through Sunday, 12 p.m. to 10 p.m.
