KOVAL Distillery

The Free Bacchus Story

In 2008 Sonat Birnecker Hart gave up a tenured professorship, having been a full professor in both the United States and Germany, to open a distillery in Chicago with her husband. It was the first distillery to open in the city since the mid-1800s.

American whiskey is usually a corn story. Bourbon has to be at least 51% corn, and most of what reaches a shelf follows that rule or something close to it. KOVAL's flagship does not. The Four Grain is exactly what the name says, oat and malted barley and rye and wheat, with no corn in it at all, which puts it outside the familiar American categories and is a good part of why it does not taste like them. Single barrel means what it says too: a bottling comes out of one cask rather than a blend of many, so bottles differ from each other instead of being averaged into a house style.

Robert Birnecker is Austrian, a third-generation distiller who grew up helping at his grandparents’ distillery, and before KOVAL he was deputy press secretary at the Austrian embassy in Washington. European fruit brandy is made on narrow cuts, where the distiller keeps only the heart of the run and sets the rest aside. Birnecker applies the same cuts to grain, which means less spirit from every run than a wider cut would give.

The certificate covers the distilling and the bottling, not any farming. KOVAL buys its grain from organic Midwestern farms, and the USDA register lists its spirits product by product. Knowing which half of a chain a certificate covers is most of what this guide is for. It will not tell you how the Four Grain tastes, and KOVAL’s own notes are not what most people expect from an American whiskey: banana, butterscotch and caramel on the nose, a creamy palate with cinnamon, and a peppery clove finish.