The story of Wigle Whiskey hearkens back to the birth of American whiskey, which, they are quick to remind us, began not in the South, but in the Northeast.

While the South may be today’s spiritual home of American whiskey, its geographic birthplace is indeed the Northeast. American whiskey historian Chuck Cowdery writes in his seminal history of American whiskey production, Bourbon Straight, that “although corn was known, grown, and probably distilled in colonial times, most colonial whiskey was made from rye, a familiar Old World grain,” and that “there were well-established rye whiskey industries in…