Quality and traceability of ingredients and social/environmental ethics are what make our spirits and aromatic bitters distinct in their industry, and memorably delicious.

Our company is founded by a hospitality worker unlike the vast majority of distilleries in the US which are owned and guided by bankers and other financially focused people.

In 2011 bartender turned bartender/distiller/deliveryman/grain-grower etc Rob East attended the Craft Distilling Course at Siebel Institute of Technology (Chicago) which offered connections and education, enough to start dirtying the hands. Later that year, establishing Workhorse Rye he and friends made the first full-scale distillation of what would become arguably the most unique and quality spread of whiskeys distilled during the craft distilling renaissance.

After dozens of rye recipe experiments on a five gallon copper pot still, Rob and collaborator Brenden Dobel of Thirsty Bear Brewery in San Francisco brewed the first mash (essentially hop-less beer). This would become one of the first batches of organic whiskey made in the US since before distilleries made the shift to industrially modified and grown grains.

The recipe was, and still is, mostly rye with a bit of malted barley and wheat. This became the flagship recipe featuring 100% organic grains aged solely in a natural wine cask.

After three years of aging a few experiments, we released that one barrel on Halloween in 2014 at RYE in San Francisco. We’ve been distilling and sourcing interesting grains ever since, in fact we’ve distilled the most heirloom and responsibly grown grains (19+ colorful corns alone to date!) that we know of out of any other US distiller.

We thank those of you who while drinking WHR see that you’re not just enjoying gorgeous spirit; you’re supporting small farmers who pay their workers proper and respect their soil. You’re also supporting an independently minded bartender who pays people well over the norm even for simple tasks like bottling help. In this vast labyrinth of poisonous and corporate food and drink in the USA, WHR is an extremely unique kind of operation.

At this point you can tell that we love our ingredients, we don’t really have marketing “stories”, but we do have actual stories about our grains and farms. We use mostly used casks which allow The Ingredient to sing first and foremost, and it mitigates our contribution to deforesting. The casks we use today we will use indefinitely unlike almost any other distiller in the US. The status quo distiller wants new oak as to add sugar (yep, caramelized oak = sugar) and a cheap way of cleaning up spirit distilled quickly from garbage grains (think Brita Filter when you think of barrel char, it is the same concept).

As the years went on the team at Workhorse Rye bought a little more grain each year and they learned more about farming, which informed the move to purchasing only regeneratively grown heirloom grains. Grains grown regeneratively are almost always heirloom varieties with great chemical compound depth (read: flavor) and they are allowed to interact with the land while being farmed in a positive manner.

No chemical sprays are used, no tilling is done, and the farmer employs many companion crops. We vet each farm to see how they treat their people, creatures, and soil; an egalitarian ethic, humble perspective, and positive impact is very important to us. This method, and subsequent food/drink from it, is not about capitalism, in fact it represents it’s retort: community.

DRINK LESS, DRINK BETTER