Adirondack Distilling Company Crafts Four Award-Winning OU Kosher Products

The Adirondack Distilling Company is a craft distillery headquartered in Utica, NY (halfway between Syracuse and Albany). With its first production taking place in November 2012, the award-winning distillery now makes four OU Kosher-certified products: vodka, gin, white whisky and bourbon.

Three friends, Bruce Elwell, Steve Cox and Jordan Karp, with their shared love of spirits, especially vodka, began talking in 2010 about going into business together. With a history of home brewing and even some bootleggers in their ancestry, making vodka was not just a fantasy, but a good business.

In 2011, with the purchase of an historic building, they opened the Adirondack Distilling Company on Varick Street in Utica. Using state-of-the-art equipment, a custom-crafted copper still from Germany, and a proven distilling process, Adirondack Distilling Company became central New York’s latest gem.  

The company produces hand-crafted, internationally award-winning, premium spirits from locally sourced corn and water from the Adirondack Mountains, meaning that all of our spirits are naturally gluten free. Hand-crafting allows us to laboriously choose what parts of the alcohol make the cut as finished product into your bottle. Therefore, our spirits are known for their unique flavors and remarkably smooth finishes.

Here are our OU-certified products:

• ADK VODKA is chill filtered for 6-8 hours over Herkimer Diamonds. Chill filtering over Herkimer Diamonds (a doubly terminated quartz crystal) produces the cleanest, clearest of spirit.
• ADK GIN has 10 different botanicals and essentials oils, one of which, an Alpine Bilberry, is native to the Adirondack region boasting a tart berry taste. The result is a gin with a complexity of flavor and a one-of-a-kind taste.
• 1000 STILLS WHITE WHISKY is not your grandfather’s clear whisky. We lightly age this spirit in an un-charred, White American oak barrel. You will find the true clean taste of corn whisky with slight oak overtones.
• 601 BOURBON is Central New York’s first legal bourbon. We make our bourbon from 100 percent New York State corn with no other grain or caramel color and flavoring. This is honest, corn bourbon, tasting how bourbon was meant to taste.

In June 2015, my husband Bruce, co-owner and president of Adirondack Distilling Company, and I participated in the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York.

We met a gentleman who had an interest in exporting our products to Israel. He simply loved our products and our company story. A few weeks after the show we received a call from Timini Co. in Israel. They had heard great things about our products and expressed a desire to import them. From there we started our OU certification process. Now, not only are we OU certified, but we are also certified OU Kosher Kitniyot for Passover. We are so proud to have this opportunity to export our products to Israel and just as proud to be able to offer these hand-crafted OU Kosher products here in the United States.

We already have won a substantial number of awards for our four OU Kosher products.  Here are a few of them:

ADK VODKA:

         Silver Medal – 2014 World Vodka Awards, London

         Double Gold Medal – 2013 American Wine & Spirits Society, New York

ADK Gin:

         Silver Medal – 2014 New York Wine & Spirits Society Competition

1,000 Stills White Whisky:

        Double Gold – 2014 NY Wine and Spirits Society Competition

        Gold Medal – 2014 SIP International Spirits Competition

601 Bourbon:

Silver Medal – 2015 San Francisco World Spirits Competition.

The distillery is always seeking new ideas to grow geographic distribution, including private labels.