ORIGINAL CRAFTERS

When Sonja Kassebaum and her husband, Dan, opened North Shore Distilling in 2004, rye was the default term for Canadian whiskey and Sazeracs and Negronis were known only to the elite set of cocktail cognoscenti. The Gulf War was ramping up and Americans, on edge, were very much into comfort food and drink. As vodka and sweetened rums rushed out of speed pours, Sonja zipped around Chicago in her little Acura, dropping off cases of their debut batches of spirits. (They used Dan’s SUV for larger deliveries, she’s quick to note.)

Flash forward 12 years and they were moving into an old fancy-kitchen showroom that allowed them to double their production space. They added another fermentation tank and several other bits of kit, plus it provided more room for barrel storage. Today, they still bottle everything by hand. The new location also gave them the opportunity to increase the size of their tasting room tenfold to 5,000 square feet. Now, it’s the fastest-growing part of the business.

“When we were starting out, people didn’t think there was a market for local, small-batch [whiskies]. No distributor would return our calls, so we self-distributed,” Kassebaum told me recently. “You either had to build distributorship or partner with someone because we were spending all our time driving cases