Before Prohibition, Illinois was one of the biggest whiskey-producing states in the U.S. Peoria alone had 73 distilleries and paid more whiskey tax to the federal government than any other city in the country; Chicago paid the second-highest tax. Very few distilleries reopened in Illinois after Prohibition was repealed, but in 1933 Hiram Walker & Sons established the largest distillery in the world in Peoria, which closed in 1981 after the decline of the American whiskey market in the 1970s (Archer Daniels Midland took over the plant and now produces ethanol there).
It’s impossible to know, of course, how many of Illinois’s distilleries will survive, but the answer to the business-model question for Quincy Street—and for the three new distilleries that have opened in Chicago in the last year—is to sell some of their product through an on-site tasting room and the rest to bars and/or liquor stores. It’s a model that’s only been possible since 2010, when Illinois created a craft distiller’s license that allows small distillers to open tasting rooms and sell directly to the public (it also cut the state licensing fee in half).
Keeping the day job isn’t unusual for distillers. Mancini still works full-time as a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, though he does employ two distillers (one full-time, one half-time), a part-time bar manager, and a part-time bookkeeper and office manager at Quincy Street. And Noelle DiPrizio, who owns Chicago Distilling Company with her husband, Jay, and his brother, Victor, still works as an interior designer; Victor is the only one in the family who’s there full-time. They employ one distiller besides Victor as well as nine front-of-the-house employees—bartenders, servers, bar backs, hosts.
An oral history of the Green Mill
We handed a pair of programmers a fistful of change (and some beers) and set them loose to give us their takes on the latest arcade bars.
Forty of our favorite watering holes, old and new, from Rogers Park to Chatham.
Find more distilleries.
