Kings County Distillery goes big at Brooklyn Navy Yards

Kings County Distillery, a year-old whiskey manufacturer that’s earned rave reviews from the foodie and locavore camps, is moving out of its 600-square-foot facility in Bushwick and into a 7,000-square-foot space in the Brooklyn Navy Yards.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the owners, Colin Spoelman, who is giving up his job at an architect firm, and David Haskell, who will stay on as a features editor at New York magazine, expect to increase production tenfold from the 270 liters they currently bottle each month and to hire more employees. The distillery currently employs two full-timers and two part-time employees in addition to the founders.

“I hope that as we scale up we are able to maintain that integrity,” Spoelman told the Journal.

Kings County Distillery chose the Navy Yard for its central location off the East River near Williamsburg. It has leased the Paymaster Building, so named because it was the site where military personnel collected their paychecks during World War II.

Andrew Kimball, president of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp., said he hopes to attract more food manufacturers and is currently negotiating with several other local food companies. [WSJ]