Fort Hamilton

By Meghan Swanson, 10/7/2021

If you were a wealthy businessman or well-connected socialite in New York City 150 years ago, you might have found yourself pulling up to your favorite social club in the evening. You’d step down from your coach under the flicker of gaslights and head into the warm club with its dark wood-paneled walls, high ceilings, elegant chandeliers, and curved, comfortable chairs drawn up around the tables. Perhaps you’d turn up your collar or snug your fur stole a little closer about your shoulders against the cold outside; seeking something to warm you up further, you might head for the bar. The mustachioed man in white shirtsleeves and fitted waistcoat behind the heavy wooden bartop has just the thing for you; he pulls down a thick glass bottle of New York rye whiskey. He cracks some ice into your tumbler, adds drops of different ingredients to the whiskey - maybe gum syrup and absinthe, but always vermouth and bitters - and swirls it all together. He might add a little maraschino syrup to the potion before straining it and sliding the finished cocktail across the bar to you. You sip appreciatively, savoring the way the spicy, bold rye whiskey interacts with the other ingredients. You’re enjoying an early version of one of the world’s most famous cocktails, the Manhattan. 

New Yorkers and their fellow Americans would enjoy the flavor of New York rye whiskey, and especially its place in early cocktail history, for hundreds of years. Right up until the event that changed everything about alcohol in America - the passage of the 18th Amendment. One of the myriad effects of the Prohibition era, lasting from 1920 until the repeal of the amendment in 1933, was the near extinction of the New York rye whiskey market. Breweries, wineries, and distilleries alike went under as the nationwide ban on the production, transportation, importation, and sale of their products strangled the market. Some exceptions were made for products such as sacramental wine and ‘medicinal’ whiskey - available only with a doctor’s prescription - but the majority of businesses that made alcohol in the United States were forced to close up shop or turn to other industries to stay afloat.

“The fact that one of the most incredible exports that America has to offer, which is the classic cocktail canon, was just decapitated for this arbitrary reason seemed weird to me.”

For all of Alex Clark’s intense passion for American whiskey and American cocktails, you’d be surprised to find that he himself was not born in America. Originally hailing from the United Kingdom, Alex Clark, co-owner and co-founder of Fort Hamilton Distillery, has been a wanderer from an early age. As a boy, he toured Europe in a Volkswagen camper van with his father. “Ultimately,” he says, “that led to an interest and fascination in food and flavor and drinks and flavor for, well, I guess the rest of my life.” After residing in Africa as a teacher and living in France for a bit, he found himself working in London as a currency options broker. Though he found it a ‘soulless’ industry full of ‘skulduggery’, he nevertheless took another broker position in New York City. He still hated the work, but fell in love with New York and with his wife Amy Grindeland, with whom he’s been married 20 years. He soon dropped the broker work and began playing music. “As all good musicians do, I ended up bartending.” he jokes.

Alex couldn’t have known it at the time, but he was about to be on the bleeding edge of innovation in the liquor industry. In 2005, he began bartending at East Side Company, working for Sasha Petraske, the visionary owner of the famous Milk & Honey bar and the person credited with the invention of modern cocktail culture. He was impressed by the approach of Sasha and others like him towards bartending and cocktails; the main focus of their work was respect for the ingredients and honesty and integrity in making their drinks. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, this attitude was incredibly unique. It was a time of what Alex dismissively terms ‘pink drinks’, a time in which the New York rye you might’ve enjoyed at any bar in the city 150 years before was exceedingly rare. “At the bottom of it all was an attention to detail around the recipes, and the ingredients, and the execution which no one had seen in decades.” he explains.

Although the original recipes of American cocktail canon often call for rye whiskey as their base, at that time it had fallen out of fashion and was hard to obtain. A distributor might be able to get a bartender a bottle of Rittenhouse or Old Overholt, but those were pretty much their only choices back then. Alex wondered, “What is happening with the rye whiskey category? Why doesn’t it exist anymore?” His curiosity drove him forward on the path of research, where he found that it wasn’t that people didn’t like rye whiskey anymore. It was that the effects of Prohibition had all but killed it, making it so rare that many people didn’t really know what it tasted like anymore or where to find it. When the 18th Amendment cut distilleries off at the knees, the big distillers in Kentucky stayed afloat by making those aforementioned exceptions to the rule (such as medicinal whiskey) or turning their hands to other trades. Hanging on by a thread already, they had to ruthlessly cut costs. One of the ways they made liquor as cheaply as possible was by using corn, a less expensive crop than rye. This moved American whiskey as a whole farther away from the use of rye, which had been a large part of the industry before 1920.

“You look at the industry and then you realize...there’s only a handful of big distilleries in America, and they’re run from boardrooms.”

As Alex’s knowledge of cocktails and craft distilling grew, so did interest in the field from up-and-comers hoping to get a foot in the door. In 2011, a friend asked him to help launch a whiskey brand. This brand would become Widow Jane Distillery of Brooklyn, where Alex would learn the fundamentals of distilling. The deeper he got into the craft distilling world, the firmer his convictions became. “There was a lot of potential for rye whiskey to be the most flavorful and substantial whiskey in America.” he points out. He parted ways with Widow Jane Distillery in 2014 and started down the path that would eventually lead him to Fort Hamilton Distillery.

Alex felt there was more room for substance in whiskey. He knew the big distilleries weren’t connected to the hottest and most happening cocktail bars, and he knew there was a need there to be filled. “Innovation is key. It’s one of the advantages we have as craft distillers that we don’t get stuck in our ways like other older distillers do.” he says. He was ready to start ‘banging the drum’ for New York rye whiskey, to understand whiskey on a molecular level, to get creative and make his own product. 

As he rode the subway home at night from his bartending job in Manhattan, he would scribble down whiskey names in his notepad. “All the names sound stupid until you stick it on something,” he says with a laugh. As luck would have it, at a friend’s baby shower he met someone in branding and packaging that was looking to represent a whiskey brand. But what to call it? In the end, he took his cue from history. Fort Hamilton Parkway happened to be his home subway stop; Fort Hamilton’s historic role as the place where the Revolutionary War kicked off and as the last functioning United States Army base in New York City suited his purpose of reviving that New York rye whiskey that had formed the base of so many of the world’s classic cocktails. The fort brought back memories of touring graveyards and cathedrals on that long-ago childhood journey across Europe, the palpable weight of history there. Fort Hamilton Distillery it would be.

“I just want to make tasty whiskey - and I’m too stupid not to do it.”

Alex is quite aware of the irony of a British person founding a whiskey brand centered around the history of the Revolutionary War. At first, he says he was afraid he’d be laughed out of liquor stores. To his pleasure, he found that the opposite was true. Buyers were receptive and appreciative of his independent, entrepreneurial spirit. All the spirit in the world, however, wouldn’t get him from scribbled subway dreams to a full-fledged distillery on its own. One of the most important elements, Alex often claims, is having a supportive partner. Amy has been more than simply supportive; she is a co-founder of Fort Hamilton and has been heavily involved in the design process and sales from the start.The first step they had to take was borrowing distillery space from some friends in Brooklyn where Alex could distill and lay down his first barrels. Using the homemade still at Industry City Distillery, Alex would land on the golden mash bill that would become Fort Hamilton’s flagship Single Barrel Rye.

The problem with distilling whiskey, as so many start-up distillers have found, is that it takes time to become the shining star they hope it will be when they first lay it down. “The biggest mistake people make in this business is thinking they’re going to be instantly successful,” Alex tells us. “That’s a very dangerous assumption to make.” As Alex tried to lay down as many barrels as he could while bartending and renovating his home, he found financial problems mounting. Rent came due, and he needed a solution to keep Fort Hamilton afloat.

Alex doesn’t see sourced product as necessarily evil. What’s important to him is transparency around what Fort Hamilton is sourcing. “There is always New York whiskey in every bottle that we make. Always New York grain in every bottle that we make.” he states firmly. Their Double-Barrel Rye and Double-Barrel Bourbon are a careful blend of sourced whiskey and whiskey distilled in-house. Every business has to cope with the realities of their strengths and weaknesses, he says, and Fort Hamilton approached starting up in the most sensible way possible given the resources at their disposal. “It’s worse than Formula One. It’s a rich man’s sport, no two ways about it.” he says ruefully. 

They needed those blended products to serve as a volume-driver to help keep the lights on. With that in mind, Alex set out to over-deliver on quality as well as a competitive price point. His former life as a bartender informed some of the decisions he made to appeal to the on-premise market; i.e., bartenders buying whiskey to pour for their patrons. Those bottles are designed with a longer neck to make a quick and accurate pour easier for the person tending bar. The chef-like seriousness with which Alex approached bartending and the focus on honesty and integrity in the ingredients that go into craft cocktails has paid off; the blended products are selling well and helped keep Fort Hamilton above water while time worked its magic on those very first barrels.

“You can run all the numbers in the world that you want, but ultimately once you start mashing and pitching yeast, you know, Mother Nature will be your boss.”

Fort Hamilton’s Single Barrel Rye is made with 90% New York rye and 10% malted barley. This was a deliberate choice by Alex, leaving corn completely out of the equation. During the Revolutionary War, the corn-based bourbon we know and love today wasn’t really around; the majority of American whiskey was made with rye, much of it coming out of New York. Happily, Fort Hamilton is seeing great chemistry and yields from this mash bill. In another deliberate connection to historic practices, he chooses to use 30-gallon barrels. The most commonly used barrel size today is 53 gallons, which weigh over 500lbs and cannot be moved without heavy equipment. That equipment wasn’t available 200 years ago, so distillers back then used the smaller 30-gallon barrels to age their whiskey. Alex also eschews the practice of ‘staving’, or adding staves or wood chips to a barrel to augment the aging process as some other distillers do. He likes a #3 char on his barrels, which he feels adds mellow tones of butterscotch, vanilla, and caramel, rounding out the spicy rye flavor and making the style more approachable.

Weighing in on the big question of pot still or continuous column still, Alex acknowledges that a column still is the more efficient choice. If distilling was only about logic and efficiency, however, we suspect few people would be getting into it. “To be able to get personal with a pot still in Brooklyn is always a good thing.” Alex pronounces with a grin. In their newly built distillery and tasting room in Brooklyn, Fort Hamilton will be installing a pot-column hybrid still.

“I’ve found myself in 3 or 4 different careers over my life, and what I love about whiskey, just--some shit happens on some days that you just cannot explain.” 

Given Fort Hamilton’s nomadic beginnings (distilling first at Industry City Distillery in Brooklyn and later at Black Dirt Distillery in Warwick, NY), we wondered if Alex had any concerns over consistency. He has done his best to keep his product consistent; he sources the same grain from the same farmers, the same types of yeast, and same barrels from the same cooperage everywhere he’s made Fort Hamilton whiskey. As every distiller knows, however, you can cut down on variables as much as possible but never remove them completely. Alex sees that element of chance in distilling as a positive, something that brings fun to the work. “Does Johnnie Walker Black taste the same now as it did in 1950? Nobody knows.” he points out. What matters to him is focusing on the flavor and making the whiskey as good as he can make it.

Staying true to that pre-industrial style New York rye means getting ingredients close to home. “That’s how things were done back in the day. You didn’t fly grain halfway around the world to make your whiskey.” he says. Rye grows better in New York than corn does, owing to the climate, and Alex believes this makes a difference. “Don’t try to put a square peg in a round hole.” he advises. He knows it’s easy to fall back on generous modern supply chains, but believes working with ingredients closer to your distillery yields a tastier product. We asked if that line of thought extends to the space in which Fort Hamilton ages its whiskey. Definitely, he says - they leave the windows of their waterfront location open spring through fall, so their barrels are awash in the local breeze. He says this gives them some barrels with hints of salted caramel and saline notes; he can’t say for sure if this is a result of the proximity to the harbor, but points to Scottish whiskey as an example that upholds his theory that terroir can travel through the air around an aging barrel.

While those windows stay open three quarters of the year, they are firmly shut during New York’s frigid winters. In fact, Fort Hamilton even heats their barrels during the coldest part of the year. It’s a practice that Alex attributes to the New York style, and as far as he can tell it’s been done this way for 200 years. Heating the barrels in winter raises the average temperature of the whiskey over the course of a year. This allows whiskey from colder climates, like New York, to compete with whiskey from warmer climates that would otherwise age more quickly. 

Fort Hamilton’s barrels stay cooled by the salty waterfront breeze and then warmed in a snug heated warehouse until Alex deems them ready to release. His first release of their flagship Single Barrel Rye was about 18 months old, too young to technically be called a straight whiskey. However, everything Fort Hamilton has released since then has been over two years old, qualifying it as a straight whiskey - they simply haven’t updated their label yet. They currently state that their Single Barrel Rye is aged three years, but Alex confesses it’s actually closer to four. 

“I spent a lot of time - and I mean a lot - in liquor stores, staring at shelves.”

Alex noticed, and we can agree, that it seems like every rye whiskey out there is sporting a green label. He wanted to buck the trend - but not overly far. Fort Hamilton’s label makes use of a striking deep blue with just a hint of green. It’s the color, Alex says, of a Revolutionary War soldier’s uniform. When you visit Fort Hamilton’s website, you’ll read that Alex started the distillery “on a mission to recapture America’s finest spirits.” The close attention to detail he has paid to his brand is evident in the wordplay evoked by even that small fragment of their brand statement. Not only does he intend to recapture flavors we once had that have since disappeared (such as the New York rye), it’s also a play on words evoking the militaristic style of Fort Hamilton. The choice is meant to make the audience think of ‘capture’ in the sense of war, when a strategic stronghold can be taken by a conquering force or won back by a scrappy band of rebels. 

Their labels are precise, clean, with a type and style reminiscent of something you might’ve seen on a handbill 150 or 200 years ago. The foil lettering, neither gold nor quite copper, brings to mind artillery brass. The attention to detail Alex lavishes on the whiskey itself is also present in the label design; the Single Barrel Rye sports just one cannon, while the Double Barrel Rye sports two crossed cannons. The center of the labels bears the name “Hearts of Oak Militia” - an homage to a volunteer militia founded in 1775 in New York City and whose most famous member was, of course, America’s most popular founding father - Alexander Hamilton. 

After years of bouncing their operations around, Fort Hamilton began work on their own distillery and tasting room in Brooklyn in 2019. While the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench in their plans just like it did every business around the world, they persisted through the challenges and finished their build-out this year. At the time of our interview, they had simply to install their brand-new still and it would be complete. Between then and publication, the distillery and tasting room officially opened for tours, which can be arranged through Fort Hamilton’s website. They’re working on expanding their barrel aging room as well so that they have more opportunities for barrel-aged finishes. 

Alex’s talk of experimenting with new barrel-aged finishes piqued our interest; it seems his creative wheels still haven’t stopped turning. We asked him what innovations and experiments he has in mind for Fort Hamilton next. He pointed out that their mission is to recapture America’s finest spirits, plural, meaning they’re not afraid to take things beyond their revival of pre-industrial rye whiskey. They’re at work on a ‘New World’ style gin, in keeping with their dedication to American history. Fort Hamilton is also interested in collaborating with individuals who are talented in other fields to weave together new projects. For example, they’re working with a chocolatier to produce chocolate bars flavored with their whiskeys and also plan to release barrel-aged maple syrup for sale in October. Ever committed to the region’s resources, they’ll take those barrels after the maple syrup is sold and refill them with rye whiskey, allowing the whiskey to soak up the deep, sweet flavor and creating another new product made from all New York ingredients.

“To call the classic cocktail America’s greatest export, what I mean by that is...as an idea, a philosophy, I think it’s really valuable. It’s such a great addition, intellectually, to the culture of the globe.”

The United States of America is a nation founded by and built by immigrants. Alex Clark is one who is doing great honor to the American craft distilling industry with his work at Fort Hamilton. His commitment to brushing aside the cobwebs of the past and bringing to light history which, by American standards, is considered ‘ancient’ is a gift American whiskey drinkers didn’t know they needed but are fortunate to have been given. We recommend you get a taste of that history, carefully distilled and tended by a man who is dedicated to its flavorful, authentic, honest pre-industrial style. We think Fort Hamilton’s Black Manhattan, a cocktail of Fort Hamilton’s Double Barrel Rye, Amaro, and a dash of bitters would make an excellent update to the venerable early Manhattan cocktail of 150 years ago. If you find yourself in New York City, stop by their new tasting room and distillery. Climb down out of your rideshare, pull your jacket a little tighter around your shoulders, and step inside out from under the buzz of electric street lamps. Let the people of Fort Hamilton Distillery pour you a taste of the past. Savor that peppery rye flavor that soldiers and socialites, businessmen and bartenders all once knew - and keep an eye out for what Alex and his team will come up with next.

TASTING NOTES:

Fort Hamilton Single Barrel Rye Whiskey (45% ABV)

Nose: Cherry, Licorice, Salted Caramel, Toast

Palate: The mouthfeel is light with some heat. The flavors are subtly spicy up front with mellow hints of cinnamon, oak and licorice. Spice grows a bit stronger through the mid palate with notes of black pepper that persist throughout, balanced nicely with dark chocolate and smoke as it moves into medium finish. 

This is a nice rye. Wonderful to sip on with a good balance of spice that lets you know you are drinking a rye without abusing the taste buds. The balance is especially successful when considering the origin story of this spirit was to revive a style of rye whiskey that would play well in a cocktail, which this certainly does. 

Fort Hamilton Cask Strength 4 Year Old Single Barrel Rye Whiskey (58.5% ABV)

Nose: Green Banana, Lemon Peel, Vanilla, Chocolate Brownie, Grass

Palate: The mouthfeel is silkier with more heat. Those same cinnamon and oaky notes are still there up front, but matched with a strong vanilla flavor that grows stronger through the middle, accompanied by brown sugar, caramel and apple flavors that push back against the spice from the rye leading to a long finish. 

This has a really great body to it. It is a great whiskey overall. Everything there is to love about the traditional single barrel release is still there with loads of additional sweetness and complexity to delight the palate. 

Fort Hamilton Double Barrel Rye (46% ABV)

Nose: Vanilla Cake/Cookie, Cinnamon, Lemon Drizzle, Rosemary

Palate: The mouthfeel is light and the flavors are vanilla sweet if not a bit muted up front, but then there is a surge of flavors that break through the mid palate. Cinnamon, brown sugar, vanilla, apples and dried apricots that lead to a long complex finish. 

Another nice rye. Lighter and sweeter than the single barrel this works as a perfect compliment, showing off how different rye whiskies can be. 

Fort Hamilton Double Barrel Bourbon (46% ABV)

Nose: Fresh Cut Flowers, Strawberries, Vanilla, Corn Muffins

Palate: The mouthfeel is delicate and silky with just a bit of heat. The flavors are honey sweet up front before giving way to a bit of black pepper spice in the mid palate. The flavors grow more complex, slightly briny and vegetal on the finish like grilled honey balsamic glazed string beans with salt.

Another nice whiskey. A lot of great, traditional bourbon flavors mixed with some unexpected twists. That vegetal note is not one that we’ve picked up in a bourbon before, but in compliments the sweetness and the spice from the bourbon well and has given us some good ideas for the next time we fire up the grill. 

Balance is really the word when tasting these whiskies from Fort Hamilton. Something every great whiskey maker and every great bartender strives for.