photo: Jacqueline Stofsick
Before Phil Brandon founded Rock Town in Little Rock ten years ago, Arkansas hadn’t had a legal distillery since Prohibition. Now, the distillery churns out award-winning vodkas, gins, whiskeys, and liqueurs all very much rooted in Brandon’s home state.
“I’m a fifth-generation Arkansan, and when I started the distillery, I wanted to source as many products as I could from Arkansas,” he says. Rock Town buys grain grown within 125 miles of the distillery for its vodka, gin, and whiskies, and gives post-distilling waste to a local farmer to feed to his livestock (it’s still got a touch of alcohol in it, so the distillery staff jokes that Arkansas has extra-happy cows).
For small already-struggling companies, this could hurt even further as they struggle to remain open.
At the beginning of the pandemic, hand sanitizer flew off the shelves quick at big box stores.
That’s when local distilleries stepped up to help, but they didn’t know then that they would have to pay big bucks for their helping hands.
“It’s super hard to keep things running as it is, and then to be hit with the fee it seems like a slap in the face for doing what we did to help,” said Phil Brandon, owner of Rock Town Distillery in Little Rock.