Colin, playing John Darling in a local production of
Peter Pan, in the days before Kings County Distillery took flight. Photo via
Colin Spoelman
Because we here at Brokelyn are responsible drinkers,
when we hit the bottle, we don’t just look to get trashed, we look for
inspiration. In the world of whiskey there are few stories more inspiring than
that of Kings County Distillery, which started as New York City’s first
distillery since Prohibition-era rules on distilleries were lifted, back in
2010 in a 325 square-foot room in East Williamsburg and went on to critical
acclaim, praise from the public, and a brand new distillery in the Brooklyn
Navy Yards.
We sat down with co-founder Colin Spoelman, former
scent model and executive producer, to see the long and winding route he took
from rural Harland County, Kentucky, to bustling New York City, and the hobby
he took with him.
1. Bert, All My Sons,
Regional Theater, Abington, VA- 1990
I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, which is a very
impoverished area where there aren’t actually a lot of jobs. So in high school,
it wasn’t a question of getting a job mowing a lawn because lawnmowing was a
pretty coveted position, and a lot of that stuff wasn’t available to me. The
first time I ever had a real paying job was when I was in a play. I was cast as
the role of Bert in an Arthur Miller play in a regional theater in Abington,
Virginia, and I was ten years old. The theater was 90 miles away, a two-hour
drive, from my house and in order to do the rehearsals and performances, my
parents would have had to drive me each way, every day, so instead I stayed in
the actor housing. A lot of the actors were from New York, so they had these
dorm rooms, basically, and they let me live away from home at ten years old
with a bunch of New York actors. They paid me the rate they paid any other
non-equity actor, so I actually got paid pretty well for that job, and
certainly pretty well for a ten year old.
2. Actor, Peter Pan, Regional
Theater, Abington, VA- 1994
I worked at that theater again for another play when
I was 13, I was John Darling in Peter Pan, and they did not offer me the same
terms. It was a different artistic director, and he said “Oh, I thought we’d
just offer you the job for experience,” and I was like, “This is bullshit,” so
I staged a little protest and they ended up paying me something, but not as
much as the last time.
3. Beeper Company Intern,
Metrocall, Pensacola, FL- 1997
So then I went off to boarding school for a couple
years, and a friend of mine from school offered to let me go live with his
family in Florida right after school and I worked for a beeper company. I was
interning there and I didn’t really have tasks, so I just fiddled around on
their computer system and ended up crashing it at least twice.
4. Brief Writer, Julie Atkins
Associates, Harland County, Kentucky- 1998
The next summer I worked in my hometown, in Harland
County, Kentucky, and a lot of people there would get on government assistance.
People in the area were pretty trained on how to do that, so the government, of
course, would fight back a little bit. You could hire a lawyer who would fight
for your case, so I was doing appeals for social security benefits for a
lawyer, just writing briefs for court. It was sort of a depressing job.
Colin, back in the day, relaxing after building some
trails
5. Trailbuilding, Volunteers
for Outdoor Colorado, CO- 2000
I was trailbuilding in Colorado one summer with a
group called Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, that was kind of fun. We would
rehabilitate hiking trails or outdoor parks, anything the government needed but
the forest service couldn’t build. I did a similar job the summer before in
Louisville, Kentucky, working for an organization called Fund for the Arts,
which raised money for Shakespeare in the Park and the symphony and all that.
6. Personal Assistant,
Downtown: A Street Tale, New York, NY- 2002
Then I graduated college and moved to New York with
the hopes of doing something in the film business, but I didn’t know where to
begin so I just took a temp job and I worked at the Columbia School Department
of International Affairs in their fundraising office. I quit that job to go
work on a movie set as a PA, which is a job I think every person in New York
eventually does, on an independent feature called Downtown: A Street Tale. The
movie didn’t come out until at least ten years after we had made it, and when I
went to see it I was the only person in the theater that day.
Capote, which Cyan Films almost produced
7. Executive Producer, Cyan
Films, New York, NY- 2002-2004
After that, I started working for a film production
company that a friend of mine from college started, Scion Films, and through
that we were executive producing a number of movies. We really were more
ambition then credibility, and ultimately weren’t able to raise that much
money. At one point we were producing the movie Capote, and when it came time
for us to move money into the account and make the movie happen, we weren’t
able to raise all the money. We had to go tell the director, the producer, and
the writer that we weren’t going to be able to raise the money at this
breakfast meeting at [the director] Bennett Miller’s apartment, and because I wasn’t the finance
guy the burden was on me to be the bad cop and say “Listen guys, we just can’t
raise the money,” and these guys were saying, “But we maybe can raise the
money!” and everyone in the room would get really hopeful, and I’d have to tell
them “No,” so that was a rough meeting.
8. Temp, Estee Lauder, New
York, NY- 2005-2007
After that I worked at a few banks, which were pretty
soul-sucking places to work, so I told my temp agency “Is there something I
could do that’s a little sexier?” and I regret that choice of wording. I was
immediately sent to Estee Lauder, which I didn’t know anything about, and I
worked in their Fragrance Marketing department. I had the unusual
responsibility of being a “fragrance model.” They were developing men’s
fragrances for their brands, and there were very few men who worked in that
office, so when they needed to figure out what a fragrance would smell like on
a man, they would round up all the dudes in the office and spray us down with
whatever they were testing, and the people in charge of development would smell
and comment. It was great, and ridiculous.
9. Publications Manager,
Bernard Tschumi Architects, New York, NY- 2007-Present
The next job I had was working part-time for Bernard
Tschumi Architects. He was the Dean at the Columbia School of Architecture for
15 years and he built the Acropolis Museum and the Parc de la Villette, a park
in Paris. Now, I majored in architecture but I didn’t train to be an architect,
and I’m basically useless in an office because the undergrad program that I
went through wouldn’t let us use computers and only let us design by hand. So
of course I was unemployable for anything in an architectural office, but
Bernard was looking for someone to help him put together publications, as an
academic he’s often writing books. So that’s how I got started there, and that
over time grew into a position where now I do a lot of marketing and public
relations and positioning projects.
Colin at his day job nowadays. Photo via Colin
Spoelman
10. Co-Founder, Kings County
Distillery, Brooklyn, NY- 2009-Present
Things were really bad after the Estee Lauder job. I
broke up with the girl I was living with, moved to Brooklyn, there was this
huge rift in my life, and around then I started getting interested in making
whiskey. I had started visiting my family back and forth in Kentucky, brought
some moonshine back to my apartment, and we’d share it with people at parties,
it was kind of a big party house in Williamsburg. At a certain point we got a
little still off the internet and started making moonshine in the apartment,
and then, after a couple years of that, filed for a federal license to do it
legally, and we became the first craft distillery in New York City.
Any advice to people looking
to start their own business based on their passion?
In our case, it was really a gradual thing, you know,
I was running this kind of hobby business for a while, and then even when it
was a legal business we were so small that we didn’t have much of a presence,
which led to some opportunities to grow the business. To me it’s always been
keep the real job and do what you’re really interested in on the side. I mean,
hopefully people get to do what they love and get paid for it, but I see this
all around me, what people really want to do with their lives doesn’t always
pay them money, and I think it takes some time getting used to that, especially
when you’re young and move to New York City with ambitions of doing what you
love.
It’s also important to have these other jobs because
you learn things from them that help you out in the future. In a weird way, fragrance
has a lot to do with whiskey, they’re both liquids of very high value, working
in a visual field like architecture helped me with designing the labels,
working in film taught me how to set up LLCs, so I think all of these little
pieces do prepare you in ways you don’t realize until much, much later.
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