A bar like Jaywalker doesn’t appear from nowhere. It is the visible tip of fifteen years of New York Distilling Company history — a 2011 founding in the middle of Brooklyn’s craft revival, an award-winning gin named for the sharpest wit of the 1920s, a whiskey category written into existence, and one nearly-extinct grain brought back from ten seeds.
Who is behind New York Distilling Company?
Allen Katz, co-founder and the palate behind the liquids — one of the nation’s leading experts on spirits and cocktails. Tom Potter, co-founder, who had already built one beloved Brooklyn institution as co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery. And Bill Potter, Chief Blender & Distiller, who runs the stills and the barrel program. They opened the distillery in 2011 with a deliberate position: great gin and great rye, made seriously.
The milestones that led to Jaywalker
- 2011 — the founding. A working distillery in Brooklyn, with a tasting-room bar attached from day one. The conviction that a distillery should be a public place never left.
- Dorothy Parker New York Gin. The anchor bottle, named for the Algonquin Round Table’s most quotable member — the table that incubated The New Yorker in 1925, with Parker reviewing books in its pages as “Constant Reader.” The gin is hibiscus-led, double-gold-decorated, and the backbone of the bar’s Martini list; the Magazine borrows the same lineage.
- Empire Rye. NYDC helped write the designation itself: a distinctly New York whiskey standard requiring at least 75% state-grown grain. Kentucky has bourbon; New York has this.
- The 13-year rye resurrection. Working with Cornell’s seed bank and Finger Lakes farmers, the team rebuilt Horton Heirloom Rye — a 17th-century variety tracing to Rye, New York, untasted in over 150 years — from ten seeds into a crop. It became Jaywalk Rye.
- 2025 — the Loch Lomond chapter. NYDC joined Scotland’s Loch Lomond Group, a whisky house founded in 1814: two centuries of tradition behind the modern pioneers of American rye.
- 2026 — Jaywalker. The tasting room reimagined as a 3,000-square-foot bar and event space, named for the rye that defines the house.
Why does the history matter at the bar?
Because every pour at Jaywalker is the end of a supply chain the company built itself — seed, farm, still, barrel, glass. “By the second drink in hand there is usually a realized plan in play built on curiosity and confidence,” Allen Katz says of a great Manhattan. “That’s the feeling we want Jaywalker to capture.” Fifteen years is a long time to earn a feeling. The full story is here; the short version is on the back bar.