Chicago’s First Distillery Breaks All Rules

What is KOVAL, and why is it a Chicago landmark?

KOVAL Distillery opened in 2008 as the first distillery in Chicago since the mid-1800s, the work of husband-and-wife founders Robert Birnecker and Sonat Birnecker Hart, who left careers in academia and government to build it. Getting there took some doing. Part of the gap was legal: Sonat Birnecker Hart had to lobby in Springfield to change Illinois law so the distillery could sell its products on site and offer samples during tours. The rest was simply timing, since craft distilling was barely a movement yet.

The scale of that shift is striking. When KOVAL started, there were only around 60 craft distilleries in the country; today there are well over 2,000, and the Birneckers helped build much of that growth, training thousands of aspiring distillers and helping set up more than 190 distilleries worldwide through their consulting work. KOVAL itself has grown into one of the largest independent, woman-owned craft distilleries in the US.

“We wouldn’t want to produce spirits anywhere but Chicago, a city built on industry.”

— Becky Schultz, communications coordinator, KOVAL Distillery

Where does the name KOVAL come from?

KOVAL translates to “blacksmith” in several Eastern European languages, but in Yiddish it carries a second meaning: “black sheep,” or someone who forges ahead and does something out of the ordinary. Sonat’s great-grandfather earned the nickname Koval when he left Vienna for Chicago as a teenager in the early 1900s to start a business, not far from where the distillery sits today.

There is a second thread, too. The surname of Robert’s grandfather, who taught him to distill, was Schmid, German for “smith.” Choosing KOVAL let the couple honor both families at once, and it spoke to their own story: leaving settled careers, moving to Chicago, and building something from scratch.

What does “grain-to-bottle” mean, and why local organic farmers?

KOVAL aims to make the cleanest, freshest products it can, and that starts with the grain. The Midwest is home to a co-op of organic farms, and KOVAL contracts with them rather than buying pre-made neutral spirits to bottle, as much of the industry does. Every choice in the process, from grain to bottle, is intentional, and each step is handled in-house in Chicago.

Because every step is logged and certified organic and kosher, a bottle of KOVAL can be traced back not only to the individual barrel it was aged in, but to the original shipment of grain it was made from.

What are KOVAL’s “heart cut” and single-barrel methods?

Two choices define the way KOVAL’s spirits taste. The first is using only the heart cut of the distillate. The second is bottling every release as a single barrel.

Together, the methods do two things. The heart cut keeps the spirit clean and grain-forward, and the single-barrel approach keeps flavor and color consistent while letting a curious drinker trace a bottle all the way back to the field. It is a level of transparency few distilleries offer.

What makes KOVAL’s millet whiskey special?

Millet is an ancient grain, long used to make spirits in places like Nepal, but KOVAL was the first distillery to make a whiskey from it. As a lighter cereal grain, millet gives the whiskey notes of nut and vanilla and a bright finish.

Millet turns up in KOVAL’s Bourbon, too, where it replaces the rye or wheat most bourbons use as a secondary grain alongside corn, lending natural sweetness and a creamy texture. It fits the distillery’s habit of reaching for unusual grains: most of its whiskeys differ from one another only in the grain that goes in.

KOVAL Single-Barrel Whiskeys by Grain

Frequently Asked Questions About KOVAL Distillery

🥃 KOVAL Distillery at a Glance

Key facts about the distillery, its people, and its spirits.