Capitol Hill’s new Heritage Distilling tasting room won’t be on the scale of the Gig Harbor HQ but it will still produce a steady flow of small batch spirits (Image: Heritage Distilling)
In August, CHS reported on the plans for Gig Harbor’s Heritage Distilling to open a new Pike/Pine tasting room. The neighborhood’s hooch manufacturing sector, it turns out, will also get a boost.
Heritage owner and master distiller Justin Stiefel tells CHS the project moving into the Central Agency building on the backside of Pike/Pine will be “doing everything you would expect distillery to do – distillation in site, barrel aging, blending. Flavoring and bottling.”
The move will add to the small set of dedicated Capitol Hill distilleries producing small batch spirits and keeping the neighborhood’s manufacturing heritage alive. CHS reported earlier this year on Sun Liquor and OOLA, the lone creators of Capitol Hill spirits, still, some five years after Washington loosened its alcohol manufacturing laws. The neighborhood, of course, also has a history of illegal boozing.
Heritage’s creations include vodkas, gins, bourbons, and whiskeys. Earlier this year, Heritage was awarded 25 medals, reportedly the most of any craft distillery by the American Distilling Institute.
Stiefel said locally crafted spirits will also include customer creations. “We will be bringing our unique Cask Club program to the location where customers can customer age their own spirits in our facility, just as in our other distilleries, and where they can get custom bottles,” Stiefel said.
With plans to open the new tasting room and distillery in 2017, the space left open by the departure of Canadian sandwich chain Meat and Bread inside the auto-row era Central Agency building is being used as a private event space until state and federal permits are acquired.
Heritage Distilling’s Capitol Hill tasting room is planned to open in early 2017 at 1201 10th Ave inside the Central Agency Building. You can learn more at heritagedistilling.com.
