Of Whiskey and Birthdays
To celebrate Cute’s latest birthday, I thought it only appropriate to take him to a favorite spot, or at least a spot that makes his favorite beverage. Hint: It wasn’t a dairy farm.
So off we and Cute’s Blue Springs-based family went to the East Bottoms, home of Knuckleheads AND J. Rieger & Co. Some interesting homes and manufacturers inhabit the neighborhood as well as railroad tracks and some of the worst roads in Kansas City, which is saying a LOT.
Jacob Rieger’s distillery was founded in 1887 near the Livestock Exchange and Union Depot and soon became the nation’s largest mail-order whiskey house before the glorious times known as Prohibition. They mailed out over 100 different products and had over 250,000 mail order customers. When Prohibition stopped the fun, a court order let grandson Alexander move the inventory to his home and the family made the transition to banking and real estate and whatever else moguls created back then.
One creation was a hotel, eponymously named, and in 2014, great-great-great grandson Andy Rieger went into the bar, Manifesto’s, that Ryan Maybee had built inside that hotel. The outside Rieger's sign was faded and barely distinguishable, but the place was hopping. They met, over drinks of course, and the result became Kansas City's first new distillery post-Prohibition, reviving the historic "Kansas City Whiskey" (a blended whiskey with a touch of Oloroso sherry) along with other fine libations.
Soon they needed to expand and bought the home of their original competitor who had built a bottling company near their own brewery. The Heim Bottling Company in the East Bottoms. was built in 1901 for the brewery established in 1884, in an area they created. Electric Park was lit by 100,000 light bulbs at a time when electricity was still novel. (Rieger’s also was a brewery at the time.) That park was an entertainment mecca with animals including an alligator farm, a swimming pool, bowling alley, bandstand, and skating rink. Heims developed all of this to bring more people in to drink his beer which was pumped directly from the brewery. It eventually moved to Midtown (47th and Paseo) but without the direct pumping capability.
We went on Reiger's Heritage Tour where informative guide Mike explained all of this and more about the process of distilling. That distillation column and giant copper still are made by hand at the Vendome Copper and Brass Works in Louisville, Kentucky, manufacturers since 1903, also a family-run organization.
We learned how Rieger makes large quantities of vodka, gin, bourbon and rye from head to tail and what moonshine is and why it was called white lightening – and how it might kill you. Despite all the mechanization now, much work is still done by hand -- and nose and tongue.
Barrels of fun were everywhere!
In the tasting room, we sampled Kansas City Whiskey and I thought it made for good sippin’. The final of the foursome tastes was Caffe Amaro, an apéritif heavy on the coffee flavor and good for the beginning or the end of a meal. Rieger has retail sales in at least 25 states and though they’re considered a specialty or small distiller, they keep growing. Cute is already in the habit of asking for their product by name, a practice the tour staff encouraged.
After our tour, we went downstairs to the Hey Hey Room, which has a speakeasy vibe, comfy chairs, and food. Currently it’s decorated for Halloween (but if you want the full works on that, go to Louie’s Reserve, formerly Café Trio, on the Plaza). We opted for the lighter but still hefty charcuterie plate before we went outside to the Electric Park area to eat more and enjoy the cool evening. There is a top floor restaurant with a fuller menu, however a private event (not ours) was having a grand time up there.
Cute pronounced his birthday a success, despite being another year older, which somehow seems inevitable each year. (That’s a good thing though, given the alternative.) He also said he agreed with Mark Twain: “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” He was kidding, too, I'm sure.
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