Our weekly business day trip to New York City is always a whirlwind packed with more food and drink experiences than can easily be digested. What started with a lunch at Casa Nonna–the newish rustic Italian restaurant from the E2Hospitality group that juggles 24 restaurants on a few continents, including BLT Burgers in Manhattan, Las Vegas and Hong Kong–continued with a trip to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where we got a lesson on Dorothy Parker and Navy Strength gin at the Shanty (the month-old bar attached to the New York Distilling Company), followed by an exquisite dinner of small plates at Pillar and Plough, the cozy, date-friendly, subterranean restaurant at the Williamsburg Hotel, remarkably reasonable for how plush it feels. While in Williamsburg, we also tried to get a haircut, shave and beer at Persons of Interest (they were all booked up) and tried to grab a coffee at Toby’s (they have shortened hours for staff training). Despite striking out on the haircut, we did grab a requisite box of cookies and some Crop-to-Cup joe at Saltie, just across from the barber.

The E2 group–whose new chef at Casa Nonna buttered us up with fried Long Island squid, an array of farm-to-pizzas and whole wheat spaghetti alla chitarra with local cauliflower–might add a food pairing to our upcoming Good Spirits line-up, which is shaping up to be the biggest and best ever. In fact, it was also Good Spirits planning that brought us to the New York Distilling Company which we are proud to report will be offering up its gin, alongside an impressive roster of spirits makers.

We got a tour of the tin-roofed distilling space from founder Allen Katz, who said he was “running on fumes,” having just opened their bar on Repeal Day, December 5, and trying to keep up with demand from wine and spirits shops around town who are moving as many bottles of New York Distilling Company product as Katz and his co-founders, the father-son team of Tom and Bill Potter, can manage on their still-being-refined production schedule. (Restaurants are apparently chomping at the bit.) Tom was a co-founder of the Brooklyn Brewery and compares the excitement of the brewery founding to the response the New York Distilling is getting from avid drinkers, chefs and barkeeps alike.

In a crowded field of spirits, Katz said, New York Distilling Company, part of the recent bloom of Brooklyn spirit makers, is trying to offer something thoughtfully different. Consider their two gins. The first, Perry’s Tot, is an homage to the nearly-extinct style of high proof gin, Navy strength, that was popular in the United States and the United Kingdom until early in the 20th century, when gin makers started realizing it was more profitable to sell lower proof recipes. (The British Navy invented it because it was at this proof that gunpowder drenched with it, as might happen on a war ship or in transport, could still ignite.) The gin includes botanicals from around the world, including a batch of Hudson Valley honey that Katz said is perhaps its most distinctive ingredient.

Their second gin distinguishes itself is being named after a woman. Gins tend to be patriarchal–Old Mr. Boston, Gordon’s, Elijah Craig. Instead, this one is named after Dorothy Parker, the rhyming, wisecracking lady of an earlier era who, by her own admission, really liked her cocktails. Katz served us the Dorothy Parker with Q Tonic, and, for contrast, we sipped a bit of the Navy Strength neat. The Shanty’s cocktail menu features the house-made hooch, of course, but the bar is deep in case your preferences don’t run to gin. pThere’s also a stash of “pink gin,” made with Angustora bitters, kept in an antique copper still behind the bar, alongside photographs of some guru distillers, including George Washington.

The distillery also has American rye whiskey in the works, although it’s still a few years from sipping-ready. Just this week, the distillery received 31 tons of rye, grown by Finger Lakes-based Pedersen Farms. The distillery has also contracted with Pederson to grow some historic varieties of rye, acquired from an international seed bank, that are the same types that would have been grown by New York’s 18th century farmers and turned into rye. In the meantime, in another homage to Americana, there are plans to leak some of the must anticipated rye in the form of a Rock and Rye, a 19th centuary ready-to-drink concoction that would combine rock candy and rye, which is due out this September. (Our mouth is already watering.)

From New York Distilling it was a short walk–once we pointed ourselves in the right direction–to the Hotel Williamsburg, where we took a table and quickly ordered a half dozen of the very delicious soundining menu items–squash fritters, warm squid, grilled striped bass, dirty rice–and stared at the string of couples on dates who were lined up at the kitchen-side bar watching their food get cooked. We can’t wait until we’ve got more time to hang there, and maybe even check out the hotel rooms. Instead, we hoofed it back to the subway, made our way to 40th Street, and managed to catch the last bus out of town.