If whiskey is having a moment, we have Koval President Sonat Birnecker to thank. 

by Kaylen Ralph

Photo credit: Victoria Campbell for The Riveter

During the month of March, we’ll be exploring the theme of “women and whiskey.” Is this a broad theme? Yes. Is it necessary? Yes. Women are the movers and shakers (pun intended) in this industry at the moment. To prove that point, we’re walking the talk by profiling the women who have put a face to the industry and proven that whiskey-drinking women aren’t just the fodder of country songs and “Mad Men” episodes.

First up, and rightfully so, is Sonat Birnecker, president of Koval Distillery in Chicago. In 2008, Koval was the first distillery to open in Chicago since the 1800s. Since then, in addition to overseeing all distributing and marketing at Koval, Sonat (along with her husband, Robert) has been running a successful distilling consulting company, overseeing the launch of pretty much every Midwestern distillery you’ve heard buzz about in the last six years.

Sonat is as charming and interesting as The Womanhattan, the cocktail Koval mixologists made for The Riveter. I was inspired by her passion for her chosen industry, and her optimistic, assertive take on women in spirits.

Interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Kaylen Ralph: So last night I just tried the cocktail you created for us, and it’ s my new go-to drink.

Sonat Birnecker: Oh my gosh I’m so happy. That’s fabulous!

KR: I was a little nervous! I knew it would be fabulous, but I myself am only recently getting into whiskey, and it was so delicious! I was making a lasagna that took me three hours so I was sipping it throughout the evening and it was lovely. Thanks again for doing that!

SB: That’s great. I love that. We aim to please.

KR: Koval’s status as Chicago’s first modern-day distillery kind of surprised me, just because of Chicago’s reputation before and after the Prohibition era. Can you talk a little bit more about the consulting you’ve done for other craft distillers in the area?

SB: Yes, most of them are actually our students; we’ve set them up.  We’ve actually started a bit of a spirits revolution in Chicago. The reason that we were the first one was probably two-fold. First, Chicago has always traditionally been a distribution house, it hasn’t really been a manufacturing house for liquor. So while there was always liquor and tons of it, it wasn’t necessarily made here. Liquor in general has always been the purview of just a few companies. There were actually thousands and thousands of liquor companies before Prohibition, but many of them were very small, and they weren’t going to be the ones necessarily shipping all across the country…So, if someone were really looking at the laws, they would not find Illinois to be particularly hospitable. That being said, when we started, we did not want to be anywhere else, because for us it was all about being in Chicago. So what I did is I figured out all the laws that I did not like, and then I went and changed them.

I went to Springfield and I lobbied and I got the laws changed, which was monumental because they had not been changed since Prohibition. After that happened, we started seeing a lot more people being interested in starting distilleries in Illinois. After we did that, there were other distilleries that started up that also had a bar component. Not just a retail package component, but a bar component. (Now) a distillery didn’t have to only rely on making its money through selling packaged goods through a distributor; it could also sustain its existence on great cocktails….It also made Illinois more attractive in general to people wanting to make craft spirits. And the publicity we received for having gone and changed the laws…we had a lot of people come through us because, in addition to making spirits, Robert and I also have a consulting company called Kothe Distilling Technologies, and what we do is help people start distilleries. We’ve actually set up more than 75 distilleries in the United States and Canada in the last six years. We’ve consulted for more than 2,000 people, we’ve educated them or consulted for them or did private labels for them… So we have a very good overview of the industry not just in Illinois, but also nationally and internationally.

KR: I know you’re very accomplished in the world of academia. You have your masters and your PhD. Did you study law or were you just like, I’m going to Springfield!

SB: I certainly studied up on it. I feel I learned a good bit on the job, so to speak, when it comes to law and policy and how to change things in Chicago and Illinois at large. But no, my degrees were in German cultural history, and then I have both a master’s and a PhD in German cultural history and a post-doc in Jewish studies.

KR: With all of the distilleries that you have had a hand in setting up one way or another, consulting or otherwise, have you found the stereotype of the whiskey and spirits industry being male dominated to be true?

SB: I think it’s changing, actually, dramatically. And I think on some level, there may be cosmetic changes in the larger companies trying to put women in positions…But that being said, there are very large numbers of women in the liquor industry. The head of one of our largest distribution companies in the East Coast is a woman, she runs the show, and also in many other ways we have women involved in liquor, and I think it’s growing. You’re also starting to see women become master distillers; we’ve set up plenty of distilleries where women are the master distillers, and some of them, I can say, their husbands take the credit and they go on trips (calling themselves) “master distillers,” but I know who’s really distilling it—it’s their wives back home.

KR: That’s also a problem. Is it still something that, because whiskey overall is seen as a more masculine drink, people are more comfortable as consumers if a man is the face of a label? Do you think that might contribute to the problem?

SB: I do. I feel like sometimes people want to see a man that’s the face of a label. I do see that that’s changing; I’ve had instances where I gave an interview with an important magazine…and it would come out, and they would quote Robert, not me. I can’t say which magazine did it, but it was a very important magazine. I was furious. I couldn’t believe it. They never spoke to Robert; they only spoke to me; they took an exact quote that I gave them and attributed it to my husband as the master distiller.

KR: How could they even say, “Sorry, it was a mistake.”? It was blatant.

SB: It was blatant. So I have come across blatant sexism in this business, but at the same time, it really does not hamper my ability to be successful…I came across similar things in academia, too…I don’t think that it’s a bad time for a woman to be in the liquor industry, I think it’s actually a fabulous time. There’s a growing interest among women for hard liquor, particularly whiskey products. You’re starting to see in marketing trends that these large companies are marketing specifically to women.  I think women are becoming more important and the larger companies are taking notice and for us, it’s just normal, it’s a woman-owned business. I’ve been expanding our distribution since the very beginning. My husband has no problem having me do lots of business and represent the company. For us it’s not an issue, and if it’s an issue for other people, well, they just have to deal with it because that’s the nature of our company.

This is not specific to liquor, but what I will say is as a woman who runs a company, something fabulous about it is that I’ve been able to be not just a woman in the workplace, but also a mother. One of the reasons that I did this is so that we could be with our kids, so that we could work together as a family, and we’ve really been able to craft this (as a) family business. For women in general, owning your own business allows you to write your own rules. Sometimes my kids are in the background as I’m making calls to distributors, and it’s ok. It’s my business. And they’re my business, too.   

KR: Sorry not sorry.

SB: Exactly.

KR: You said that it’s an exciting time to be a woman in the industry. Could you talk a little more about that?

SB: I feel that it’s an exciting time because there’s a general awareness amongst people in the industry that they want to include women. For example, there’ll be an (industry) conference, and they’ll want to have a women’s panel discussion about women in the industry…A lot of the people that I know who are experts, or investors, or are running distributions companies, or are running distilleries, or are master distillers are women, so it may not be the majority, but it’s happening and it’s going to continue happening that way.

Traditionally speaking, women were the distillers. If you think about pre-Prohibition alcohol, it wasn’t the men distilling—it was the women distilling. Women were home distillers. They would make home remedies—it’s obvious. So there’s a historical precedent, but Prohibition wiped away so much of what was normal.

KR: Then there’s who we see on television drinking whiskey, and thinking of it as a kind of prop to perpetuate what a typical whiskey drinker might be. I do think that might be changing. I just binge-watched BBC’s ‘The Fall’ and the head detective’s drink of choice is always a drink of whiskey.

SB: I definitely think it’s changing. And it’s (whiskey’s) more intriguing. I forgot where I read, but it was about women abandoning vodka in favor of whiskey. And I think that’s kind of true. There’s a lot more to whiskey than vodka. It’s got more flavor, it can be dynamic in different ways, and I think women are learning to appreciate that. It’s a different era. (Trends) ebb and flow, you never know. Gin could be the next big thing, which I hope it is because I like our gin. But right now I think whiskey is receiving a focus and a revival. With the real interest in rye, traditional American rye whiskey and now bourbon is seeing such a love affair in the press amongst cocktail mixologists and all of that. Right now it’s a great time for whiskey and it’s a great time for women in whiskey.

KR: Do you think that Koval, as compared to some of the larger, more institutionalized brands like Brown-Forman, for example, is able to do things differently or take more innovative approaches to your craft?

SB: We have no choice. We absolutely have to, because we can’t compete on the same level as they’re competing. We do not have the marketing dollars, we do not have the funds for big ad campaigns, we cannot get as many “impressions” through multimedia advertising, product placement—you name it. We have to rewrite the rules: we have to be able to get earned media, which means we have to earn it. What Koval does well and what we wanted to do from the very beginning is to create a grain to bottle product that’s all organic, that’s sourced locally. These are things that resonate with people and they certainly resonate with us, which is why we decided to do it—to provide a new take on whisky, one that’s cleaner, brighter, more grain forward. We take the best part of the distillate, “the heart cut,” and that is what goes into our whiskey. Traditional American whiskey combines the heart and the tails—tails by themselves smell and taste like a wet dog, but if you age them for long enough it mellows and tempers and it’s useable alcohol that these large companies would be crazy to throw away, so to speak. But because we’re a smaller distillery, we can repurpose our tails for other products—redistill them, get the alcohol content up again, use them as a base for our liqueurs or our gin; we’re not throwing them away, we’re just doing a different kind of whiskey. We wanted to provide American with a new take on whiskey, which is actually a very traditional take on whiskey but European, not American. We took this mentality used by brandy makers for centuries, because if you’re making a brandy, you’re never going to put the tails in it, because it would muddy the flavor of the fruit, and we felt, why would we want to do that to a grain? I want to know what rye tastes like without it being muddied by these long ends that come out of the still later. So we took that approach to whiskey, we also decided to focus on alternative grains, which is something that a lot of large companies were not doing at the time, and now of course a lot of them want to do that.

KR: Do you have a personal favorite of the grains and the whiskies they produce?

SB: Right now I’m favoring bourbon, but my affections tend to wander when it comes to whiskey; it may just be because I’ve been having a lot of great bourbon cocktails, but there is millet in the bourbon, millet and corn. So I also really appreciate the millet, I’ve had some amazing manhattans with the millet, but I like rye, too. But I’ve been having a bourbon moment.

KR: Do you have a favorite bar where you get your favorite whiskey-based drink?

SB: Watershed makes a lot of amazing cocktails using our products, so I always enjoy having cocktails there, because they are constantly working with our products and have amazing cocktails, so I love to go there and enjoy a Koval cocktail, but there are so many places that have been making Koval cocktails that do a great job. It’s hard to single anybody out. 

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Kaylen is The Riveter’s co-founder and editor-in-chief. She moved to Minneapolis, MN after graduating from the Missouri School of Journalism in August 2013. In addition to her editorial duties at The Riveter, Kaylen also works as a freelance researcher for The Sager Group. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter at @kaylenralph.