The Kennay family has farmed in Illinois for six generations, and in 2019 it started turning some of the harvest into whiskey. Kennay Farms Distilling is what the farm to table idea looks like applied to spirits: the grain is grown, selected and harvested on the family's own ground outside Rochelle, then milled, fermented and distilled by the family itself, a sequence the trade calls grain to glass and which very few distilleries actually do end to end. Many craft labels buy neutral spirit or contract distil; a farm that owns the whole chain from seed to bottle is the exception, and it is the kind of operation that only makes sense where the farm came first. The tasting room is on Lincoln Highway in downtown Rochelle, in the middle of the town the family farms around, and the range runs from vodka and gin, which can be sold young, to rye and bourbon, which sit in barrels and wait. The timing of the venture had one piece of luck in it: months after the doors opened, Illinois raised its production cap for craft distillers from thirty five thousand gallons to a hundred thousand, and the Kennays scaled up with it, by their own account becoming the largest craft distillery in the state. Whatever the ranking on a given day, the underlying fact holds still: an Ogle County corn and grain farm bottling its own crop under its own name.
Getting there
41.9233, -89.0667
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