Ep. 249: Hillrock Estate Distillery with Jeffrey Baker Show Notes
Hillrock Estate Distillery: Jeff Baker on New York Whiskey, Estate Grain, Dave Pickerell, and the Long Work of Terroir
This episode brings us back to my home state of New York, which is always a point of pride for me.
I’ve said before that one of the best parts of doing The Whiskey Ring Podcast is getting to build a map of whiskey outside the usual centers of gravity. That’s true internationally, it’s true across the United States, and it’s especially true when the map comes home. New York whiskey has gone from a small handful of post-Prohibition pioneers to one of the most interesting state distilling scenes in the country, and every time I get to highlight a New York distillery, it feels like I’m filling in another part of the story I should have known from the beginning.
Hillrock Estate Distillery is one of the most important pieces of that story.
I’m joined by Jeff Baker, one of Hillrock’s founders, to talk about the estate, the farm, Dave Pickerell’s influence, New York grain history, floor malting, field-specific whiskey, Solera bourbon, double cask rye, American single malt, the Estate Whiskey Alliance, and why Hillrock has always approached whiskey through a lens that looks more like fine wine than conventional American whiskey.
Hillrock is in Ancram, New York, in the Hudson Valley, and I’ve been lucky enough to visit twice: once with Kurt Maitland’s Manhattan Whiskey Club, and once on my own. It’s a place that leaves an impression. The fields, the house, the malt floor, the tasting room, the bottles, the whole estate has a very particular rhythm to it. There are distilleries that you visit and enjoy. Then there are distilleries where the place itself helps explain the whiskey. Hillrock is the latter.
And yes, I still have a couple of Double Cask Rye owner’s cask selections from my last visit, because I am, proudly and predictably, a rye guy.
A New York Estate Whiskey Before “Estate Whiskey” Had a Framework
Jeff begins the story before the distillery.
He grew up working on farms, eventually found himself in New York City in the 1980s, and quickly realized he needed some connection back to the land. He bought his first farm in the late 1980s, had one of the early rotationally grazed dairy herds on the East Coast, later raised pasture-raised beef, and then, in the mid-1990s, relocated to the property that would eventually become Hillrock Estate.
The property started at around 250 acres, and by 2000 the Israel Harris Captain’s House had been moved on site. The distillery buildout began in 2010, and operations began in 2011. Jeff confirmed that timeline in the episode, and also cleared up one point I’d seen in earlier research: despite one old source suggesting there may have been distilling on the property around 2000, there wasn’t. When they bought the property, it was open farmland. The distillery was purpose-built from scratch around the estate whiskey concept.
That concept came from looking backward and forward at the same time.
Jeff started researching New York’s agricultural and distilling history and found that in the early 1800s, New York was growing a massive share of the country’s barley and rye. There were likely around a thousand farm-based distilleries in the state before Prohibition. The Hudson Valley, the grain, the house, the land, the old agricultural economy, it all pointed toward whiskey as something New York had already done and could do again.
But Hillrock wasn’t built as nostalgia in a bottle. Jeff was looking at fine estate wineries and asking why whiskey hadn’t embraced the same ideas: grow the grain, control the farming, control the processing, control the malting, distill on site, mature on site, and let the whiskey express where it came from.
Today, those ideas are much more common in the language of whiskey. In 2010, they were not.
Dave Pickerell at the Kitchen Table
Dave Pickerell is central to Hillrock’s story.
Jeff reached out to Dave in late 2010 because Dave was one of the very few people in American whiskey at the time talking seriously about terroir and whiskey in the same breath. Within a couple of weeks, Dave was at the farm, sitting at the kitchen table with Jeff, planning out the concept and design for what Jeff describes as the first estate whiskey distillery in the United States.
That’s not a small claim, and the more we talk through the details, the more obvious it becomes how deeply Dave shaped Hillrock.
He was involved from the beginning. He helped design the facility, specified the equipment, created the mash bills, customized the Vendome system, set up the protocols, trained the team, and designed the quality-control framework. Jeff says that, for the first eight years of Hillrock’s life, Dave was on site one week a month until he passed away in 2018. He also spent time in the market for Hillrock when he wasn’t at the farm.
Jeff estimates that the vast majority of Dave’s consulting time was split between Hillrock and WhistlePig. That’s a striking point, because Dave touched so many projects after leaving Maker’s Mark, but Hillrock clearly wasn’t a logo on a client list. It was one of his major post-Maker’s commitments.
That comes through in the whiskey. It comes through in the finishing. It comes through in the Solera. It comes through in the wood specs, the air-dried staves, the floor malting, the mash bills, the willingness to be patient, and the way Hillrock refuses to be merely a brand wrapped around someone else’s distillate.
Jeff is very clear: Hillrock couldn’t have done this without Dave.
Finishing Before Everyone Was Finishing
One of the places Dave’s influence shows up most clearly is cask finishing.
Dave had been interested in finishing for years, including during his time at Maker’s Mark, and Hillrock gave him a place where that interest could finally breathe. Jeff and Cathy came in with a wine background and were already comfortable with the idea of secondary and tertiary cask influence from the single malt world. When Dave brought his finishing knowledge to Hillrock, they didn’t hesitate. Jeff says they were enthusiastically on board with whatever finishes Dave thought would work.
That put Hillrock ahead of much of the American craft whiskey world. Today, finishes are everywhere, sometimes to great effect and sometimes because someone found a barrel and a label printer. Hillrock was playing in that space from day one, and not casually. Nearly every major product receives some form of finish, and in some cases multiple finishes, but the point isn’t decoration. It’s layering.
That wine-world sensibility runs through the whole distillery. It’s in the estate model, the field-specific releases, the focus on terroir, the cask sourcing, and even the way Jeff talks about building relationships with wine producers. Hillrock doesn’t just want a cask because it held wine. Jeff and Cathy want casks from producers they enjoy, people they can build relationships with, people whose barrels make sense in the larger Hillrock flavor language.
That doesn’t mean every dream cask is possible. Jeff mentions a Sauternes producer or two still out there beyond Hillrock’s reach, and while he doesn’t name names, the conversation pretty clearly points toward Château d’Yquem. Because of course it does. If you’re going to dream about Sauternes casks, you might as well dream from the top shelf, with the bottle locked in a glass case and the accountant quietly weeping in the corner.
The problem, as Jeff notes, isn’t just getting those casks. It’s getting those casks and then making a finished whiskey that doesn’t require a second mortgage and a priest present at checkout. Hillrock is premium, but Jeff is clear that he doesn’t want the whiskey to become ridiculous or unreachable. He still wants someone to buy a bottle, open it, pour it, and share it.
A luxury bottle should still have a cork that gets pulled.
The Grain Comes From Here
Hillrock now farms about 800 acres, all within roughly five miles of the distillery.
That’s central to the estate model. Jeff’s goal was never simply to make whiskey in New York. It was to make whiskey from this part of New York, using grain grown on land Hillrock controls, harvested field by field, cleaned and stored separately, and tracked all the way through distillation and maturation.
That level of traceability is rare in American whiskey. It’s hard enough when you’re making bourbon from multiple grains. It becomes more powerful with rye and single malt, where Hillrock can trace whiskey to a specific field, harvest, and variety. Jeff says their ryes and single malts have been released by individual field for the last several years, and while the varieties haven’t always been listed on the label, Hillrock can trace each barrel back to its origin.
That’s the kind of detail that makes whiskey nerds, me included, start rearranging the furniture in their brains.
Jeff also makes a point that I loved because it shows how young this conversation still is. When Hillrock first tried to source rye seed, no one could even tell them the variety. That’s almost impossible to imagine if you come from wine, where clone, site, soil, and variety can be part of the basic grammar. Whiskey agriculture, especially in the United States, had lost a lot of that language.
Hillrock has been rebuilding it slowly. They’ve tried commercial rye and barley varieties, experimented in small ways with heirlooms, and gravitated in rye toward an Eastern European variety that may be similar to what settlers were growing in the region in the early 1800s. But Jeff is careful not to overstate it. He says it may take 50 or 100 years to really understand which varieties work best in this location.
That’s estate whiskey at its most honest. It isn’t a marketing phrase. It’s a generational research project with weather.
Floor Malting in the Hudson Valley
If there’s one part of the Hillrock tour that stays with me most, it’s the malt floor.
I love it because it’s tactile. You can walk into the malt house, see the grain spread across the floor, reach down, pick up a few kernels, and taste malted barley in process. For a whiskey drinker, it’s one of those moments when a phrase you’ve seen a thousand times becomes physical.
Hillrock was the first purpose-built floor malting operation at a U.S. distillery since before Prohibition, and even now, with thousands of craft distilleries in the country, only a small number of producers have anything close to a traditional malt floor. For Jeff, that decision was baked in from the start. If he was going to grow estate grain and make world-class single malt, he wasn’t going to send the barley off-site to be malted.
Dave’s Scotch experience helped, but Hillrock couldn’t simply copy a Scottish malt floor. The team visited facilities in the UK and Scotland, but Jeff says most surviving traditional floor malting operations were much larger, almost industrial compared to what Hillrock needed. So they looked further back, toward what a town-sized European malt house might have looked like in the 1700s or early 1800s, the kind of “one-man malt house” that could have served a local brewing community.
They built the malt house to minimize mechanical movement once the grain is soaked and fragile. Grain is elevated up to the steep tank, laid out on the second-floor malt floor, turned by hand, then shoveled through a hatch into the kiln, where it can be smoked, dried, and toasted. From there, it goes into labeled storage, identified by harvest year, variety, and smoke level.
It adds complexity, labor, cost, and probably a few sore backs. But it also keeps the grain story intact.
Hillrock Single Malt: Scotch Inspiration, American Body
Jeff describes Hillrock’s single malt as 100% estate-grown barley, 100% floor malted on site, and small-batch pot distilled. It was the first whiskey off the still when Hillrock began production, and it has remained one of the most important parts of the distillery’s identity.
The production method is deliberately more Scotch-style than much of American single malt. Jeff notes that a lot of American single malts are made more like traditional American whiskey, with grain-on mashing, fermentation, and distillation. Hillrock, by contrast, uses a Vendome mash tank designed to make both American and Scotch-style whiskey. When they make single malt, they install a false bottom, rakes, and scrapers, then lauter traditionally.
It’s a lot more work. Jeff estimates it may be three times the work of making bourbon or rye.
The style is also not a simple Scotch imitation. Jeff came to whiskey as a wine and single malt drinker, and the Hillrock single malt carries those influences, but it’s still American. It starts in new American oak, which gives it more power, vanilla, and color than a typical Scotch-style ex-bourbon maturation. It then moves into ex-bourbon, then Pedro Ximénez and Oloroso sherry casks, with a port-finished version as well.
There’s peat, but not Islay peat. Hillrock still imports Speyside peat, which gives a lighter smoke profile than the medicinal, coastal punch of Lagavulin or Laphroaig. Jeff likes those whiskies too, but Hillrock’s single malt is going after something else: depth, color, complexity, and a full-bodied American interpretation of single malt rather than a fragile copy of Scotland.
He makes an interesting wine analogy: Pinot Noir doesn’t stay the same when it moves from Burgundy to the United States. It changes character. American single malt should be allowed to do the same.
That’s the right frame for Hillrock. It knows its inspirations, but it isn’t trying to pass as something it’s not.
Early Whiskey, Small Barrels, and the Solera Seed
One point I wanted to clarify with Jeff was the role of early whiskey.
Research had suggested that some older whiskey was present early on, and I wanted to understand whether those whiskies had come from Dave’s work elsewhere. Jeff’s answer was more precise. The early award-winning two- and three-year-old whiskies were largely Hillrock’s own estate whiskey, matured through small barrel formats and moved through multiple barrels, some as small as 10 gallons, to layer on profile. Dave was an expert in maturation, and Hillrock put tremendous cost and effort into grooming those early whiskies carefully.
The sourced component came into play with the Solera bourbon.
Dave sourced seed whiskey to help start the Solera, and younger estate whiskey was added into that system. Because a Solera is never emptied, there will always be some trace of that seed whiskey in the system. But over the years, as Hillrock has added estate whiskey into it, the Solera has effectively become an estate-driven Hillrock product.
Jeff frames that as an elegant way to handle something many brands do much more awkwardly: starting with sourced whiskey while building toward your own production. Hillrock didn’t want to become another label on whiskey made elsewhere. The whole premise was farming, distilling, aging, and bottling on the estate. The Solera allowed them to build continuity while the estate whiskey matured into its own future.
It’s a long-view answer, and Hillrock is very much a long-view distillery.
The First Solera-Aged Bourbon in the United States
Hillrock’s Solera Aged Bourbon is one of its signature releases, and as far as Jeff knows, it was the first Solera-aged bourbon in the United States, perhaps the first Solera-aged American whiskey of any type.
I joked that the TTB took around nine months to approve it because they didn’t know what they were looking at, which seems fitting. Solera aging belongs more naturally to sherry, brandy, and rum conversations than bourbon, and Hillrock brought that system into American whiskey early enough that the regulatory machinery had to squint at it for a while.
Most of Hillrock’s bourbon enters the Solera system after significant time in new charred American oak. Jeff noted that the estate bourbon now has to be in new charred oak for at least six years before it begins working through the Solera. That’s a major change from the early years of craft whiskey, when many distilleries were pushed by necessity to sell younger spirits. Hillrock intentionally made more whiskey than it planned to sell, sometimes three times as much, so it could build age and inventory rather than get stuck selling three- or four-year-old whiskey forever.
That patience is now paying off. Hillrock has 14-year-old bourbons in stock, along with serious volumes of six-, seven-, and eight-year-old bourbon that aren’t necessarily going into the Solera at all.
The Solera bourbon offers consistency, depth, and layered Oloroso sherry influence. Jeff describes it as floral, nutty, complex, and deep. It’s the kind of bourbon that makes sense as the house signature because it carries both Hillrock’s estate ambition and Dave’s finishing and maturation fingerprints.
But it’s no longer the only bourbon story.
Double Cask Bourbon and the Next Bourbon Chapter
Hillrock’s Double Cask Bourbon gives Jeff and the team another way to explore bourbon outside the Solera.
The first release in that space was a five-year-old, 100-proof, bottled-in-bond bourbon released as individual barrels. Jeff said the newer releases are moving to six years and beyond, with multiple age statements and mash bills possible over time.
That’s the advantage. The Solera is a fixed system, built for consistency and continuity. The Double Cask Bourbon can be more flexible: separate mash bills, separate age statements, individual barrel releases, and a lower entry point for consumers who may not be ready to grab a $100-plus bottle of Hillrock off the shelf.
Jeff also sees it as a cocktail-friendly product, one that can sit more comfortably in on-premise programs and introduce more people to Hillrock without asking them to start at the top of the price ladder.
I like that direction. Hillrock has always had a distinct profile and a premium frame, but a distillery also needs entry points. A well-made bottled-in-bond double cask bourbon gives people a way into the house style without giving up the estate and maturation ideas that make Hillrock Hillrock.
Double Cask Rye, Malted Rye, and the Future of Single Malt Rye
As much as I enjoy Hillrock’s single malt and bourbon, the Double Cask Rye is the one that has my heart.
Because it’s not my distillery, I’m allowed to say I have a favorite.
Hillrock’s rye is a 100% rye mash bill with both malted and unmalted rye. That already sets it apart. When Hillrock started, there were very few American distilleries working meaningfully with malted rye, maybe Old Potrero and a small handful of others. But Hillrock had the malt house, and once you have the ability to malt your own grain, of course you start playing.
Jeff says they put straight malt rye into barrels early on and let it sit in the rickhouses for five or six years before someone finally said, “We should probably try that.” It turned out to be unbelievably delicious. For a time, Hillrock released roughly a barrel a year of the straight malt rye, but the quality pushed them to make more.
That may be one of the most exciting parts of Hillrock’s future.
Jeff floated the idea that this region could someday become known for single malt rye, almost as a rye-based counterpart to the sophistication of single malt Scotch. Rye is better suited to the Hudson Valley climate than barley in some ways, and malting rye brings a delicacy and sophistication that unmalted rye doesn’t quite have on its own. Hillrock has five- and six-year-old single malt ryes in the rickhouse now, and Jeff expects that within the next couple of years, it may start becoming more of a product line.
The official American Single Malt definition doesn’t create space for “single malt rye” as a category, but Jeff isn’t especially worried about that. Hillrock’s own standards are already stricter than most category rules: estate-grown grain, field-specific traceability, floor malting, small-batch pot distillation, and on-site production. If they release single malt rye, they’ll call it single malt rye and let the whiskey make the case.
I am very ready for that case.
Long Air-Dried Staves and Better Barrels
We also spent time on casks, because with Hillrock, you have to.
Dave Pickerell was known for pushing longer air-drying for staves, and Hillrock has carried that forward. Jeff told a story about Dave rejecting a load of barrels because the staves had only been air dried for 18 months. Hillrock’s requirement was at least 24 months, and they’ve gone much longer, including four, five, and even more than five years of air drying from Adirondack Cooperage.
Air drying is a slightly misleading phrase because the staves are really sitting outside, getting rained on, exposed to sun, weather, and time. That process leaches tannins and changes how the wood will interact with whiskey. Longer air drying can make the finished whiskey more sophisticated, delicate, and better integrated, and Jeff says that when you smell the inside of those long-air-dried barrels, you can tell immediately the whiskey is going to be different.
That’s a very Dave Pickerell detail. The average consumer may never ask how long the staves were air dried. But the decision shows up in the glass. It’s part of why Hillrock can use smaller casks, multiple barrel movements, and finishes without letting the whiskey collapse into raw oak.
Hillrock’s approach to wood is not “more oak equals more premium.” It’s better oak, used patiently and deliberately.
Pricing, Value, and the Cost of Doing Things the Hard Way
Hillrock is not a budget brand, and it has never pretended to be.
The bottles often sit in the $100 to $150 range, with some smaller releases moving higher. Jeff acknowledges that, but he also makes a fair point: when people understand the work behind the whiskey, the pricing makes sense. Hillrock is sustainably farming hundreds of acres, growing estate grain, floor malting on site, distilling in small batches, using high-quality barrels, finishing thoughtfully, holding back significant inventory for age, and building a product that may not be sold for 10 years.
That costs money.
At the same time, Jeff doesn’t want Hillrock to become absurdly unapproachable. He doesn’t want $1,000 bottles of Hillrock just because some rare cask could technically justify it. His view is that a $100 or $150 bottle of whiskey, unlike a similarly priced bottle of wine, can last a while. It can be opened, revisited, shared, and enjoyed across many pours.
And yes, he encourages people to make a great Manhattan with Hillrock once in a while.
I respect that. A bottle can be special without becoming a museum object. Whiskey does better when it’s allowed to get into a glass.
From Passion Project to Full Focus
Hillrock was a passion project from the beginning, but only in the last few years did Jeff begin winding down his finance work to focus fully on the distillery and farming.
That timing makes sense. Hillrock was never designed to be a quick craft startup: buy some seed whiskey, make a brand, scale fast, sell, and exit. Jeff describes it as a generational business, one meant to impact the industry, the region, and the idea of estate whiskey itself.
That required patience and capital. It meant making more whiskey than they were selling, resisting the pressure to move immature whiskey, and waiting for the inventory to catch up to the ambition. Now, after the 2019 expansion and years of production, Hillrock has what Jeff jokingly calls a lot of “liquid assets” on the farm. Twelve-year-old whiskies. Older bourbon. Single malts coming into a new stage of maturity. Rye and malted rye that can finally show what the estate model can do over time.
Hillrock is currently distributed in a limited number of states, but Jeff’s goal is to expand throughout the U.S. and into key international markets. That will take work, and he’s now focused on building the business while maintaining the quality and identity Hillrock has spent more than a decade developing.
That’s the pivot point Hillrock seems to be at now: from proving the concept to widening the audience.
The Estate Whiskey Alliance
The Estate Whiskey Alliance is a natural fit for Hillrock.
Jeff is one of its founding members, and he’s proud of the work being done with the University of Kentucky’s James B. Beam Institute to define and certify estate whiskey. The idea is to give consumers a trustworthy framework for understanding what producers like Hillrock are doing: growing grain, controlling production, connecting whiskey to place, and incorporating sustainability and traceability into the definition of quality.
This is where the conversation gets especially interesting because it brings Kentucky into dialogue with places like New York.
Jeff credits people like Seth DeBolt at the Beam Institute and Rob Samuels at Maker’s Mark with helping push the conversation forward. Rob’s interest in regenerative farming and the development of Star Hill Farm connect back to the same questions Hillrock has been asking for years: what does it mean for whiskey to come from a place, and what would happen if large distilleries took even part of their production in an estate direction?
Jeff doesn’t think every major distillery is going to become fully estate-based, nor would that be realistic. But he can imagine a future where 10 or 20 percent of a large distillery’s production might be estate whiskey, and where whiskey stores eventually have an estate whiskey section.
That would be a huge shift.
It also parallels what happened with American single malt. Once the big players started paying attention, they brought visibility to a category smaller producers had been building for years. Estate whiskey may follow a similar path. Hillrock doesn’t lose its identity because larger companies get involved. If anything, the category helps explain why Hillrock has been ahead of this conversation for so long.
Dave Pickerell’s Legacy at Hillrock
Near the end of the conversation, I asked Jeff about Dave Pickerell’s legacy.
Dave’s influence on Hillrock is everywhere. He designed the systems, the mash bills, the protocols, the equipment, the training, the finishing approach, the maturation philosophy, and the Solera. Jeff says Hillrock owes him a debt, and that they have a responsibility to maintain the quality and legacy he helped build.
That responsibility is also literal. Because the Solera is never fully emptied, Jeff believes Hillrock’s Solera bourbon may be one of the few places where you can still find whiskey distilled under Dave Pickerell’s hand in the system.
That is a powerful thought.
Dave is missed across American whiskey, but Hillrock may be one of the places where his work remains most materially present. Not just as a name in a brand story, and not just as a consulting credit, but as liquid, protocols, grain decisions, cask decisions, and a working distillery still operating according to the framework he helped build.
There’s a temptation in whiskey to turn legacy into mythology. Hillrock’s Dave Pickerell legacy is more practical than that, which may be more meaningful. He built the thing so it could keep working.
Hillrock’s Legacy and New York Whiskey
Jeff wants Hillrock to be known for the highest possible quality, and for whiskies that cannot be duplicated anywhere else because they’re tied to Hillrock’s location and terroir.
That’s the core of it.
Hillrock is not trying to be Kentucky in New York. It’s not trying to be Scotch in New York. It’s not trying to be a sourced whiskey brand with a beautiful bottle. It’s trying to be an estate whiskey distillery in the Hudson Valley, using the grain, climate, soils, team, farm, malt house, stills, barrels, and ideas that only exist in that configuration in Ancram.
For me, there’s an added layer because it’s New York.
I love getting to talk about my home state as a serious whiskey state, not as a novelty, not as an afterthought, and not only through the few brands that broke through early. Hillrock started when New York distilling was still ramping up. Today, the state has a wide and growing whiskey scene, and Hillrock’s place in that growth is important because it aimed high from the beginning. Estate grain. Floor malting. Terroir. Solera bourbon. American single malt. Rye that may yet point toward an entirely different future for the Hudson Valley.
That’s not just New York whiskey existing. That’s New York whiskey making an argument.
What This Episode Is Really About
This episode is about Hillrock Estate Distillery, but it’s also about patience.
There are easier ways to build a whiskey brand than buying farmland, growing grain, floor malting, pot distilling, using long-air-dried barrels, holding inventory for a decade, working through a Solera system, and trying to explain terroir to a category that spent a long time pretending grain was mostly interchangeable.
Hillrock chose the hard way because the hard way was the point of the project.
Jeff Baker, Cathy Franklin, Dave Pickerell, and the team built Hillrock around the belief that American whiskey could have the same estate-driven seriousness as wine while still being fully itself. Not wine cosplay. Not Scotch cosplay. Not Kentucky cosplay. A New York estate whiskey distillery with its own fields, its own malt floor, its own house style, and its own long horizon.
That’s why Hillrock matters to me as a drinker, a rye fan, a New Yorker, and someone who wants American whiskey to keep getting more specific, not more generic.
The whiskey comes from a place. At Hillrock, you can stand there and see it.
Hillrock Estate Distillery
Website: https://www.hillrockdistillery.com/
Shop: https://www.shophillrock.com/
Tours: https://www.hillrockdistillery.com/tour
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hillrockestatedistillery/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hillrock-estate-distillery/
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