SEWICKLEY, Pa. — “Enter here you gorgeous bastard” is the first greeting visitors are met with as they ascend the ramp to McLaughlin Distillery in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. For veteran business owner Kim McLaughlin, starting with a laugh is the best way to ensure a good moonshine-tasting experience.
McLaughlin grew up around moonshine and, after an unexpected turn of events, he was thrust into the world of distillery-making full-time. The opportunity turned out to be “divine intervention” and in 2016 McLaughlin Distillery officially opened.
Alongside serving laughs, moonshine and bourbon, McLaughlin makes it his mission to give back to his veteran community every year on Marine Corps birthday and Veterans Day.
“It’s pretty cool having the Marines come in because once a Marine, always a Marine,” McLaughlin said. “I am really grateful as far as everybody thanks you for your service. But to me, it was an honor to serve.”
McLaughlin Distillery
McLaughlin grew up with eight siblings on a small dairy farm in northern New York. After graduating high school, he joined the Marine Corps in 1976 and served on embassy duty for four years. He moved back to upstate New York in 1980 with the hopes of running his own dairy operation.
In 1983, he bought 300 acres of land to farm 200 acres of alfalfa and milk 120 Holsteins cows. In the beginning, he sold the milk to local milk processors but eventually transitioned into running his own processing and bottling operation.
But, with no one to take over the dairy farm, he sold it in 2006 to embark on a new journey working for the oil and gas industry in western Pennsylvania. McLaughlin plugged wells for 10 years before he felt another calling: making neutral grain spirits, also known as moonshine.
In the midst of constructing the facility and brewing his first few batches of moonshine, McLaughlin was laid off from the oil and gas industry in 2016. But this would only ignite his passion and focus for making spirits.
“Right after I got my last permit, 10 days later, I got laid off. So it pushed me into it, kind of like divine intervention,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin Distillery officially opened its doors in 2016, selling three different types of clear spirits.
For the first couple of years, the distillery could only deliver its products. But today, the distillery sells bottles in-house as well as offers tours, cocktail classes and in-store and home tastings.
Its menu has also expanded, which includes 42 different types of moonshines, bourbons and vodka. All of McLaughlin’s products are made from a moonshine base, which uses corn from Heritage Cooperative in Columbiana County, Ohio. He also makes maple syrup for his Maple Flavored Whiskey and Bourbon Barrel-aged Maple Syrup.
McLaughlin recently won a double gold medal in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition for his Creamy Limoncello Moonshine and a gold medal in the same contest for his Cask Strength Baby Barrel Whiskey.
Alongside making award-winning moonshine and bourbons, McLaughlin likes to honor his fellow veterans. Since the distillery opened, he has given Marines and veterans a free bottle of vodka on Marine Corps’ birthday and Veterans Day.
McLaughlin gave away less than 20 bottles when it first started. Today, he gives away 200-300 bottles.
“On Marine Corps birthday, you have different generations, the grandfather, the father, the son and the grandson, all Marines come in at the same time. And of course, all of them think they’ve had it the worst,” McLaughlin laughs. “But then everybody’s talking ‘Hey, where’d you serve?’ We have a lot of fun with it, that’s a couple of the nicest days of the year.”
McLaughlin Distillery, 3799 Blackburn Road, Sewickley, Pennsylvania, is open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and on Sunday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, visit https://www.mclaughlindistillery.com/.
Park Family Farms Distillery
Inspired by the love of his family history and other veteran-owned distilleries, Nick Park opened Park Family Farms Distillery in 2021 with help from his cousins Jesse and Allen Park and his dad Bill Park. The distillery is located on his family’s farm in Stahlstown, Pennsylvania, where they currently grow hay. The Park farm dates back to 1912 and still contains the original farmhouse.
However, the Park family history in Pennsylvania dates back even further than the 20th century, to Nick’s great great great great great grandfather Zebulon Park who served in the Revolutionary War at Valley Forge.
For his service, he was given a land grant in western Pennsylvania. He died in Westmoreland County and was buried about one mile from where the distillery is today.
“We’re really proud of our family history,” Nick said. “Our name used to be Park with an e, that’s the old English spelling. Cornelius Park, a couple of generations after Zebulon, hated the British so much that he dropped the ‘E’.”
Following in his fifth great-grandfather’s footsteps, Nick and Jesse both joined the military. Nick, an active duty Army officer, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh ROTC program in 2011, and after attending army training school from 2011-2013, he was deployed to Afghanistan in 2013 for a year.
Nick conceived the idea of opening a distillery with his cousins in 2016 while stationed at Fort Campbell near the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Nick and his cousins began clearing out the warehouse in Stahlstown and applied for an LLC.
But the venture was put on pause while Nick was stationed in Hawaii for four years. He moved back to western Pennsylvania in 2021 when he was stationed in Pittsburgh. The close proximity allowed Nick and his family to continue setting up the distillery.
To do this, they converted their uncle’s old sawmill building into a tasting room and warehouse. The distillery officially opened in late 2021, and is open every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. for tasting and bottle sales. Park Family Farms Distillery also travels to festivals in Somerset County and Westmoreland County to sell their products.
All of the distillery’s bourbons are made from grain. Its first whiskey, called Ridge Water, was made from 80% corn, 20% malted barley and water from a fresh spring on the property.
Its second whiskey, Stahlstown Tea Party, represents Nick’s ties to Zebulon Park and the Revolutionary War. The whiskey is made using Bohea tea, a popular tea prior to the Revolutionary War, which was the most tea, by volume, thrown into the Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party.
Today, Park Family Farms Distillery sells four different types of whiskey and is currently aging four more whiskeys, including a single malt oat whiskey, a coffee bourbon sourced from a local coffee shop and a mint bourbon from mint grown on the farm.
The distillery is a certified PA-Preferred business, meaning all of its ingredients are locally sourced in the state. Its malted barley comes from Dancing Star Farm in Somerset, Pennsylvania, is malted by CNC Malt in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the corn comes from various farms in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania.
Nick recognizes he’s no expert in making bourbon, which has come with a learning curve, but he’s ambitious for the future. He has plans to expand into Allegheny County, sell his products in more stores, turn the old farmhouse into a tasting room and one day grow his own grains.
On top of everything else, Nick is proud to be a veteran business owner.
“I like to put veteran-owned business on all of our products, and it’s not because I want to sell more products because I served, or my cousin served. It is a matter of pride,” Park said. “It doesn’t mean like, hey, buy this because I served, so give me your money. It means that that work ethic and that level of service is in that product, and I try to build that into all of the things that we do.”
Park Family Farms Distillery is located at 3891 PA-130, Stahlstown, Pennsylvania. For more information, visit https://www.parkfarmsdistillery.com/.
(Liz Partsch can be reached at epartsch@farmanddairy.com or 330-337-3419.)
