Port Chester distillers switch up on their fruit brandies

• From Munchies

While you were sucking down pumpkin spice lattes this fall, business partners Noah Braunstein and Yoni Rabino were holed up in their Port Chester, NY, distillery crushing thousands and thousands of pounds of pears. Like 24,000 pounds. Instead of becoming centerpieces in a Harry & David holiday gift basket, those New York-grown pears are on their way to become a small batch of Neversink Spirits pear brandy.

“It’s an extremely, extremely low-yield product so we only do a few hundred bottles of it every year,” Rabino said of the brandy. It takes more than 45 pounds of fruit to make a single 375-milliliter bottle. ...

“This is New York, we grew up picking apples upstate, we should do a New York apple brandy,” Rabino said of their thinking process. “Now, of course, there are a bunch of New York apple brandies, but at the time it seemed like a really different idea.”

Using only local ingredients, the two-year-old operation produces apple brandy (both aged and unaged), gin, and, most recently, bourbon in addition to the pear eau de vie. The partners quickly realized that there was a lot of noise to break through in the alcohol industry.

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