Born in the Shadows.
Raised by Rebellion.

Three daughters, a five-gallon still, and a woman the law never caught up

Stefania was my great-great grandmother. She was born in the late 1800s in a part of Poland that wasn't on any map yet, the borders hadn't caught up to the people living there. In 1914, with the first tremors of war moving through the region, she and her fiancé Feliks made the kind of decision that doesn't feel brave until you look back on it: they left. Norwich, Connecticut became home.

They married, and the daughters came fast. Sophie in 1914, Sabina in 1916, Jennie in 1917. Sabina was my great-grandmother, who I grew up around until she passed in 2013, a direct line from Stefania's kitchen to mine. Feliks worked the floor of a factory, the kind of job that asked everything and promised nothing. It was enough, until 1918, when the Spanish flu took him and left Stefania alone with three daughters under four years old.

She had no English worth speaking of and no trade the new country had any use for. What she had was a five-gallon stovetop cooker, a house nobody was watching too closely, and three reasons to figure it out anyway. She turned that cooker into a still. Bathtub gin, whiskey, vodka, moonshine, made and sold out of her own home while Prohibition turned half the country into customers and the other half into informants.

This isn't a brand legend we found and borrowed. It's family. We craft whiskey the way Stefania lived her life: bold, resilient, unapologetic.