Edible Drinks: Boston Harbor Distillery
Photo by Michael Piazza / Styled by Catrine Kelty
On a cold weeknight in January, Boston Harbor Distillery is in between the distilling, private events, VIP tours, tastings, live music and camaraderie that keep the brick-and-beam building quite literally buzzing with activity. It’s a rare quiet moment in the 11,000-square-foot space that has been home to various business enterprises since 1859.
While the distillery’s founder and CEO, Rhonda Kallman, waxes poetic about the distillery’s products—including whiskey, rum, gin, vodka, liquors and prepared cocktails—and the process by which they are made, she’s also effusive about the history of the site itself, located in the historic Port Norfolk neighborhood of Dorchester on the southernmost waterfront of Boston Harbor.
“This peninsula has been the center of entrepreneurial commerce since the mid 1800s,” she says, pointing to horseshoe nails manufactured by the Putnam Nail Company, which supplied the nails to both sides of the Civil War.
Fittingly, Kallman graced her whiskey line with the name Putnam. But the connection runs deeper than the nail company: Growing up in Lynn and Peabody, Kallman frequented Putnam’s Pantry in neighboring Danvers— a candy and ice cream shop adjacent to the homestead of General Israel Putnam.
After Putnam came George Lawley & Sons, builders of both yachts and World War II minesweepers—and Kallman’s inspiration for the Lawley’s line of small-batch rums and botanical gin and vodka. Seymour Ice Cream Company also once operated out of the building.
As Kallman offers a history lesson about the space, she also tells her own story of 40 years in the beverage industry.
But her love affair with whiskey started long before; it was part of growing up, she says. Her grandparents, who hailed from Eastern Europe, drank it. So did her father. In fact, one of her father’s favorites and what Kallman recalls as her first drink—whiskey and ginger ale—was the inspiration for the distillery’s EZ-Rye-der cocktail.
“I just love the smell of whiskey, and I fell in love with the flavors and complexities,” she says.
Kallman also fell in love with pub culture and the hospitality industry early on, waitressing at age 15 and bartending and waitressing her way through college. After college, she went to work for the Boston Consulting Group as a secretary to eight people, including Jim Koch. He invited Kallman to join him in founding the Boston Beer Company, which went on to produce Sam Adams beer.
“I was 24 when we launched in 1985,” says Kallman, who handled the sales part of the operation and rose to executive vice president, becoming a pioneer in her own right. “There were no women in the industry then.”
After 15 years with Sam Adams, she saw subsequent entrepreneurial stints in the beer industry. Kallman founded New Century Brewing to make innovative American beer styles, including Edison beer, a light beer made from scratch with brewmaster Joseph Owades, the inventor of light beer; and the original premium beer with caffeine, Moonshot. But when the FDA banned caffeinated alcohol drinks in 2010, Kallman was forced to pivot.
“When life handed me lemons, I decided to make whiskey,” she says.
Kallman sought the help of James Swan, the world-renowned expert on whiskey maturation, and learned the art of whiskey making under his tutelage in Taiwan: everything from water temperature fluctuations to how to treat the barrels to the right equipment. She incorporated Boston Harbor Distillery in 2012 and opened the door to the warehouse space in 2015.
But ultimately, it comes down to the ingredients. “For me, it’s about quality ingredients,” she says. “It’s great stuff in and great stuff out. You really have to care about what goes into it.”
That means all-natural ingredients, water sourced from the Quabbin Reservoir and no added sugars; Vermont- based Ackermann Maple Farm’s maple syrup serves as the distillery’s signature sweetener, including for its Putnam maple old-fashioned, coffee liqueur, maple cream and espresso liqueur. Even the Spirit of Boston line features spirits distilled from Sam Adams beer—what Kallman calls “really full circle.”
Kallman speaks about the integrity of the ingredients with the same sort of reverence and level of detail she conveys for the distilling and aging process.
The tour ends in the barrel room, surrounded by seasoned, toasted and charred American white oak barrels, and Kallman pauses to take it all in. A pioneer in her own right in a space where pioneers before her carved out their legacies, she considers herself lucky.
“I’ve been at this business a long time, and now we have a distillery in Boston on the ocean,” she says. “That’s like a dream, building a community and making high-end, really good quality products here.”
RECIPES
THE CHERRY BOMB
Makes 1 cocktail
2 ounces Demon Seed Whiskey
½ ounce elderflower liqueur
2 ounces tart cherry juice
½ ounce lemon juice
1–2 dashes Angosturra bitters
ginger beer
Luxardo cherry, for garnish
Combine all ingredients except for the ginger beer in a shaker tin with ice. Shake until chilled and strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Top with a floater of ginger beer and garnish with a cherry.
LAVENDER GIN SOUR
Makes 1 cocktail
2 ounces Lawley’s Harborside Gin
½ ounce fresh lime juice
½ ounce fresh lemon juice
½ ounce lavender simple syrup (simmer lavender flowers in equal parts sugar and water for 10 minutes; strain)
sprig of fresh lavender or a lemon wheel, for garnish
Combine all ingredients in a shaker tin with ice. Shake until chilled and strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with fresh lavender and/or a lemon wheel.
THE STALLION
Makes 1 cocktail
2 ounces Putnam Straight Rye Whiskey
½ ounce Fiery Ginger Syrup (we prefer Liber & Co.)
¾ ounce fresh lime juice
lime wheel, for garnish
Combine all ingredients in a shaker tin with ice. Shake until chilled and strain over a big ice cube in a rocks glass. Garnish with a lime wheel.
This story appeared in the Spring 2025 issue.
