Julia Williams
Julia Williams
Editor-in-Chief
When the U.S. Congress passed the 18th Amendment in January 1919 and it went into effect in 1920 — which prohibited the sale, manufacture and intoxication of alcohol — saloons, taverns and distilleries began to shut down across the country, including one Kansas City business in the limelight.
J. Rieger & Co was founded by Jacob Rieger in 1887 as a Kansas City distillery (1529 Genesee St.) and over its original 32-year run, went on to become the largest mail order whiskey house in the U.S., according to its website.
It was not until Ryan Maybee — former Manifesto and The Rieger Hotel bar and restaurant owner — and Rieger’s great, great, great grandson, Andy Rieger met at The Rieger in 2010 and began discussing a brand relaunch in December 2011 for this family business that a distillery, which had boarded its doors so to speak for 90 years, would re-emerge into the 21st Century liquor scene.
In 2014, the two founders reopened J. Rieger & Co — mirroring its former location in the West Bottoms to the East Bottoms — at 2700 Guinotte Ave., where the business still operates today.
Maybee and Rieger have gone on to distribute its products from coast to coast as well as internationally — including places within the European Union such as Denmark and France as well as the Caribbean and South Africa.
This mass distribution, Maybee shared, while largely is due to personal industry connections he acquired as Manifesto’s — a James Beard-nominated, Kansas City cocktail bar and speakeasy, which operated from 2009 to 2020 — owner, it is also because of the traditional-style product J. Rieger has created.
“What has an impact is [our] authentic story today, having connection to the family, the look of the bottle that we’re close to replicating today,” Maybee said in an interview. “People connect with [our] authenticity; We’re not just a new brand, we have a deeply rooted history.”
While Maybee shared that the company’s relaunch in 2014 served to re-establish J. Rieger’s original mission of a family-owned distillery and whiskey house, this also included a resurgence of the company’s original whiskey recipes and processes.
“We [had] the opportunity to resurrect [one of the biggest whiskey businesses in the U.S.],” Maybee said in an interview, Tuesday. “We wanted to make something as close to the product as possible.”
As a majority of recipes were lost over the years, Maybee shared that the business worked for two years to uncover the closest thing they could find to what J. Rieger whiskey — and its brand — was in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Part of this includes incorporating sherry — a fortified wine — into American whiskey, which was a common practice among distillers before prohibition, including J. Rieger products.
Following this discovery, Maybee and Rieger — along with additional staff — worked to develop and coin the product, “Kansas City Whiskey” — which incorporates sherry into its whiskey just before bottling, at the end of its aging process — that it has marketed and appeared on labels for the past 10 years.
It is this tie back to the business’s roots and its originality — as well as the team’s industry connections and work to build its brand, which has allowed J. Rieger’s Kansas City Whiskey to appear on shelves across 30 states including upscale restaurants and hotels in New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago, Ill — Please Don’t Tell (PDT) in East Village, N.Y., The Warbler in Chicago and most recently, The Met Dining Room inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, N.Y., which J. Rieger announced to the public in a social media post on May 5, during the 2025 Met Gala.
“It’s with regard to some of the best cocktail bars and restaurants in the U.S.,” Maybee said in reference to connections he made through Manifesto. “I’m really proud, it’s exciting to see our product on the shelf in New York or Chicago. To be on the menu of some of the best bars in the world, I’m really proud of that.”
J. Rieger’s Agency of Record Lauren Wire, who is located in New York, clarified that Kansas City Whiskey was not served during the Met Gala but was available inside the Museum’s formal dining restaurant for guests the evening of the Gala — and will continue to be a menu item going forward.
“It’s been cool to watch [Maybee and Rieger] create the category of Kansas City Whiskey and see it become a staple in lots of bars, sitting next to Macallan,” Wire said in an interview.
And while Kansas City Whiskey has made its way across the U.S. and selected international locations, Maybee said it is the city to which it got its name that matters to the business the most.
“We want to be the best we can be in Kansas City,” Maybee said in an interview. “We are grateful for the recognition and appreciation of our product in other places, but this is where we need to be the best.”
Maybee shared that currently, J. Rieger headquarters and additional locations around Kansas City represent more than 75% of total revenue for the distillery. J. Rieger does not only consider itself a local brand, but rather a distillery that competes as one of the best whiskey producers within the U.S. Last year, Maybee shared, J. Rieger’s Kansas City Whiskey was named “Best American Whiskey in the Ascot Awards — the American Spirits Council of Tasters — and the same organization additionally awarded its bourbon as “Double Platinum.”
The distillery, Wire said, is currently working on its Monogram Whiskey for 2025, which the business plans to release on June 6, according to J. Rieger’s social media. Wire said this Monogram Whiskey comes out once a year and is considered its most expensive — and most collected — bottle of Kansas City Whiskey.
To read more on J. Rieger, including information on its Monogram Whiskey, visit: https://www.jriegerco.com/.
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