A small Tel Aviv distillery is poised to become the first Israeli producer to tap into the growing international market for single-malt whisky.
“We want people who love the land and love whisky to buy our whisky, ” Gal Kalkshtein, owner of Milk & Honey Distillery, told CNN. Since there aren’t enough whisky drinkers in Israel to support the distillery, Kalkshtein expects to sell the majority of its one million bottle production run in the United States.
Milk & Honey CEO Nir Gilat expects to find a market in the U.S. for the kosher whisky, and predicts that demand in Israel will subsequently follow. “We took a look at what’s happening in the U.S. with the beer market, wine market, and whisky market, ” he said, “and we saw that Israel follows the U.S.”
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Milk & Honey raised $76, 000 on Indiegogo after its founding in 2013, with the rest of the financing being provided by Kalkshtein, who is a serial tech-entrepreneur. Its first batch of whisky will be ready by 2018, after a three year maturing process.
The company hired its master distiller, Jim Swan, from Scotland. Swan has overseen whisky production in places such as India and Taiwan, according to a 2014 feature in Tablet Magazine.
The complete CNN report, including a brief segment with Swan, is embedded below.
by TheTower.org
[Photo: Milk & Honey Distillery / Facebook]
