Matchbook Distilling Co.

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Overview

Date Established	04/2017
Founder	Leslie Merinoff Kwasnieski, Brian Kwasnieski, Paul Monahan
Headquarters	Greenport
Industries	Beverage Hospitality
Website	https://mdcdropshop.com/
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About

Matchbook Distilling Co. is an R+D facility dedicated to the production of spirits that champion agriculture, anthropology, tradition, and science. They believe that healthy soil produces the healthiest ingredients, which in turn produce the best flavor. Located in Greenport, NY, they have a tasting room operating Saturdays from 1pm - 6pm and ship nationwide. Their custom-built, American-made equipment is designed for maximum versatility and scalability, emphasizing quality.

Founding Story

Matchbook Distilling Co. was founded on the belief that spirits should capture the natural world at its peak—bottling a season, a peak arromatic moment in a flowers life, a sense of place that can be tasted.

Launched in 2018 by Leslie Merinoff-Kwasnieski, Brian Kwasnieski, and Paul Monahan, Matchbook began as a contract distillery, crafting spirits for others. But during the pandemic, when everything slowed, the team found themselves immersed in their own experiments, distilling at an almost obsessive pace. Over four years, they produced one to three entirely new releases every month, each one an exploration of fermentation, agriculture, and process.

This period of deep creativity shaped Matchbook’s identity. Some spirits, like Elsewhere Blood Orange Aperitif and Daytrip Strawberry Amaro, have grown into national releases. Others remain intimate, made in response to the rhythm of the farms that bring their harvest to the distillery—bottled at the peak of ripeness, freezing a moment of the natural world in time. Then there are the collaborations: spirits designed for bars, restaurants, and chefs, each one a challenge to push into new territory, to capture an idea in liquid form.

Matchbook is not just a distillery; it's a house of research and development, a space where agriculture and alchemy meet. Every bottle is a drinkable snapshot of the world as it was in that moment—a life-like picture, frozen in time, waiting to be poured.