Distinct Spirits from North Shore Distillery
I met Sonja Kassebaum for a weekend of bar-hopping run in downtown Champaign. This wasn’t an exhibition of partying, it was two night of discovering. The discoverer was me and it was the spirits of North Shore Distillery that I was learning (and tasting). You see, this isn’t a company where you just walk through a distillery and taste their products, North Shore Distillery does the traveling and brings the adventure to you. The husband and wife team of Sonja and Derek Kassebaum own and operate North Shore Distillery, an artisanal distillery located in a Chicago suburb of Illinois. They started six years ago and have put their time into making quality products in this small distillery. They are hands on with everything, including Sonja’s picking of the herbs for the gin. She readily admits that “Grey Goose makes in one day what we do in six years.” There is another who makes the spirits of North Shore possible -- Ethel, the 250 liter copper still that was hand-crafte