Koval is Yiddish and means “black sheep” – or that someone does something extraordinary. Like the founders of the Koval Distillery. In 2008 Robert and Sonat Birnecker gave up their academic careers. The distillery expert as well as the lecturer in distillation and the history professor swapped books for stills in order to continue the distilling tradition in Chicago that Robert had learned from his Austrian grandfather. Today Koval is the largest independent craft distillery in the USA. Koval makes innovative whiskeys from sustainably grown, mainly unmalted organic grain (often unconventional varieties) from the region. According to the “grain-to-bottle principle”, the distillers control the entire supply chain and carry out every distillation step themselves.





