The Moonshiners: The Editor, the Architect and the Bottle

"So you just yeasted?" David Haskell, a features editor at New York magazine, asked a young man in a blue T-shirt named Simon, who was sitting in a vinyl chair by an industrial window in Bushwick.

Simon, a recent Bennington graduate who makes video art, and who has black hair and a thick mustache, said he did. He had also mashed, strained and stripped a foul-smelling brew that would eventually be distilled into un-aged corn whiskey (or moonshine) or aged into bourbon.

This was late in the afternoon on a Saturday at the Kings County Distillery, which Mr. Haskell and his business partner, Colin Spoelman, registered in April under a farm distillery license, introduced into law by former governor Eliot Spitzer. The 325-square-foot space, situated on the second floor of a nondescript building not far from the English Kills creek, was heavy with the smell of yeast and simmering corn.

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