Poor as they were, Irish immigrants brought to America a treasure worth its weight in gold. “Uisce beatha,” they called it in the old country, or, roughly translated, “water of life.”
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The “Stone Breaker” name is a nod to the backbreaking work once performed by Michael’s immigrant forebears, who in the 1800s used picks and shovels to carve a place for Kansas City out of the high limestone bluffs along the Missouri River.
“Stone Breaker is 100-percent barley in the grain bill; we’ll use four kinds,” says Benay, a pink galoshes-wearing former science teacher and Restless Spirits’ chief distiller. At the center of her new “classroom” is a beautiful 500-gallon copper pot still custom-crafted by Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Louisville, Kentucky.
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