There are easier ways to make whiskey than growing your own grain on an organic farm, milling it in a former sheep barn, fermenting it for a week, distilling it twice in custom copper stills, and then aging it for three years in an unheated barrel house at the mercy of Columbia County weather. Silver Brothers Spirits Company did all of that before finally releasing its first batch of whiskey this June.
On a drizzly August afternoon, the 220-acre Old Chatham farm smells different every few hundred feet. Malted barley in the grain room is sweet and nutty enough to eat by the handful, somewhere between cereal and the inside of a Whopper. The still house is warm and yeasty. In the barrel room, oak mingles with the faint whiskey aroma of the “angel’s share,” the small amount of spirit that evaporates through the barrels as they age. Outside, the distillery’s resident mouser patrols between buildings.
All of it matters to founder Matt Greitzer because Silver Brothers is trying to make a whiskey that could not quite come from anywhere else. “It doesn’t really matter to me what kind of whiskey we end up with as long as it tastes like it’s from here,” he says.
Field of Dreams: A Farm Distillery
Greitzer grew up in Spencertown before leaving Columbia County and spending about 25 years in New York City working in marketing-technology startups. His interest in making things to drink ran alongside that career, rooted partly in his mother’s Italian family and the stories he grew up hearing about relatives making wine. By his mid-20s he was buying North Fork grapes and making small batches at home. From there, his curiosity moved into spirits and eventually whiskey.
“In leaving, I started to realize more and more what an incredible area it was and how unique in the country and the world the Hudson Valley is,” he says.
In 2020, Greitzer and his wife, Kim Driessen-Greitzer, bought the former Old Chatham farm with the express purpose of turning it into a farm and whiskey distillery. Matt is genial and infectiously nerdy about the project, happy to disappear down a rabbit hole about barley varietals or the terroir of the Hudson Valley before catching himself, laughing and apologizing for his ramble. Kim, who cofounded Silver Brothers with him, has an almost opposite kind of presence: calm and unhurried, with a warmth that makes you feel immediately at ease. Her background in art and design, including running a stationery company, feels evident in a project where everything from the bottles to the tasting room feels carefully considered. The name is a nod to their twin sons, Alex and Andrew, who share the initials A.G., or Ag on the periodic table: silver.
The property gave Greitzer a place to test his conviction that the Hudson Valley could produce serious whiskey. Grain could grow here. Beneath the farm sits an aquifer running through limestone and slate bedrock, producing high-calcium water useful for fermentation. And then there was the weather.
Silver Brothers leaves its barrel house unheated and uncooled, allowing the seasons to work on the whiskey. Summer heat pushes the spirit deeper into the oak; winter cold pulls it back out. A particularly hot summer or severe winter can leave a different mark than the year before, meaning two batches made from the same recipe may still have their own character. “Every batch is a little different,” Greitzer says. “It’s not by design, but it’s just by nature.” That variability is exactly what he wants. “We have all of the right ingredients for making world-class whiskey,” he says.
Records of agriculture on the farm predate the American Revolution; more recently, it was an Angus cattle farm and then home to the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company. The barn-like buildings look older, but were actually constructed for the sheep operation in the mid-1990s.
The Hard Part Is the Farming
Greitzer expected plenty of trial and error in building a distillery, but some of the steepest learning curves turned out to be in the fields.
Silver Brothers currently grows about 80 percent of the grain it distills, including rye, barley, and heirloom red corn, with plans to approach 90 percent next season. The rye and bourbon are already made entirely from estate-grown grain; growing enough barley for the American single malt has proven trickier.
Rye has a long history in the region and has adapted well to the farm, where Silver Brothers grows both Danko and Hazlet varietals for their distinct flavor profiles. Barley has been harder to please. Many varieties prefer the drier Upper Midwest, narrowing the options that can handle a humid Hudson Valley summer. Violetta has proven successful here, though Greitzer notes that even a seed stock that works can disappear as growers move on to newer varieties.
Then there is winter. During the distillery’s first growing season, an extreme cold snap without protective snow cover wiped out a field of barley. This past winter, temperatures hit 15 below zero for two nights, but snow insulated the crop and little was lost. “We’re our own customers,” Greitzer says. If Silver Brothers loses a crop, it can buy grain elsewhere and keep making whiskey. A farmer whose income depends directly on that field has much less room for a bad experiment.
The farm’s organic approach adds another layer of patience. Fields spend alternating seasons under restorative cover crops such as clover rather than producing grain year after year. Once a crop is harvested, most of the work stays at Old Chatham, with one major exception: malting.
Barley travels to Hudson Valley Malt in Germantown, where it is soaked and briefly allowed to germinate, activating enzymes that turn its starches into fermentable sugars. Heat stops the process before the barley gets any grand ideas about becoming a plant, drying the grain and beginning to develop the toasty, nutty flavors that will eventually follow it into the whiskey. Then it comes back to Old Chatham.
Flavor Over Efficiency
Silver Brothers’ copper alembic stills were custom made by Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Louisville, using a basic design Greitzer says would have been recognizable to distillers 200 years ago. There are considerably faster ways to do this, but speed is not really the point.
Silver Brothers could ferment a batch in about two and a half days. Greitzer knows because they tried it, along with four days, seven days, and longer. Quick fermentations produced plenty of fruitiness but relatively simple flavor. Let things run too long and the result became, as Greitzer puts it, “a little too funky.” Seven days was the sweet spot.
“I mean, it is both science and magic,” he says. “There’s a lot of things that you can control in the process and there’s some purposeful experimentation that we do. And there’s other things that just happen.”
After fermentation, the mash is essentially a strong beer. It passes through the stills twice, concentrating the alcohol and allowing the team to collect the smoother, flavorful heart of the run before aquifer water brings it down to barrel proof.
What remains does not get tossed. The wet spent grain is collected by two nearby farms to feed cattle. In July 2026, that cycle made an especially satisfying loop at a Friend of the Farmer supper at Bimi’s Canteen in Chatham, where Greitzer says the steak served that night came from one of the farms that takes Silver Brothers’ spent grain.
Grain went into whiskey, what remained fed cattle, and some of it ultimately returned to the table as dinner. For a distillery so preoccupied with where things come from, it’s a satisfying circle.
American Single Malt Whiskey
Silver Brothers currently makes around 220 barrels a year, with roughly 600 aging on the property. When the first ones went into oak, Greitzer expected to have a two-year-old whiskey ready to sell.
The whiskey disagreed.
“We’d pop a barrel maybe six months old and say, ‘This is phenomenal. This is gonna be great,’” Greitzer says. “And then we’d come back to that barrel six months later and we’d say, ‘This is terrible.’”
As he explained the swings, the comparison turned naturally to children. One week, they are impossibly sweet; the next, you wonder what happened to the person you knew. “How long are we going to be in this phase?” Greitzer jokes.
Young whiskey, it turns out, can inspire much the same question. A barrel might taste great, become tannic and awkward months later (adolescence?), then emerge as something entirely different. Around two and a half years, Silver Brothers found that those swings began to settle and the whiskey started improving more reliably.
So when the planned two-year release approached and it was not ready, they waited. By about two years and eight months, Greitzer liked where the barrels were headed. With three years within reach, there was little reason to rush.
The first releases make a good case for just how differently those ingredients can express themselves. Batch No. 1 rye goes warm and spicy, with orange and apple notes giving way to clove, brown sugar, vanilla, and rye spice. The American single malt is brighter and more delicate, moving through green apple, lemon, and fresh-cut grass before landing on toasted marshmallow, vanilla, and a slate-like mineral finish. Greitzer expects both to move to four-year releases next year, while other barrels will stay put longer, waiting until they taste ready.
A Place You Can Taste
The road to Silver Brothers winds through the kind of northern Columbia County farmland that makes you slow down to gawk, with rolling fields, old farmhouses, and long stretches of open country before the distillery comes into view. Silver Brothers finally opened its tasting room to the public on June 6, nearly six years after Greitzer and Kim bought the farm and more than three years after the first whiskey entered barrels.
The opening means people who have watched the project take shape can finally come inside and taste it, but the work continues on several different clocks. By late September, another crop will be going into the ground. Across the yard, hundreds of barrels from earlier harvests will keep aging through freezing nights, humid summers, fake springs, and whatever else a Hudson Valley year decides to throw at them.
Eventually, those timelines meet in a glass. The grain came from the fields outside. The water came from the ground beneath. The whiskey spent years experiencing the same weather as everything else growing on the farm.
A drinker does not need to identify every part of that history sip by sip for Greitzer’s idea to work. What he is after is the less literal feeling certain foods and drinks can carry, when a flavor brings a place rushing back even when you are nowhere near it: terroir.
“If you have a really good whiskey, it can take you to the place it was from,” he says. “You can bottle the place and take it away with you.”
Silver Brothers Spirits Company
155 Shaker Museum Road, Old Chatham
silverbrothers.com | @silverbrotherswhiskey
