Lake George Distilling Company sits just outside Fort Ann in the rolling countryside of Washington County, where brothers Preston and Jeremy Hebb turned their family’s maple syrup operation into one of New York’s most distinctive craft distilleries. They opened in 2015 after converting part of their family’s maple farm into a small-batch distillery, bringing together generations of agricultural knowledge with modern distilling techniques. The operation runs out of a converted barn on their 200-acre property, where they’ve installed custom copper stills and aging rooms that smell like oak and pure Adirondack air. The Hebb brothers didn’t just stumble into distilling—they spent years perfecting their recipes while still running the maple operation full-time. Preston handles the distilling side with a background in chemistry, while Jeremy focuses on the business and visitor experience. What started as weekend experiments with leftover maple syrup eventually became a full commitment when they realized they could create something genuinely different by incorporating their maple heritage into spirits. They source their corn locally and use their own maple syrup in several expressions, creating whiskeys that taste distinctly like upstate New York. Visitors get the full farm-to-bottle experience here, touring the production floor where you can see the entire process from mash to barrel. The tasting room overlooks their maple groves, and during syrup season you might catch them boiling sap right alongside distilling whiskey. It’s a working farm first, distillery second, which gives the whole operation an authentic agricultural feel that’s hard to fake. The brothers often lead tours themselves, and they’re happy to explain how maple syrup production techniques influenced their approach to fermentation and flavor development.