Some of the best things in this city have always been hiding in plain sight.

I grew up in Huntsville. Spent a good chunk of my first eighteen years in the shadow of the Space and Rocket Center, eating Zesto’s and Gibson’s BBQ, watching the Stars play at Joe Davis Stadium (sadly all but the Space Center are gone now), and learning the geography of this city the way you only do when it’s actually yours. I left eventually, the way a lot of people do, and settled into life up in Ohio, which is fine. Ohio is perfectly fine. But Huntsville has done something in the last decade or so that most mid-sized Southern cities only dream about. It grew up. Grew fast. Grew smart. The Rocket City has been that nickname long before it became a marketing slogan, and these days it’s legitimately one of the more interesting small cities in the South, and every time I come back I find something I didn’t know was there.

This particular trip wasn’t a homecoming in any sentimental sense. My wife and I were passing through on our way to Birmingham to help move my son out of his college apartment, which is the kind of deeply unglamorous errand that doesn’t make for much of a story on its own. We had a weekend, we had Huntsville to kill some time in, and I had a list of distilleries I’d been meaning to check off. So we checked them off.

We stopped at Irons One Distilling first, and it was the guy behind the bar there who mentioned Black Patch, which I was unfamiliar with. Black Patch Distilling is on Leeman Ferry Road next to the Parkway, tucked into a mixed-use office building that is accessible from just about any corner of the city, which I appreciated. What I did not appreciate, at least in the first sixty seconds, was how thoroughly unremarkable the outside of the place looked.

Not What You’d Call Inviting

I want to be fair about this, because the story gets considerably better and I don’t want the setup to oversell the problem. But I’d be lying if I said the first impression was anything other than confused. The building looks like somewhere you’d go to dispute a billing error. The suite itself could be a dentist’s office or a CPA’s waiting room or a place where someone faxes things to someone else who also faxes things. Walking through the front door, that vibe didn’t immediately improve. You step into what is essentially an office lobby, a small reception desk with a cash register sitting on top of it, and over in the corner a modest assortment of Black Patch branded merchandise arranged in a way that suggests the word “shop” only applies if you’re feeling generous. You could get yourself a hat or a t-shirt if the mood struck you. Nobody was going to pressure you about it either way.

Nobody was at the front desk at all, which for a brief moment made me wonder if I’d gotten the address wrong. But we must have tripped something on the way in, because after a minute or two, one of the owners materialized from somewhere in the back to see what we needed. His name was Drew. He was friendly, unpretentious, and I don’t figure he’s used to people walking in at one o’clock on a Friday afternoon full of questions, but he rolled with it graciously.

We spent a few minutes at the front talking through the lineup, where they distribute, how they ended up at this particular address. Drew mentioned that 2025 had brought both new ownership and a move from their original Madison location to here in Huntsville. He mentioned this was a second career for him, and that a big part of what appealed about it was the chance to work alongside his son. I filed that detail away, because it was going to matter more in a few minutes.

I asked if we could buy a tasting. He said sure, and led us toward the back.

Around the Corner

There’s a short corridor, a turn, and then the place opens up completely.

I don’t know if Drew stages this on purpose, leads people through the unremarkable front half so the back half lands harder, but if he does it’s an effective bit of theater. The tasting room is genuinely well done. Good bar, comfortable seating, tables arranged the way a room should be arranged when the point is for people to relax and stay a while. The kind of space that probably hosts some interesting happenings, if the layout is anything to go by. And forming the entire back wall of the room, a bank of windows looks directly into the working distillery. Four column stills. Rack space for aging barrels. A real, functioning craft operation, right there visible from your barstool, close enough that the whole thing feels participatory rather than decorative.

The lobby had managed expectations somewhere around “adequate.” The tasting room reset them entirely.

Drew appeared to be the only person working that afternoon, and from what he shared, he and his son may represent the full extent of the Black Patch operation at the moment. Two people building something from scratch on a second-career pivot, running a distillery by hand, producing a lineup that’s worth writing about and worth driving to. The scale is scrappy, and I mean that as a genuine compliment. There’s a clarity of focus that comes from small operations that larger ones tend to lose somewhere between the third hire and the first investor meeting. Whatever Black Patch is right now, it’s unambiguously itself.

The Black Patch

Before the whiskey, the story deserves its proper telling, because it’s not the kind of origin a marketing team could invent and a founder couldn’t forget.

Gary Cooper, the original founder, started developing what would become the Black Patch bourbon in 2007, while his son Clayton was on his first combat deployment overseas. Gary had been a dedicated home brewer and distiller for years, and he spent those long months of waiting and not knowing doing what he knew how to do: working on a whiskey. Getting the recipe dialed in. Building something with his hands while his son was somewhere far away doing something Gary couldn’t be part of. Clayton came home. He’d been seriously wounded in combat and lost his leg in the process. He helped his father finish the recipe anyway, and that bourbon recipe has not changed since.

The name comes from the single unmarked patch that Clayton’s special operations unit wore on their uniforms in the field. Sterile gear, no unit identification, nothing that would tell you who they were or where they were from. Just a black patch. Gary said it defined his philosophy for the distillery as well: uncomplicated, authentic, hardworking. No fuss, just the work.

When Drew and his son Jacob came into the picture, that history didn’t go anywhere — and Drew told me after our visit that carrying it forward is something they think about carefully. They’re not veterans themselves, and the distillery was originally founded and heavily marketed as a combat veteran-owned business. The line they’re walking is a deliberate one: preserving Gary and Clayton’s legacy of sacrifice while expanding the brand into a broader vision of Huntsville — one that draws on the military inspiration and innovation that runs through Redstone Arsenal and the community around it. Jacob spent years as a contractor supporting multiple DoD agencies before moving over to support NASA. Their family has members who served. The tribute isn’t performative. It’s personal.

And the reason Drew made the jump in the first place rhymes with the reason Gary started the distillery to begin with. A father wanting to build something alongside his son. When this opportunity came to Drew and Jacob’s attention, Drew told me they’d already talked about wanting to own something together, to have a family legacy of their own. What sealed it was Gary himself — who stayed on to mentor and train them through the transition. The symmetry isn’t subtle, and Drew didn’t pretend it was accidental. Some places just carry their founding energy forward whether they’re trying to or not.

What’s Actually in the Glass

Drew poured us through the complete lineup, and I want to give each one a fair accounting here, because they’re not all the same story and they shouldn’t be treated as if they are.

The bourbon is the flagship and the foundation, and it earns both of those designations without being flashy about it. Crisp, smooth, decidedly approachable. Gary designed it to be drunk, not displayed, and Drew confirmed when I asked that approachability was the explicit goal from the very beginning of the recipe’s development. You’re not pulling this out at a tasting to impress a room full of bourbon nerds, and it won’t pretend to be something it’s not in that setting. What you are doing is pulling it out on a Tuesday because you want a solid pour after a long day, or you’re building a cocktail and you need a base that isn’t going to fight everything else in the glass. It’s genuinely good bourbon. It just knows what it is and doesn’t try to be anything else. I bought a bottle and I’ll do a proper full review once I’ve spent a few evenings with it.

The rye runs the same philosophy through a different grain. I’ll be upfront about my general relationship with rye whiskey, which is somewhere between skeptical and barely tolerant. This one surprised me by simply not being aggressive about it. Like the bourbon, its natural home is the everyday pour or the cocktail build. It’s not a shelf piece and it doesn’t need to be.

Drew also poured us both expressions of their blue agave spirits — the clear and the barrel-aged version. What I can tell you is that the aged version is considerably more interesting than the clear, and that the barrel time does it genuine favors. Technically what they’re making here is a tequila-style spirit, agave-based, distilled like tequila, though they don’t call it that because it isn’t produced in Mexico and therefore doesn’t qualify under the appellation. Fair enough. By any other name, the aged version has something going for it.

Then came the blue agave whiskey, and this one caught me completely off guard.

I want to be honest about where my head was walking into this pour. I’d just had two expressions of the agave spirits, I’m not a tequila person under the best of circumstances, and the concept of a blue agave whiskey wasn’t exactly speaking to any preference I was aware of having. I took the pour mostly out of completeness and expected to be diplomatic about it afterward. What I got instead was sweet, cool on the tongue, and genuinely pleasant in a way I had no ready framework for. There’s something almost refreshing about it, and it sits differently from the straight whiskeys in a way that makes it feel like its own category rather than a footnote in someone else’s. You’d drink this one on its own, maybe over a single cube, and not need it to be anything more complicated than it is.

After our visit, Drew filled in a detail that reframes the whole thing: Black Patch was the first to submit a formula combining blue agave with whiskey for federal approval. The TTB had never seen it before, and they had to get agave listed as an approved ingredient before they could even release it. When we stopped at Dread River Distilling in Birmingham later that same weekend and saw their own version on the menu, I’d thought I was spotting a trend. Turns out I may have been seeing the trend’s offspring. Worth knowing.

The cinnamon whiskey I’ll address directly because the category doesn’t require much preamble. Every craft distillery in America seems to make one, most of them are fine, and Black Patch’s version is fine and then some. What it reminded me of, specifically, is the cinnamon hard candies my grandmother kept in a dish on the coffee table in her living room, the kind you’d eat because they were there and they were sweet and the cinnamon was warm without being hot about it. That’s this whiskey. Sweet, warm, recognizable, not challenging in any direction. Pour it over ice and you’re in good shape. Compared to the commercial options that dominate this particular category, it’s a meaningful step up, and that’s the honest comparison to make.

And then there was the pecan pie liqueur.

Thanksgiving in May

Black Patch is sitting on something genuinely special and I want that on record without qualifications attached to it.

The pecan pie liqueur runs at 60 proof, which is appropriate because it’s a liqueur and that’s how liqueurs work, and which tells you nothing useful about what’s happening in the glass. Don’t let the proof make you dismissive, because there is something serious going on here. It tastes exactly like what it claims to be, and I don’t mean a loose interpretation or a vague nod toward dessert or one of those spirits where you can tell they were reaching for something and mostly didn’t grab it. This tastes like Thanksgiving in May. Brown sugar, toasted pecan, warm spice, a suggestion of maple that doesn’t overplay its hand, and a smoothness that makes the whole thing go down in a way that should probably come with some kind of advisory. There are actual pecans in the bottle, and the sweetness is present and generous without going cloying, which is the razor’s edge that most dessert-style spirits never manage to walk without tumbling off one side or the other.

Getting that balance right took months, and it wasn’t accidental. Before Black Patch, Drew spent a career as a culinary chef for major restaurant chains — developing new products, running consumer tests, understanding where sweetness levels need to land to work rather than overwhelm. That background is why the pecan pie liqueur hits the way it does. It’s not a happy accident. It’s a chef’s instinct applied to a still.

My wife had a taste and smiled.

I need you to understand what that means as a data point. My wife does not drink spirits. She doesn’t drink liqueurs. She was at this tasting out of solidarity and general good humor and the reasonable expectation that nothing in the lineup was going to register as a personal discovery. She tried the pecan pie liqueur, looked at me, and told me we are buying a bottle. That is the review. Everything else I can say about this product is elaboration on what that sentence already told you.

I brought a bottle home to Ohio. My son, the one we were in the process of moving out of his Birmingham apartment, now has standing orders to bring a bottle north on his next trip home. It’s that good. It is genuinely one of the best flavored spirits I have come across, and at this point I’ve come across a fair number of them. If Black Patch finds a way to get this distributed beyond Alabama’s borders, there is a real and waiting audience for it on the other side. The pecan pie liqueur is the reason you stop at Black Patch, and it’s the reason you come back.

What’s Coming

Drew shared a few things about where Black Patch is headed, and there’s enough in the pipeline to make a return visit worth planning for.

The state of Alabama is still the primary focus, and Drew’s candid about the fact that there’s significant ground left to cover there before they start worrying about what’s beyond it. That said, within the last month they’ve secured their Tennessee distribution license, and neighboring states are next on the list. The blue agave whiskey, Drew told me, needs to be introduced beyond the region to really find its audience — and I suspect he’s right about that.

The most intriguing thing on the horizon is a Founders Cut release. There’s a bourbon in the cellar that’s been aging since the beginning — eight years old now — and the plan is to bottle it at a higher proof as a limited special release. Eight-year craft bourbon from a distillery with this much story behind it is the kind of thing worth paying attention to when it drops.

New expressions are coming too, though Drew wasn’t ready to be specific about what. He did say they plan to build the Black Patch name into something the Huntsville community feels genuine pride in — which, given that both he and Jacob have called this city home for over twenty years, doesn’t sound like a marketing line. It sounds like a person talking about the place where he lives.

Worth the Stop

Drew walked us out the way he’d walked us in, back through the lobby that still looked like somewhere you’d go to file something important and mildly inconvenient. By that point it didn’t matter. The back half of that building had already done all the work the front half was never going to do.

He’s a gracious host and an honest one, and clearly glad to be doing what he’s doing in a way that doesn’t feel performed. He didn’t try to oversell anything or run the polished pitch version of the distillery’s story. He just talked about it the way someone talks about something they built with their own hands, which is the only kind of talking worth listening to in a place like this. I came in with more questions than he was probably expecting from a Friday afternoon walk-in, and he answered all of them without making me feel like I was keeping him from something else.

Black Patch Distilling is a small operation with a serious story, a focused and honest lineup, and one product that is flat-out exceptional and deserves to be known far beyond the reach it currently has. The building is never going to tell you that, and the lobby sure isn’t. But walk around that corner, pull up a stool at that bar, and let Drew take you through the lineup from start to finish. By the time you get to the pecan pie liqueur, you’ll understand exactly why I’m writing about it.

I grew up in this city. I know what it feels like when Huntsville does something right.

This is Huntsville doing something right.

Black Patch Distilling Co.  |  2650 Leeman Ferry Road, Suite B, Huntsville, AL 35801

(256) 325-1321  |  blackpatchdistilling.com

Thursday & Friday: 11am–6pm  |  Saturday: 12pm–5pm