Amy and Lenny Eckstein founded Deerhammer in 2010 in Buena Vista, Colorado, a mountain town they were drawn to by the whitewater of the Arkansas River. Lenny Eckstein built the first distillery himself around a hand-hammered, direct-fired 150-gallon copper pot still that made about one barrel of whiskey a month, and after a little over a year it scaled up to one 53-gallon barrel a day, the pace it keeps today. The distillery mashes, ferments and double distills every whiskey on site on two squat-head copper pot stills, using grain grown in Colorado, and ages its barrels in a rackhouse at 8,000 feet for at least four years. Its flagship is an American single malt made from pale malt with chocolate and crystal malts, alongside a four-grain bourbon, a rye and a hickory-smoked corn whiskey. Deerhammer remains wholly independent, with no outside investors.