Jacob Rieger, an immigrant from Austria-Hungary, founded J. Rieger & Co. in Kansas City's West Bottoms in 1887, and under his son Alexander it grew into the largest mail-order whiskey house in the country before Prohibition closed it in 1919. In 2014 bartender Ryan Maybee and Andy Rieger, Jacob's great-great-great-grandson, revived the company as the first distillery in Kansas City since Prohibition, with master distillers Dave Pickerell and Tom Nichol backing the launch. Their first product, Kansas City Whiskey, blends sourced straight bourbon, light corn whiskey and straight rye with a small amount of 15-year-old oloroso sherry, a practice the company says it revived. The distillery began making its own spirits on a 750-gallon copper Vendome still in 2015, and in 2019 it moved production into a 1901 building in the city's Electric Park district. Its own whiskey reached the market in 2021 with a Bottled-in-Bond Straight Rye, and the core range now includes a sweet mash Straight Bourbon and Straight Rye distilled on pot and column stills under Master Distiller Nathan Perry. Its co-founders still run the company.