Sugar House Distillery is a food and drink brand founded in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2013.
When the pandemic shut the bars in 2020, Sugar House Distillery in Salt Lake City started making hand sanitizer, partly by distilling beer that Wasatch Brewery couldn't sell. Most early bottles went free to police and hospital workers, and a few school districts later bought more under contract. It was the rare Sugar House batch nobody was supposed to taste.
James Fowler founded the company in 2013, after more than 20 years of home brewing and a career in chemical sales. "Banks didn't want anything to do with it," he told SLUG, because nobody could promise him a permit, so he paid for it himself. The state license came seven months after the federal one. In July 2015 a 400-gallon mash tun was making 275-gallon batches, because the only still held 100 gallons.
The bigger still took a year of waiting and a month of installing. It has 28 plates and can run 500 gallons in a six-hour shift, and in 2016 the bourbon took gold and Best of Class from the American Distilling Institute. Fowler still owns the company, and every bottle is filled in the same Unit 14 on South West Temple where the grain is mashed.
In 2015 a $44 bottle of Sugar House whiskey carried about $26 in taxes, largely from the 68 percent markup the state charged the distillery.
