At a Fleischmanns street fair, a bottle with a bright red label and bold white type — Station Navy Strength Gin — stops Brett at the Skillers booth. Owner James Rooney pours a taste and explains why British sailors once needed their gin strong enough that gunpowder would still ignite if it got splashed with the stuff. That bottle leads to a drive up to Lexington, NY, to see where it's made.

Skillers Mountaintop Distillery occupies a small pre-fab barn in what started as Rooney's ski house property near Hunter. Kaatscast walks us through some of the New York state laws that made a small operation like his possible — the Micro Distillery Act of 2003, which cut licensing fees enough to let small producers in; the Farm Distillery Act of 2007, which let distillers open tasting rooms and sell direct, the way wineries already could; and the Craft New York Act of 2014, which simplified licensing further and let farm distilleries sell in satellite locations. In exchange, farm distilleries have to source at least 75% of their ingredients from New York — Skillers uses 100% New York corn as the base for all three of its spirits, filling in the small remainder with botanicals like coriander that can't be grown locally.

The three bottles get a full tasting. Greywacke vodka takes its name from the bluestone bedrock under the Catskills, and Rooney credits its stony, mineral edge to Schoharie Creek water that's filtered through that rock. The navy strength gin, bottled at 57% ABV, is built specifically to survive being mixed into a Negroni without landing flat. And horilka — a honey and chili spirit named for the Ukrainian word for flower (kvitka) — nods to the area's Ukrainian community, using local honey and an ultrasonic extraction process to pull flavor from Thai chilies.

Gin-smith Jeff Graham describes running the still, watching a batch drip for hours to yield about 20 gallons at a time. Marketing director Todd Spire talks about the tasting room's weekend acoustic music series. And we learn that Skillers spirits are now on shelves at Elevated Wines in Hunter and behind the bar at Small Talk in Woodstock and Peekamoose in Big Indian. Next up: a Skillers Negroni made entirely in-house, which means Rooney is now considering his own line of vermouth.

Featuring

• James Rooney, founder and owner, Skillers Mountaintop Distillery
• Jeff Graham, gin smith
• Todd Spire, director of marketing
• Ric Rawlins, tasting guest

Music: "Growing Up Catskills" by Josh Roy Brown, from the documentary of the same name.