Powdermen Spirits Company

Pow! Right in the Kisser!
Powdermen Spirits Company, Simsbury
January 2025

Wow. Kapow. What a wild journey to get to Powdermen Spirits to be able to properly write this page. It’s entirely embarrassing on my part. I know this. But when you’re the guy doing the thing where you go and do and then write about everything in every town in this little state of Connecticut, certain things must be done.

Powdermen Spirits Company has always been in Simsbury. Where it was and when it was open had been a mystery to me for five years. In fairness to the father-son duo who own and run the operation, I’m not sure they knew either. In fact, I had completely given up on Powdermen in late 2024 and began writing its eulogy. It was to be a bit angry, as I was upset I never got to visit a place that purported to have been open at some point… somewhere in Simsbury. Which is very near CTM-HQ.

But now in early 2025, things seem to be a bit more knowable.

The business was founded in 2016, which, when considering it’s a distillery, makes some sense. Distilling spirits and turning that into bourbon takes at least two years. Powdermen does, in fact, distill rather than shipping in corn whisky from Indiana and cheapening the process. This is a good thing.

They had an address at some little office park behind Millwright’s Restaurant for years. I would drive by on occasion between 2022 and 2024 during supposed open hours and find nothing. There’s a weird church there and some empty offices. Facebook posts were frequent in 2019 and 2020, then infrequent.

They were open, somewhere during the pandemic, as evidenced by these 2019-2020 posts:

We have corn whisky! And we’ll be open this Saturday and Sunday from 1 – 6pm. Stop by and pick up a bottle before the holidays while supplies last!

Good morning. I hope everyone is surviving the quarantine and haven’t gone stir crazy yet. Luckily, the distillery is an essential business. Although, no one is beating down the door for Corn Whisky during the apocalypse, we are here if you want to brave the outdoors.

We just opened at Christmas and sold out quickly. Now, no one is out shopping and having fun, so we just keep making whisky and waiting.

There were dozens of pictures of stills and bottles. There were customer testimonials of how good their stuff was. I was left perplexed. I emailed. I messaged through their chosen Facebook platform. I never heard a word.

Then one day I noticed a picture of their building, which was not the building behind Millwright’s. I knew where that building was! It was on Hopmeadow Street! It was the old sister train station to the one Plan B occupies! Let’s go!

So I went and it looked abandoned. (That social media post with the building was a response to someone defacing it with anti-Trump graffiti. It was from March 2024 and said, “Trump can’t win… Trump can’t run.” Well, I suppose he probably physically can’t run, considering weight, age, and those ridiculous lifts he wears, but the message was not only vandalism, it was wrong.)

Then there were posts of people buying bottles. I drove by again another time and it still looked abandoned. That’s when I wrote the aforementioned angry eulogy/lament.

So imagine my surprise when, as I was tying a bow on all things Simsbury in January 2025, I decided to check in on the one blank spot on my long list of Simsburalia:”

We’ve been developing and improving our spirits at our current location of 738 Hopmeadow Street and have recently taken the project full time – here are a couple pictures from our journey so far and our two small pot stills!

We invite you to experience the distillery firsthand as we’re going to be open to the public with regular business hours, offering tours and tastings on (most) Fridays and Saturdays from 10am-6pm, beginning this Friday!

Our current 2 products are our clear corn whisky, “Flyrock”, and our 2yr “Blackwick” Bourbon, both IN STOCK and available for tasting, & purchase at the distillery in both 375ml and 750ml size.

So it was with excitement that I drove to the distillery on a Saturday at 5 PM. It was closed. (In fairness, it does say above “most” Fridays and Saturdays. But this was getting ridiculous. Even more so when you realize I don’t particularly like whisky and never drink it.)

Then it happened. The clouds above King Philip Mountain parted and sun shone down upon the little ol’ former train depot. Angels trumpeted. It was a Friday. I had just been given a nice promotion at work. It was lunchtime. Powdermen is 9 minutes from my house. Let’s celebrate.

No, don’t celebrate me, but Powdermen! They were open! And it’s a nice little building! (It’s more or less behind the Red Stone Pub.)

The name “Powdermen” refers to the plural of a blaster, explosives engineer, or miner – who are known individually as a “Powderman”. Founder and owner Frank Lucca is a modern day powderman. As their website explains:

Having grown up in the mining & explosives industry, Frank has never been too far away from distillation, as the history of mining is deeply intertwined with spirits. The old-school Powdermen, having to work with nitroglycerin and other unstable explosives, usually drank heavily to calm their nerves! Powdermen and miners from around the world who came to the USA, all brought their own version of at-home, distilled spirits.

The association of mining and spirits continued during the development of the United States. Often, train cars full of explosives being delivered to remote mining projects during the USA westward expansion would be followed by train cars full of alcohol to supply the miners. Appalachian coal miners were often also moonshiners.

Dudes blowing stuff up and drinking high proof spirits seems a bit dangerous to me (the labels on their bottles do say “Don’t drink and blast!”) But when I visited, Frank’s son Vincent told the same stories and added some local flare – Simbury’s long history as the home of Ensign-Bickford, first American makers of the safety fuse which saved countless miner and blaster lives over the years.

For ten bucks, visitors can learn about Powdermen’s history, the processes of distillation and aging, drink some samples, get a tour, and learn about the history of the building – a building which is in great condition considering its age. They’ve procured a bunch of historic railroad paraphernalia and while there’s no seating and it’s very small, I found that they’ve done a great job giving a nod to the past.

All of their products are made with local ingredients, with corn from Pleasant View Farms in Somers and malted barley from Thrall Family Farm in Windsor.

At the time of my visit, they’d bottled two spirits: Flyrock Corn Whisky (moonshine) and a Black Wick Bourbon (that same corn whiskey aged in a charred oak barrel for 2 years). I didn’t dislike either, which is a big endorsement from me. Both their commercially sold bottles are 80 proof.

I was told all sorts of qualities of the booze, but what mattered to me is that neither burned and neither just tasted like pure ethanol. My earnest interest in their operation got me a taste of an experimental rum from a barrel in the backroom. It was much higher in alcohol, but was also pretty smooth. I made it clear that I never drink brown liquor (or moonshine for that matter), but I appreciated what they were.

The Lucca’s are engineers and enjoy the precision of distilling, so I expect their products to always be pretty good. Clearly the social media and promotion and day-to-day business aspects of Powdermen can only improve, now that the younger Vincent is dedicating himself to that in 2025.

And now you know that Simsbury has an actual real distillery. Go check it out.

Powdermen Spirits Company
CTMQ’s CT Distilleries