Brand Story
A taste of history
It’s no coincidence that J.K. Williams is located in Peoria, Illinois. Over 100 years ago, this city was the whiskey capital of the world, home to more than 24 breweries and 73 distilleries — including what was once the largest distillery in the world. According to some, the tax on distilled spirits produced in Peoria alone accounted for nearly half the revenue of the entire federal government at the time.
In short, whiskey was a big deal here. Wealthy distillers and brewers gathered and lived here, funding projects that built landmarks you can still visit today. One such distiller was J.K. Williams, whose recipes helped Peoria earn recognition for the quality (and quantity) of whiskey it produced. But everything changed for Williams — and for Peoria — in 1920, when the 18th Amendment prohibited the production and sale of alcohol.
Today, it’s a well-known fact that making alcohol illegal didn’t make people want to drink it any less. They just had to work a little harder for it — drinking in speakeasies away from the prying eyes of the law, producing their own low-quality wine and moonshine at home, and buying from bootleggers who continued to produce alcohol in defiance of Prohibition.
Williams was one of many distillers who moved his operation to the backwoods, continuing to produce and sell quality whiskey despite the harsh penalties threatened by the 18th Amendment. He continued his operation for a number of years, but eventually ran afoul of the criminal element based in the city of Chicago. And while selling whiskey had become illegal, continuing to do it didn’t mean Williams was ready to consort or compete with gangsters like Al Capone.
So, fearing for his safety and his family, Williams left the Peoria area and moved to Decatur. It’s unknown if he continued to produce or sell whiskey after the move, but his run-in with the darker side of the state’s criminal underworld put an end to his career as a major distributor of alcohol. However, his son Buck had acted as his assistant over the years and dutifully preserved his father’s recipes.
A LASTING LEGACY
Nearly a hundred years later, his great-grandsons Jesse and Jon learned about his time as a distiller and a bootlegger and discovered the recipes Buck had recorded before the end of his time as a distiller. Together, they and their families took up his legacy and created JK Williams Distilling, a modern-day homage to the golden age of whiskey in Peoria.
In 2019, our current President and Vice President, Andy and Stacy Faris, bought the business from the Williams family. We are proud to carry on this long tradition. That’s why we continue to make and bottle whiskey using the original recipes first created by JK Williams.
And while we continue to innovate and produce high-quality handcrafted spirits, everything we do is done with a nod to the past — a contemporary twist on a legacy of quality that dates back more than a century to the heyday of distilling in Peoria, the Whiskey City.
