Tulsa’s first legal distillery set to open this year
TULSA — Tulsa’s first legal distillery is scheduled to open this year.
Red Fork Distillery, 3310 Southwest Blvd., will be distilling vodka, whiskey, gin and moonshine if all goes as planned.
Michael and Dana Hoey have been in the planning stages for nearly four years and want to locate their distillery on historic Route 66. It will sit in the Red Fork district where Tulsa County’s first oil well, the Sue A. Bland, was completed in 1901. The oil well brought nationwide publicity to Tulsa and Indian Territory.
Red Fork was a town that was founded in 1883 as a railhead on the Arkansas River. Tulsa annexed Red Fork in 1927.
Starting a distillery in Oklahoma isn’t the easiest thing to do. There are a lot of regulations, and every piece of government wants to be involved.
“It is a very regulated industry, so you have to have federal licenses, you have to have state licenses, you have to have local licenses. And that whole process, one is depending on the other to get approval and so it takes a long time,” Michael Hoey said. “We have been working about 3 ½ to four years to get to the point where we are now. We are hoping to have products on the shelves by the end of the this year, that is our goal.”
Hoey’s interest in starting a distillery was sparked by a magazine article.
“I read an article in a magazine called Garden and Gun about a south Georgia distillery that was making rum from sugar cane and from there it just piqued my interest,” he said. “So that evolved into researching it more, studying it more and then we decided to create Red Fork Distillery.”
The Hoeys still have some work to do on the former manufacturing facility that will be the home for the distillery. The front office’s walls will be torn out to make room for a gift shop and tasting room. A vent has to be made for the distiller, and fermentation tanks will need to be purchased. They bought a 250-gallon copper distiller.
Current law won’t allow them to sell on site, but in October 2018 they will be able to give samples of their products to visitors. They hope future legislation will enable them to sell a small quantity on site.
The couple is using a local artist for the label artwork. Jenks artist Josh Stout has created the labels for Southern Journey Vodka, Lonesome Arrow Whiskey, War Dance Cinnamon Moonshine and White Bison Moonshine. Each work of art has ties to native America.