Buried inside a former boat-parts warehouse on the working-class fringe of Greenport’s waterfront, something extraordinary happened in 2016 — not with fanfare or investor pitch decks, but with fermenters, native yeast, and a founder who refused to accept that the world already had enough spirits. What Leslie Merinoff Kwasnieski built at 230 Corwin Street is not a distillery in the conventional sense. It is a research laboratory where the North Fork’s soil speaks through every bottle, a place where philosophy and fermentation occupy the same square footage, and where the ancient art of distillation has been made entirely new.
For anyone who has spent time in the liquor industry — and the Merinoff family has spent generations in it; early members of the family founded Canadian Club whisky, and her father Charles Merinoff runs Breakthru Beverage Group, one of the largest wine and spirits wholesalers in the country — the gravitational pull of tradition is relentless (Distiller Magazine, 2024). What makes Leslie’s story remarkable is that she felt that pull and walked deliberately in the opposite direction.
The Origin: Sparking Something New
Co-founded in 2016 by Leslie Merinoff Kwasnieski, her husband Brian Kwasnieski, and COO Paul Monahan, Matchbook Distilling took its name from a simple, beautiful idea. As Brian put it during the naming process: matchbooks spark people, they literally keep the light of a spark, and they kick off a chain of reactions (Distiller Magazine, 2024). The name stuck because it was honest.
Leslie came to the project after years working in liquor sales and marketing, homebrewing on the side, and growing increasingly frustrated by what she described as “too many replicas” on the shelves (VinePair, 2025). Her initial vision was to act as a contract distiller — a creative partner for individuals with a compelling idea and no license to execute it. She quickly realized, however, that aspiring distillers often didn’t know the depth of what they didn’t know. So she began distilling her own vision instead.
The facility she operates from is one of those spaces that earns its mythology honestly: 38,000 square feet of former maritime storage, now home to custom stills, dozens of fermenters, aging casks, and what amounts to the most adventurous flavor library on Long Island (The Purist, 2021). During the isolation of the pandemic, with no clients to answer to, Leslie distilled with complete freedom — releasing two original spirits per month, refining her process, and building a body of work that has no precedent in American craft distilling.
New York’s First Bespoke Custom Distillery
Matchbook holds the distinction of being New York’s first bespoke, custom distillery, a designation that carries both historical and legislative weight (Suffolk County IDA). Leslie was the driving force behind landmark New York State legislation that, for the first time since Prohibition, allows an individual or company without a distilling license to produce their own spirits — provided they partner with a licensed distillery like Matchbook. It was an act of civic advocacy as much as business strategy, opening the industry to voices that the existing framework had silenced.
The Suffolk County Industrial Development Agency played a meaningful role in Matchbook’s physical expansion, supporting the acquisition of four buildings in Greenport totaling 35,779 square feet — a move that anchored the distillery permanently in the North Fork community and created a supply chain that runs directly through Long Island’s farming corridors (Suffolk County IDA). Matchbook partners with local regenerative farms including Treiber Farms in Peconic, Rogers Farms, and RGNY, operating on the foundational belief that healthy, living soil produces the healthiest ingredients — and that those ingredients produce the most honest flavor.
As a 25-year fixture on Route 25A, I’ve watched countless local enterprises come and go based on their willingness — or refusal — to root themselves in this particular place. What Matchbook understood from day one is what every lasting North Shore institution eventually learns: the terroir is not background. It is the product.
The Spirits: A Grammar No One Had Written
Matchbook’s catalog reads less like a product list and more like an avant-garde literary journal — each release a limited edition, each bottle an argument against category thinking. Among their most celebrated expressions: Ritual Sister, a smoky spirit made from 1,600 pounds of pineapples roasted for three days in an underground earth oven before three weeks of fermentation. Flatlander, an Oaxacan-style corn whiskey made pechuga-style with aji amarillo peppers and local goose, finished in mezcal casks. Jenny Lind Aperitif, distilled from an heirloom muskmelon that had nearly vanished from agricultural memory. Eldest Daughter, a vermouth built from biodynamic Oregon pinot gris grapes and Long Island’s own elderflower bloom from Briermere Farms, layered with rare Timur peppercorns (Distiller Magazine, 2024).
Then there is Metamodernity Bourbon — perhaps their flagship statement of intent. The signature component is roasted oats, processed through a coffee roaster, comprising just five percent of the mash bill. The effect is a rich mouthfeel and a finishing note of sesame that sits just at the edge of recognition (Surface, 2025). It tastes familiar and impossible at once, which is exactly what Matchbook is after.
Leslie has described herself as a “perfumer alchemist, trying to practice a sort of transfiguration of the peak moments of the natural world into the bottle” (VinePair, 2025). That is not marketing language. It is a philosophy of practice that Heidegger might have recognized — the idea that genuine craft is not the imposition of form onto material, but a revelation of what the material already contains, a bringing-forth of what is already present in the grain, the fruit, the flower. Matchbook’s spirits do not taste like they were manufactured. They taste like they were discovered.
The Clientele: Bars That Understand What They’re Pouring
The industry has noticed. Eleven Madison Park, consistently ranked among the world’s finest restaurants, collaborates with Matchbook on custom spirit components. Thai Diner in Manhattan relies on Matchbook for a cardamom amaro and a Thai-spiced rum made with pandan leaves and Thai tea. Four Horsemen, Oxalis, Café Mado, and Place des Fêtes have all built proprietary Matchbook distillates into their programs (Surface, 2025; Punch, 2020). For Claire Sprouse at Hunky Dory in Brooklyn, Matchbook produced an Eau de Milk Punch from a goat farm’s discarded whey.
These are not accounts won with a sales sheet. They are relationships formed because Matchbook can do what no other distillery in the state can: take a chef’s ingredient list, a bartender’s concept, or a farmer’s surplus harvest and transform it into something that expands the conversation at the table. VinePair named Leslie Merinoff Kwasnieski its Distiller of the Year — a recognition that landed in a craft spirits world crowded with exceptional talent and still felt undeniable (VinePair, 2025).
The national press has followed accordingly: Vogue, The New York Times, Food & Wine, Punch, Imbibe, and Surface have each taken their turn documenting what is happening on Corwin Street. What none of them quite capture is the physical experience of the place — the smell of fermenting botanicals colliding with aged oak and something unidentifiable and floral, the production timeline Post-its covering one wall like evidence in a case that keeps expanding its own boundaries.
The Lin Beach House: Distillery as Ecosystem
Matchbook’s identity extends beyond the still. Leslie and Brian also operate the Lin Beach House, a boutique eight-bedroom hotel in Greenport that serves as both an extension of the distillery’s hospitality mission and a laboratory of a different kind (Imbibe, 2022). Every first Friday of the month, guest bartenders reimagine cocktails using Matchbook spirits alongside collaborative dishes from guest chefs. It is the kind of cross-disciplinary programming that refuses to see a meal, a drink, and a place to sleep as separate experiences. The distillery and the inn are one continuous argument that quality of life is not a category. It is a standard.
For anyone thinking about the North Shore real estate market — and my wife Paola and I have spent considerable time thinking about exactly this as we prepare to launch Maison Pawli in 2026 — what Matchbook and the Lin Beach House represent is something developers should study carefully. The properties that hold value across decades on the North Fork are not the ones with the most square footage. They are the ones with the most conviction. Identity-forward establishments create gravitational fields. They make the neighborhoods around them desirable in ways that no marketing campaign can replicate.
Visiting Matchbook: What to Expect
Matchbook’s Apothecary Tasting Room operates Saturday afternoons, with summer hours running from 3:00 PM to 8:00 PM at 230 Corwin Street, Greenport. Walk-ins are welcome during the tasting window; reservation-only experiences allow for deeper distillery tours and guided exploration of the Matchbook catalog. The rotating lineup changes with the seasons and with whatever is growing in excess on local farms — meaning no two visits will be entirely the same. That is not a marketing promise. It is the logical consequence of building a distillery around agriculture rather than around brand identity.
Staff approach every pour as an opportunity to teach without lecturing — the hallmark of confident expertise. Whether it is a flight of flagship sippers or one of the rarer limited releases, the pour comes with context: where the ingredient came from, how the fermentation decision shaped the flavor, why this particular oat was roasted in a coffee drum and not a conventional kiln. You leave knowing more than you arrived, which is not a given in the tasting room business.
The Deeper Argument
Every great craft institution is, at its core, a sustained argument against the premise that quality and scale are the same thing. Matchbook makes that argument with every limited release, every partnership with a North Fork farmer growing in living soil, every spirit that resists categorization because no category had been invented for it yet. The distillery’s 38,000-square-foot footprint makes it physically large; its annual output, measured in small-batch bottles rather than case volume, makes it philosophically small — and that tension is precisely where its authority lives.
Twenty-five years behind the counter at The Heritage Diner have taught me that the institutions people return to are not the ones that give them what they expect. They are the ones that give them something they didn’t know they needed until it arrived in front of them. Matchbook Distilling Co. does exactly that, one bottle at a time, in a former boat warehouse on the working edge of a village that has always known how to produce something worth the drive.
Matchbook Distilling Co. 230 Corwin Street, Greenport, NY 11944 Website: mdcdropshop.com Email: info@matchbookny.com Tasting Room: Saturdays | Regular Hours 1:00 PM – 6:00 PM | Summer Hours 3:00 PM – 8:00 PM Walk-ins welcome during tasting hours. Reservations required for distillery experiences. Instagram: @matchbookdistilling
