90 Proof New York - NYTimes.com Clockwise from top left: wheat and fermenting tanks at Breuckelen Distilling; Peter Simon, an owner of Industry City Distillery, sampling vodka; Breuckelen 77 Local Rye & Corn Whiskey; Kings County Distillery; and Van Brunt Stillhouse barrels. Steven DeAngelo was bored on Wall Street. Colin Spoelman never found a job he wanted to do. Brad Estabrooke was laid off from one he would never miss. Dave Kyrejko was a former art school student working with fish tanks and aquariums. They were short on direction, at the tail end of the last decade, when an idea called out to them. Artisanal, handmade, local, sustainable, retro, pricey - what could be more of the moment? We are talking, of course, about making booze. The four men are now part of a boomlet in small distilleries in New York City, the first of their kind since Prohibition. On a recent morning in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Mr. Spoelman, 34, walked through what may be the world's smallest corn field and offered a tour of the Kings County Distillery, which in 2010 became the city's first legal whiskey distillery in more than 80 years. The air smelled of sweet fermenting corn; the shelves inside held bottles of bourbon and moonshine. "Up until the Civil War, this used to be the distillery district, run by Irish immigrants," he said, beginning a story he has told often, mainly for the tour groups that come to see the stills and sample the wares in the company's "Boozeum." For Mr. Spoelman, the route to making craft booze began casually, with an unlawful still in his kitchen in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He was working for an architectural firm, where he still works half the week, and friends were always asking him for samples for parties. "My hesitancy in finding a career is that I didn't want to do anything," he said, walking through the 1899 building's vast open space, past five eight-gallon stills on cinder blocks and 2,000 pounds of organic corn from upstate New York. Mr. Spoelman has a gentle, sandy beard and a voice to match. Asked why he wanted to make whiskey, he cited neither a need for the product nor a passion for distilling. Commercial distillers, he said, were making perfectly good bourbon at much lower prices than he could sell it for. "I became curious about what makes good whiskey, and I wasn't satisfied with the answers I was getting," he said. He poured a small sample of clear moonshine - a raw-tasting liquid made from corn mash, without the caramelizing effects of bourbon's charred oak barrels. Beside him was a shelf of books featuring whiskey, including the history-dense "Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining: How to Make and Drink Whiskey," by Mr. Spoelman and his business partner, David Haskell, an editor at New York magazine. The company will sell about 3,000 cases this year, a tiny fraction of what big distillers sell. Mr. Spoelman said the year's harvest from the few rows of corn outside yielded only about one and a half gallons of whiskey, but that was not the point. "Making whiskey is an abstraction," he said. It allows you to project whatever you want onto it. I can be a historian, a traveler, a chef, a novelist. Because making whiskey in itself is repetitive and boring. Since Prohibition, state regulations had discouraged distillers from doing business in New York City. But in recent years, booze has taken on a new identity, not as a vice, but as a centuries-old farm product that creates jobs, revenue and tourism. The State Liquor Authority in 2007, under Gov. Eliot Spitzer, introduced a $128 farm license that allowed manufacturers who used at least 75 percent New York State grain to produce small quantities of alcohol and sell it directly to customers at distilleries. That enabled people like Mr. Spoelman to create brand identities without spending money on ads or marketing, attaching their names to narratives and local vibes. At a meeting for beer, wine and spirits manufacturers in October, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo pledged $1 million to promote the industry, with an additional $2 million in advertising if the manufacturers contributed matching funds. An industry was born. Since Kings County, 19 more liquor manufacturers have opened shop. Brad Estabrooke was one of the first, with a company he called Breuckelen Distilling, from a name he had seen on a map in the old Williamsburg Bank in Brooklyn. In 2008, on his 30th birthday, Mr. Estabrooke was laid off from his job as a bond trader at Deutsche Bank, a job he was happy to leave. "I was never a good bond trader," he said at his distillery in Sunset Park. My wife and I noticed other people in Brooklyn who started craft companies, like Mast Brothers Chocolate and Gorilla Coffee, who were making products from scratch. There was this thing happening, and we thought, that'd be great. He chose the name Breuckelen, he said, because he "thought the name would look really good on a label." But does the world need gin or whiskey from Brooklyn, produced under economies of scale that mean it costs more than long-established commercial brands?