Big Spring Spirits Distillery Tour

Located in Bellefonte, just a few miles from State College, Big Spring Spirits opened in 2014 as a community focused craft distillery. Founded by Penn State alums, its products are made from grains sourced from local farmers, and of course depend on the town’s famous water.

That water flows from the big spring at the heart of Bellefonte. Only steps away from the distillery, it produces millions of gallons of water a day. Indeed, the town owes its very name to the spring, which was called “la belle fonte” by the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, during a brief exile to the United States in the 1790s.

In 2014, the Big Spring’s water was named “Best Tasting Water” in Pennsylvania by the Pennsylvania Rural Water Association. In fact, Bellefonte’s water rivals the legendary limestone water of Bourbon County, Kentucky. It’s so good that multinational companies bottle it and sell it under their own names.

Big Spring Spirits produces over a dozen products in the former Pennsylvania Match Factory complex. Once one of the leading producers of wooden matches, the factory closed in 1947 as changing consumer tastes made its products less popular than cigarette lighters and cardboard book matches.

The distillery’s products include vodka, several whiskeys, rum, and gin. In early 2020, in the beginning of the COVID pandemic, the distillery added hand sanitizer to its product line. Its most popular product is Talleyrand Cream Bourbon named for, who else, Charles Talleyrand.

Видео Big Spring Spirits Distillery Tour канала Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts