Meet the Guys Behind Pennsylvania’s Best Rye Whiskey
History and education infuses everything Dad’s Hat does since opening almost 15 years ago.
Herman Mihalich and John Cooper at their Dad’s Hat distillery / Photography by Todd Trice
Sometimes when Herman Mihalich is giving tours of Bristol distillery Dad’s Hat, he’ll sprinkle some historic knowledge onto the group. He might say, “Hey, did you know there were something like 200 whiskey distilleries in Pennsylvania before Prohibition?” Or maybe, “Pennsylvania really is the birthplace of American whiskey.”
“They’re like, ‘Oh, we had no idea,’” says Mihalich. “‘We thought whiskey started in Kentucky.’”
That education infuses everything Mihalich has done at Dad’s Hat since opening almost 15 years ago, resulting in the state’s finest rye whiskey — grassy, peppery stuff that’s perfect on its own and equally great in an old-fashioned or Sazerac.
Mihalich’s whole life seemed to point him to Dad’s Hat. As a kid, he lived above his family’s namesake bar in Monessen, south of Pittsburgh, where his grandfather would often ask a young Herman to pour him a couple fingers of rye. (“I still have a memory of what that smells like,” he recalls half a century later.) A mile away was the former site of Gibson Distillery, once the largest rye whiskey distiller in the world. In 2006, Mihalich, then a chemical engineer, read a New York Times article about the revival of rye, and his wife bought him 10 of the whiskeys mentioned in the story for Christmas that same year. It got Mihalich thinking: Wouldn’t it be cool to help bring rye back from obscurity?
Dad’s Hat Pennsylvania rye whiskey
Many things led to the collapse of rye in the mid-20th century — the rise of bourbon and single-malt scotches; the decimation of distilleries in the Northeast, the spirit’s ancestral home. But Mihalich, along with former Penn fraternity brother John Cooper, was determined to bring it back.
The two soon quit their jobs, drove 700 miles to take classes at Michigan State’s artisan distilling program, and built a business model. They tested old Pennsylvania rye recipes and learned to get choosy about yeast strains. When Kentucky and Indiana distillers told them it would be impossible to find good American rye grain to use, the unfazed duo headed back to Pennsylvania and teamed up with Bucks County farmers to grow it.
“I enjoy the fact that we had a part to play in bringing rye whiskey back to its historical home,” Mihalich says. Make that all of us.
Published as “Hat’s Off” in the April 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
