Andy Rieger & Ryan Maybee

Andy Rieger and Ryan Maybee are the partners who in 2014 revived J. Rieger & Co. — bringing back a Kansas City whiskey house founded in 1887 and shuttered by Prohibition, and opening the city’s first distillery since Prohibition.

Biography

J. Rieger & Co. was founded by Jacob Rieger in 1887 in Kansas City’s West Bottoms. Under his son Alexander Rieger, who took over around 1900, it grew into the largest mail-order whiskey house in the country — reaching hundreds of thousands of customers — before Prohibition ended its operations in 1919.¹²

The revival began with Ryan Maybee, a Kansas City hospitality entrepreneur behind the award-winning basement bar Manifesto and co-owner of The Rieger restaurant, both housed in the historic Rieger Hotel building. Fascinated by the building’s connection to the pre-Prohibition distillery, Maybee set out to restore its legacy.² He partnered with Andy Rieger — Jacob Rieger’s great-great-great-grandson, who left a career in private equity and investment banking and returned to Kansas City to resurrect the family business.¹³

The pair formally relaunched J. Rieger & Co. in October 2014, with early production support from master distiller Dave Pickerell; former Tanqueray master distiller Tom Nichol joined in 2015 to develop the company’s Midwestern Dry Gin.² In 2019 the company opened a large new distillery and visitor experience in the restored 1901 Heim Brewery bottling house in the East Bottoms — an $11.3 million conversion of a 60,000-square-foot building listed on the National Register of Historic Places, acquired in 2018.⁴⁵ It opened to the public in July 2019, with daily tours beginning that August 1.⁴

Legacy

Rieger and Maybee turned a forgotten piece of Kansas City history into a thriving modern distillery, anchoring the city’s craft-spirits revival and adaptively reusing two landmark buildings in the process. Andy Rieger, who serves as the company’s president, has since been a recurring subject of Kansas City business-school leadership programming.⁶

See also

• j-rieger-and-co

Sources

Footnotes

1. “J. Rieger & Co.,” Wikipedia — founded 1887 by Jacob Rieger in Kansas City; the largest mail-order whiskey house in the country before Prohibition; shut down December 1919; relaunched 2014 by Andy Rieger (great-great-great-grandson of Jacob) and Ryan Maybee as Kansas City’s first distillery since Prohibition. ↩ ↩²

2. “Our History,” J. Rieger & Co. official site — Jacob Rieger, an Austro-Hungarian immigrant, established the distillery in the West Bottoms in 1887; son Alexander took over in 1900 and built the largest mail-order whiskey house in the United States, over 100 products, slogan “O! So Good!”; shut down at Prohibition in 1919; Andy Rieger and Ryan Maybee purchased the original trademark and reopened in October 2014; Dave Pickerell guided the initial launch and Master Distiller Tom Nichol partnered with the company in July 2015 to develop gin and train the production team; 2019 move to a landmark 1901 building in the Electric Park neighborhood. [The page’s URL was corrected 2026-09-08: the previously cited jriegerco.com/history returns HTTP 404; the live path is /about/history.] ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. “Life & Work with Andy Rieger of Kansas City,” VoyageKC — dual Math and Finance major at SMU, finished a semester early; “over four years in the private equity and investment banking world”; living in Dallas during the 2013-2014 startup phase before returning home to restart the family distillery. ↩

4. “J. Rieger Rolls Out Top-Shelf Destination Distillery in East Bottoms,” Flatland KC — the $11.3 million conversion of a 60,000-square-foot former brewery building completed in 1901 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places; daily tours scheduled to begin August 1, 2019.` — it was carried on a Feast Magazine citation whose URL now returns HTTP 429 with no Internet Archive capture. Flatland and The Whiskey Wash (published July 24, 2019 — thewhiskeywash.com) together establish a July 2019 opening, not the exact day.] ↩ ↩²

5. “J. Rieger & Company (2018); Heim Brewing Company Bottling Plant (1901),” Clio — identifies the distillery’s building as the former bottling plant of the historic Heim brewery complex in the East Bottoms, acquired by the modern J. Rieger & Co. in 2018. ↩

6. “Journey to Leadership with Andy Rieger, President of Jacob Rieger Distillery Company,” UMKC Henry W. Bloch School of Management, July 2020 ↩