Nathan Perry recently became a master distiller at J. Rieger & Co., but like many of the spirits he creates, there’s more to the story than the finished product.
He came from the small Missouri town of Cabool (population: 2,000) and moved to the area in 2001 as a medical student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. After earning a biology degree in 2006, he took a job teaching science at Oak Grove High School.
“I was fresh out of school looking for a job, and I thought that I could teach,” Perry said. “I had a lot of family and friends who were teachers, and I had some wonderful students. But I didn’t love all the aspects of the job, so after two years, I quit.”
Perry knew someone who worked at Kansas City-based Boulevard Brewing Co. and applied for a job. After starting in quality assurance, he worked his way up to become Boulevard’s microbiologist. Perry earned a master’s degree in bioinformatics from UMKC in 2015, while he was working at Boulevard.
“I was thinking about going into clinical research and doing something like that,” Perry said. “In the fall of 2014, I heard Andy Rieger and Ryan Maybee were relaunching J. Rieger and Co. and needed a distiller. I thought that I should talk to these guys because it looked like they were going to start something that would be really cool.”
While working on the recipe for Kansas City Whiskey, Maybee and Rieger enlisted the help of Dave Pickerell, who spent 15 years as master distiller for Maker’s Mark and is known as a founding father of craft distilling. Pickerell came to Kansas City in October 2014 to help interview people for the head distiller job.
Rieger said they whittled about 100 résumés down to about 20 in-person interviews before then narrowing it to five applicants. With no professional distilling experience, Perry ranked fifth. All five finalists came in to talk with Pickerell.
“It came down to Nathan and one other guy, who didn’t have a science background,” Rieger said. “Dave Pickerell liked that Nathan understood all the principles but had no bad habits he would have to correct. The other applicants had business experience we really didn’t need, and we didn’t have anyone with a science background, so we ended up hiring Nathan.”
Perry’s lack of distilling experience also appealed to Tom Nichol, a former master distiller for Tanqueray who has a reputation as one of the world’s preeminent gin makers. Nichol had a gin recipe he always wanted to make and was looking for a craft distillery to work with. He specifically wanted a distiller who didn’t think he or she knew everything about making gin and would be completely open to learning the entire process from a master craftsman. Perry fit the bill perfectly.
“Nate was mentored by Dave Pickerell and Tom Nichol,” Rieger said. “There’s nobody else in the world who can say they learned to make whiskey from arguably one of the best to ever do it and learned to make gin from arguably one of the best to ever do it. The guy who can say that is Nate Perry, and he lives in Kansas City.”
Perry said he’ll never forget working on Rieger’s Midwestern Dry gin with Nichol in August 2015. Nichol was at the distillery to make the first batch, which wasn’t quite where it needed to be. Perry said if he had been there himself, he would have had no idea what to do about it. Nichol showed him how to made a few adjustments, but it still wasn’t right. Nichol helped tweak it again, and this time the recipe was perfect.
“Afterward we were at Andy Rieger’s house drinking Negronis, and Nichol said he was really glad it worked out because he was having a hard time sleeping the night before, wanting to make sure we weren’t disappointed,” Perry said. “I said, ‘Wait, you were having a hard time sleeping?’ I couldn’t sleep at all because I was getting ready to distill gin with the master, arguably one of the greatest gin distillers alive, and it felt totally crazy to me. But he’s just a very humble person with an incredible skill set and knowledge base who was willing to talk to me about it. He loves when I point something out and ask a question about it.”
Nichol was in Kansas City in September, working with Rieger’s distilling team on tasting the various botanical components of gin and learning how they interact with one another. Nichol stopped in the middle of the lesson and said he had an announcement: He was bestowing the title of master distiller on Perry. He also brought Perry to London in October to be installed into the Gin Guild.
“It was a huge surprise, and there were a lot of emotions there,” Perry said. “I was thinking about what he just said and what that meant. It meant a lot to me. Then we went to the Gin Guild, and Nichol introduced me to Desmond Payne (Beefeater’s master distiller and a Gin Guild Lifetime Achievement Award winner), which was really surreal. I was now part of this group.”
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