Definition
A distillery is a place or building where alcoholic liquors are distilled or manufactured. In legal usage, the term refers primarily to the physical premises — the facility itself — where the distillation process occurs. This is the consistent meaning across both historical legal dictionaries and modern regulatory frameworks.
The term carries significant legal weight in excise, licensing, and tax law, where "distillery" designates a regulated class of premises subject to federal and state oversight, record-keeping requirements, and tax obligations tied to production.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A place where distillation takes place, especially of alcoholic spirits; also, a company that distills alcohol, or the process of distilling alcohol itself.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The building and works where distilling, especially of alcoholic liquors, is carried on; also, the act of distilling spirits.
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow but worth noting. In ordinary usage, "distillery" can refer to a company or business entity (as in, "a Kentucky distillery released a new bourbon"). In law, the term is typically anchored to the premises, not the corporate person. Regulatory statutes impose duties, inspection rights, and penalties on distilleries as physical locations, which means corporate structure does not substitute for or override the legal identity of the place itself.
Why It Matters in Research
The legal significance of "distillery" is almost entirely a function of its relationship to excise and revenue law. Researchers should be alert to several navigational points:
First, the term's legal meaning was shaped intensively by federal revenue legislation of the Civil War era. The Act of July 13, 1866 (referenced in Bouvier's) was part of a major statutory framework imposing federal excise taxes on distilled spirits and subjecting distilleries to strict federal supervision. Research into 19th-century distillery cases will frequently intersect with revenue collection disputes, federal inspector authority, and tax evasion prosecutions. The cases Bouvier cites — 45 N.Y. 499 and 54 N.Y. 35 — reflect state-level litigation that arose alongside this federal framework.
Second, Black's signals that "strict meaning" is a phrase of art here. The parenthetical noting the strict meaning implies that contemporaneous legal disputes turned on whether a given facility qualified as a distillery for statutory purposes — whether partial operations, ancillary premises, or storage facilities could be swept within the definition. Researchers should not assume the statutory definition of "distillery" in any given regulatory scheme maps cleanly onto the common or historical legal meaning.
Third, the Prohibition era and post-Repeal regulatory reconstruction significantly reshaped how distillery is defined in federal law. The modern Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) framework defines and licenses distilled spirits plants (DSPs), a regulatory category that has largely supplanted "distillery" as a term of art in federal licensing, though "distillery" remains in widespread use in state law.
Fourth, when researching historical sources, be alert to the fact that "distillery" often appears in tandem with "rectifier" and "rectifying establishment" — a different category of facility that processed or blended distilled spirits without necessarily distilling them from raw materials. Conflation of these two categories was a recurring issue in revenue enforcement.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's and Bouvier's converge on the same core definition: a place or building where alcoholic liquors are distilled or manufactured. The agreement is unsurprising — this is not a contested concept but a factual classification that matters primarily when a statute turns on it.
Black's introduction of the "strict meaning" qualifier is the more analytically useful contribution. It acknowledges that the word was subject to interpretive pressure and that courts sometimes confronted broader or narrower applications depending on statutory context. Bouvier's entry is notable for its direct citation to federal statute and to New York appellate authority, making it a useful pointer into the case law of the post-Civil War revenue era.
Neither source addresses the post-Prohibition regulatory transformation, which is expected given their publication dates but is the most significant gap for modern researchers. The 20th-century shift to "distilled spirits plant" as the governing federal regulatory category is entirely absent from both dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
Federal law governs the licensing and taxation of distilleries through the Internal Revenue Code and TTB regulations, but state law independently regulates distilleries through licensing, zoning, and alcohol control statutes. Definitions vary: some states define distillery by production capacity, others by product type or proof. Craft distillery exemptions and licensing tiers introduced in many states since the 2000s have added further variation.