A Story in Every Sip

Inside West Bottoms Whiskey, Kansas City history does not sit behind the bar.

It lives in the walls, the rails, the sherry, the myth and the glass.

By LaRee Durden · AVIA AREE

The tunnel meets you almost immediately

You walk into it.

That is the first thing the room teaches me.

Before Alex Lindsey begins talking. Before Cassandra leads me through another doorway. Before the whiskey is poured over ice and the scent lifts out of the glass.

Outside, the West Bottoms sits low and stubborn beneath Kansas City, reached by a concrete bridge and streets that appear part stone, part dust.

Traffic moves by suggestion more than command.

The buildings do not offer themselves easily. Former factories and industrial shells stand close to the road, still alive with small businesses, rooms, bars, studios and ideas that have learned how to inhabit old weight.

Inside, the air changes.

A parlor opens where a train once moved. A wet bar sits to the right. A slim wooden staircase rises along the wall.

Barrel tables hold menus and glasses. A small vase of flowers softens the room without taming it.

The upstairs parlor introduces the brand through service, wood and conversation.

The ceiling curves overhead in dark metal. The wall beside me is black, uneven and glossy in the places where the light catches it.

A caged bulb glows close to the surface, revealing every ridge, every block line, every scar.

This is not decorative distress. It is not a finish someone ordered because old things photograph well.

Alex later explains that the worn walls are not simply erosion. They are marked by the building’s first life—by heat, steam, industry and the force of trains moving through.

In the back of the building, the old tracks still show themselves.

You are not drinking near history. You are drinking inside its path.

What the room knows before the question

Cassandra greets me first.

There is something calm and precise in the way she moves through the building, as if she understands that the space cannot be explained from one angle.

It has to be entered, then followed. The public room gives one answer. The office gives another. The distillery behind it gives another still.

Near the bar, a mixologist pours West Bottoms Whiskey slowly over a large cube of ice.

The whiskey lands with that small, serious sound of liquid meeting cold glass. Before anyone names a tasting note, the smell reaches me—grain, oak, warmth, something rounded at the edge.

I came for an interview. The building begins before I do.

“It all really started years ago when I was distilling in my garage,” Alex says.

He was self-taught. The word matters. It places the beginning outside institution, outside lineage, outside the tidy version of craft that likes to pretend its origin was already complete.

“I really loved the process of it,” he says. “I loved how you can take grain and mash it, ferment it—basically create beer—but then you can distill that and pull flavors from different grains.”

Behind the parlor, copper, barrels and tanks reveal the working side of the distillery.

As he speaks, the working room behind Cassandra’s office comes back to me: the copper still catching light, the hoses, the barrels, the tanks, the concrete floor, the marks of use.

The room does not hide labor. It leaves it where you can see it.

Alex is describing transformation: grain into mash, mash into fermentation, fermentation into distillation, distillation into flavor.

Flavor becomes something that can wait in wood and keep changing after the person who made it has walked away.

“At the time, I was starting to get into whiskey a little bit more,” he says. “Not just because I enjoyed drinking it, but because there’s a good story behind it.”

Murdock and the invention of an ancestor

On the barrels and in the branding, a gentleman watches. Top hat. Monocle. Old-world composure. A face that seems to have arrived from another century, though not from a family tree.

His name is Murdock.

“Murdock is our fictional forefather,” Alex says.

Fictional forefather. It sounds like a contradiction until you look around.

West Bottoms Whiskey is surrounded by real history, but the company itself is young. Murdock gives the whiskey a face. The West Bottoms gives it a place.

“I thought, if I could put a good product behind a good story, that would be really, really unique,” Alex says.

Behind. Not on top of. Not over. Not as costume.

The building from Craigslist

“So it was, like, 2019—I found this space on Craigslist,” Alex says.

There it is: the tunnel, the old tracks, the worn walls, the parlor, the heavy door, the whiskey, the fictional forefather.

Craigslist.

“We always joke that Craigslist is used for non-nefarious things,” he says.

The line loosens the room. It lets the origin stay human. The building was not discovered through a cinematic act of fate. But once they saw it, the ordinary part ended.

“We found it on there and learned a lot of the history of this space,” Alex says. “It just fit so well.”

Stone under brick: the building’s foundation shows the layers beneath the parlor.

The fit is not abstract. It is underfoot. It is overhead. It is in the metal ceiling and the rail line still visible at the back of the building.

It is in the black wall that seems less painted than remembered. It is in the tunnel itself, where a whiskey cocktail can be held inside a former route of movement.

“What’s a better place to start making whiskey, but also have a whiskey cocktail in a pre-Prohibition-era train tunnel?” Alex asks. “It’s about as authentic as you can get.”

Kansas City whiskey and the sherry that comes through

“We started with our Kansas City whiskey, which is a pre-Prohibition-style blend: bourbon, rye and sherry,” Alex says.

“Sherry is the key ingredient,” he says. “Oloroso sherry is the key ingredient to making Kansas City whiskey.”

Alex places West Bottoms Whiskey beside J. Rieger & Co. in a larger effort to have Kansas City whiskey understood as a recognizable style of its own—one carried by the pre-Prohibition practice of bringing sherry directly into an American whiskey blend. The word I kept circling in my notes was reduction. The older word is rectification.

J. Rieger & Co. helped revive that history in modern Kansas City; Alex is working to keep it moving rather than letting the style belong to only one bottle or one distillery. The practice is not the same as placing whiskey in a sherry barrel and waiting for the wood to speak. It is more direct, stranger, more openly blended: sherry incorporated into whiskey itself.

The sherry does not sit politely at the edge of the whiskey. It enters.

Bourbon gives one structure. Rye gives another. Oloroso brings an older accent—dark fruit, dry depth, a softness that does not become simple sweetness.

It rounds, but it does not erase.

Cassandra, the room and a whiskey called Wait for Me

Cassandra gives the interview another rhythm. She does not interrupt Alex’s story; she steadies it.

Before West Bottoms Whiskey became a room people could enter, Alex worked in software consulting. Cassandra came from education.

“I started out with early childhood education, and then I went up to elementary,” Cassandra says. “Then I received my master’s in teaching English as a second language and started working with higher education.”

By the time they met, the plan and the space were already taking shape.

“He had already kind of started his business plan and secured this space at the time that we met,” she says.

Alex credits her with the half of the company guests feel before they ever study a bottle: the hospitality, the furnishings, the objects and the atmosphere. He describes his side as manufacturing and whiskey development; hers reaches through the public rooms and into the business discipline behind them—the numbers, decisions and daily structure that keep the experience standing.

That distinction is useful, but the work is not separate. The whiskey gives the room its purpose. Cassandra gives it a way to be encountered.

Her influence also reaches into the whiskey itself.

Among West Bottoms Whiskey Co.’s small-batch releases is Wait for Me, a rye whiskey finished in a Tannat wine cask. Bottled at 93 proof in a 375-milliliter bottle, it carries an illustrated woman with a fan on its label—a detail that makes the bottle feel as carefully considered as the whiskey inside it.

The fan is more than decoration. The name draws on the romanticized, codified “language of the fan” associated with the 19th century: in published lists of fan gestures, opening a fan wide signaled, “Wait for me.”

Cassandra recalled that an actual folding fan came with every bottle, extending the signal beyond the label and giving the whiskey’s story a physical form.

The additional time in the Tannat cask does not replace the rye’s character. It adds another layer, drawing darker fruit and tannic notes into the whiskey’s existing spice.

Wait for Me sits between the two sides Alex describes: made through production, then carried into the world through story, character and invitation.

A few bottles to know

• Kansas City Whiskey — A pre-Prohibition-style blend of bourbon and rye with Oloroso sherry. Look for baking spice on the nose; spice, caramel and leather through the palate; and stone fruit at the finish.

• American Blended Malt Whiskey — A four-year single malt blended with peated American single malt. Summer grass and hay meet abundant honey and barrel oils, followed by a light thread of peat smoke.

• Convergence Whiskey — Rye and malt whiskeys finished in wine casks. Dark fruit leads into balanced spice and sweet malt, with a rich, dark-fruit finish.

• Maple Cask Finished Rye Whiskey — A warm maple-finished rye built around camp-spice character, with a piece of Barrel No. 1 attached to every bottle.

• Wait for Me — A rye whiskey finished in a Tannat wine cask. Darker fruit and tannic notes settle into the rye’s existing spice.

• The Best Old Fashioned in KC — A ready-to-pour cocktail made with Kansas City Whiskey, Grade A maple syrup, Angostura bitters and chocolate bitters—rich, balanced and complete in the glass.

Ways to enjoy them

• Taste it neat first — A room-temperature pour gives the grain, cask finish and texture space to introduce themselves before water or ice changes the glass.

• Pour it over one large cube — A slow melt opens the whiskey gradually without burying its structure.

• Order a tasting flight — The cocktail parlor offers flights and individual pours, making it easier to compare the sherry, malt, rye, maple and wine-cask finishes side by side.

• Build an Old Fashioned — Kansas City Whiskey’s spice, caramel, leather and stone-fruit finish make it a natural base for the classic.

• Keep the ready-to-pour version simple — Serve The Best Old Fashioned in KC over one rock and finish it with an orange slice or a good cherry.

• Make the room part of the pour — Try a cocktail in the parlor, reserve seating in the train-tunnel space or pair the tasting with a distillery tour.

West Bottoms Whiskey Co.’s cocktail parlor is at 1321 W. 13th Street, Unit HT, inside Kansas City’s historic West Bottoms.

Jesse James enters the room sideways

Missouri never lets Jesse James enter cleanly.

He arrives as history, myth, crime, rebellion, tourism, violence, family name, preservation effort and local appetite all at once.

West Bottoms Whiskey’s James Gang Rye steps into that difficult space. The whiskey was made in collaboration with the Friends of the James Farm, connected to the James Farm in Kearney, Missouri.

A portion of proceeds from each bottle supports the Friends of the James Farm and its preservation mission.

That matters. It keeps the bottle from becoming only outlaw decoration.

Barrels, copper and Missouri Spirits Expedition markings connect the distillery to regional craft and preservation stories.

The moment the business chose him back

A founder story is usually cleaned up after it survives.

Someone has an idea. Someone believes in the idea. Someone leaves a stable job. The business opens.

Alex’s story does not move that neatly.

He stayed in software consulting while West Bottoms Whiskey launched. He wanted to know whether the company had legs.

“Then, when we launched in 2021, I did both jobs for a while,” he says. “One reason was to see if this business had any legs—if it could take off.”

The launch came during COVID. Still, the whiskey began moving.

“We started distributing our Kansas City whiskey into Kansas and Missouri, and we really started to feel it take off,” he says.

But feeling a business grow is not the same as trusting it enough to let go of the other life.

That decision arrived as a truck.

Six months in, the operation was still working inside a small space. Alex had been waiting all day for a massive bottle shipment. He also had consulting calls.

By 3:30, he had one more call left. The client was already unhappy. Then the truck pulled up.

“This truck pulls up, and then I get out and see that he’s struggling with it,” Alex says. “So I went inside, got on the phone and was like, ‘I can’t make this call.’”

“I was like, ‘I have to choose this,’” Alex says.

“You can’t half-ass two things. I needed to whole-ass this business.”

The tattoo that made Murdock a witness

Before the bottle truck, there was the permit.

“Once we got our distiller’s permit—that allows us to federally start making whiskey—that was kind of an ‘oh, shit’ moment for me,” Alex says.

“This was a shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment.”

So he put Murdock on his arm. The fictional forefather moved from label to skin.

“That was transition phase number one,” Alex says. “It was: All right, you’re really committing to this. This is on your body. You have to make this happen.”

Murdock becomes witness. Not because he is real. Because Alex made him hard to escape.

The business beneath the atmosphere

A distillery photographs beautifully.

Copper knows what to do with light. Barrels know what to do with shadow. A metal ceiling and black wall can make almost anything look cinematic.

But West Bottoms Whiskey is not only an atmosphere. It is a business with permits, bottles, freight, payroll, distribution, accounting, inventory, weather, evaporation, experiments and decisions that cannot all be made from romance.

“Transitioning to just running the business was hard,” Alex says.

The whiskey can be poetic. The business cannot survive on poetry alone.

The glass as a room

By the time I return to the parlor in my mind, the glass on the bar has changed.

It is no longer only whiskey over ice.

It is the tunnel. The rails. The wall. The steam. The metal ceiling. The stone foundation. The Craigslist listing. The fictional forefather.

Cassandra opening the rooms. Alex choosing the bottle truck. The sherry moving through the blend. The maple waiting in the barrel. Jesse James entering as Missouri myth and preservation question.

The glass looks still. That is the trick. Everything in it has moved.

Walking back out

When I leave, I pass back through the rooms in reverse.

From the working distillery, through Cassandra’s office, into the second space, back toward the parlor.

The slim stairs are still there. The barrel tables are still there. The small flowers still look almost too delicate for the room and therefore exactly right.

Outside, the West Bottoms has not softened.

The streets still look part stone, part dust. The old factories still stand with their windows and weight and withheld explanations. Traffic still moves as if it has negotiated its own rules.

I think about what Alex said: a good product behind a good story.

Maybe that is why the building works.

The story is not placed on top of the whiskey. The whiskey is placed inside the story, then asked to stand.

In the West Bottoms, history does not need to be clean to be useful. It does not need to be finished to be worth entering.

It can be worn, steamed, burned, fictionalized, blended, rectified, preserved, questioned and poured.

Behind the massive door, inside the old tunnel, West Bottoms Whiskey is not trying to make the past behave. It is letting the past keep its texture.

Then it hands you a glass.

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