Cat’s Eye Distillery is a small family-owned micro-distillery whose mission is to create truly EPIC tasting products. John Baker, one of the owners, previously worked at Honey Creek Distillery in Van Buren County where he gained his initial experience distilling products. Since then he has done considerable research and met with owners of 22 different micro-distilleries in Colorado to see what works and what does not work. After much experimenting, they released their first whiskey product, “Essence of Iowa” followed by “Krupnik”, “Juniper Delight”, and “Some Like it Hot” which is a jalapeno-based spirit.

When deciding on a name for the distillery John’s wife Linda said to be true to his heart and name it after something that he truly liked to do. John is a member of the Quad Cities Astronomical Society and one of John’s favorite hobbies is astrophotography so he decided to name it after one of the Hubble space telescope’s greatest pictures of deep-sky object NGC-6543, better known as the Cat’s Eye Nebula. Linda liked the name but said that not too many people would understand the logo so they took a picture of their daughter’s cat, Maui, and “Wah-Lah!”, the perfect logo!