Inside the decades-old Philly booze factory that churns out 7,000 cases of liquor a day

Booze could be flowing below Lehigh Avenue right now, and you’d never know it. Each month, railcars filled with alcohol pull into a yard off Tulip Street. The liquid is then pumped underneath the five-lane street into one of several 30,000-gallon storage tanks at the corner of Lehigh and Trenton. There, it waits to be used in one of more than a hundred recipes, be it straight vodka, sloe gin, or ready-made Irish coffee.

The tanks belong to Charles Jacquin et Cie Inc., better known as Jacquin’s. From the street, Jacquin’s four-building complex looks like a dusty relic of Philly’s industrial past — and not the beautiful red-brick kind destined to become another Kensington hotspot. These buildings are boxy, beige, and weathered. Workers have been blending and bottling liquor here since 1941, but the company is even older — founded in 1884, Jacquin’s bills itself as America’s oldest producer of cordials, a broad range of sweetened, flavored liqueurs.

Kensington is swimming with booze these days, thanks to the cool bars and distilleries that have colonized the neighborhood. But the collective tonnage of spirits flowing through them each week doesn’t compare to what Jacquin’s whips up and ships out on a given day. From May to September — its peak production season — the company churns out upward of 7,000 cases of booze a day, much of it Pennsylvania Dutch Egg Nog and other variants of its line of wildly popular cream liqueurs.

Those products are far from the only stuff Jacquin’s makes. Its sprawling portfolio includes 145 products in all, from its eponymous line of bargain-priced vodka, rum, and gin to its colorful cordials, familiar from the back bars of Philadelphia dives. It makes tried-and-true mainstays of your grandparents’ liquor cabinets (think ginger brandy and orange- and cherry-laced Rock & Rye) as well as shiny newcomers like Union Forge vodka and Roaster’s Daughter, a ready-made espresso martini whose branding nods to Philadelphia’s coffeehouse history. The company also imports brands like Savory & James sherry and Royale Montaine orange liqueur.

Despite producing more booze than any other site in the city (for now), the Jacquin’s factory is something of a mystery to anyone who didn’t grow up nearby. You could walk or drive past and barely notice it’s there. Its social media presence is dwarfed by flashier Kensington counterparts like Stateside Vodka and Philadelphia Distilling. Jacquin’s didn’t even have a website until 2020.

“A lot of people ... just look at this place and have no idea what it is or who we are,” says plant manager Jim Logan, a 25-year veteran of the company who grew up blocks away. “I always say [we should try] the Willy Wonka golden ticket thing.”

In fact, Jacquin’s is in the early stages of planning a tasting room that’ll welcome locals inside for drinks and tours. It’s among a number of efforts to modernize this 140-year-old spirits maker while maintaining its legacy. Those changes are happening as the neighborhood around the factory transforms, too, creating a convergence of old-school Kensington and new. Ahead of its public debut, Jacquin’s hosted The Inquirer for a tour of its plant and a dive into its little-known past.

Walking around Jacquin’s feels a bit like touring a working museum. There are antique artifacts — an explosion-proof 1930s rotary phone, a vintage Toledo scale that maxes out at 1,200 pounds, a cavernous freight elevator with its original wooden gates — side by side with new technology. The company is slowly updating equipment, prioritizing whatever’s most expensive to repair and maintain. Even so, some relics will stay in place.

“I don’t want to lose that charm‚” says Bob Lomber, Jacquin’s recently appointed VP of operations, who’s leading the charge to update the facility. Fresh paint, epoxy floors, and new windows — selected to match the building’s history — are slated to go in now that eggnog production is over for the year.

Spirits of all kinds course through pipes and hoses inside the Trenton Street factory, flowing from a couple dozen steel vats on the top of the four-story building. Like many liquor companies, Jacquin’s doesn’t distill its own base alcohol; instead, it purchases it in bulk from large-scale wholesalers. (A giant gin still that’s been dormant for two decades is earmarked for a revival in the coming years.)

Some spirits go faster than others. A tank of tequila might last years, while neutral grain spirit — the low-flavor, high-proof alcohol used as a base for various liqueurs and ready-to-drink cocktails — gets deployed frequently enough to require monthly deliveries. Every ounce of alcohol here is documented throughout the blending process by Jacquin’s government accounting office, which tracks the alcohol’s weight and proof for tax purposes. (The federal government once had its own officer stationed at the factory, and the tanks were kept under their lock and key until the late ’70s.)

All the booze is ultimately destined for the second-floor rectifying area — the mixing bowl of the plant, where its many recipes come together inside 2,000-gallon tanks. Hose hookups are labeled with the liquor that most often runs through them: West Indies rum, blackberry wine, citrus brandy, grain spirit. The alcohol gets blended together with water, sugar syrup, and other ingredients — be they fruit-flavored extracts, Pennsylvania cream, or local coffee — to make a final product.

Finished product gets filtered, then funneled into gleaming glass bottles that clink down the bottling line, to be packed into cardboard cases. This is the noisiest part of the factory. To the untrained ear, it sounds like an earthquake rippling through a liquor store. Employees characterize it differently.

“We call that the sound of music,” Logan says. “When the bottles are flying, that means everything’s running. That’s the music playing.”

Several workers staff the line, dumping cases of empty bottles on the conveyor, affixing labels, ensuring every bottle is properly filled, sealed, and safely squared away in its cardboard case. Each line can fill about 60 bottles a minute, enough for 2,000 12-pack cases per eight-hour shift, and Jacquin’s union workforce generally runs two lines a day. The cases ride a winding path of rollers that leads over a skywalk to the warehouse next door, where they’re palletized and stowed for shipping. Jacquin’s distributes nationwide and to Canada, but Pennsylvania is its biggest customer by far, accounting for 40% of its business.

Last year, Jacquin’s blended and bottled roughly 500,000 cases of booze, according to Lomber. That’s about a third of what the company produced around its peak: In 1971, then-owner Maurice Cooper told the Philadelphia Bulletin that the Trenton Avenue plant cranked out 1.5 million cases of liquor per year. At the time, Jacquin’s employed 300 people, had a second production facility in Florida, and reported roughly $30 million in sales.

That was the high-water mark of a company with a long and complicated past. Jacquin‘s was started in 1884 by Charles Jacquin, a New York restaurateur and Frenchman said to be a member of a prominent cordial-making family. He formed the company in New York City with the backing of Sigmund Hochstadter, a wealthy liquor purveyor. The company introduced a range of European-style liqueurs — think creme de menthe, anisette, caraway-flavored kummel, and maraschino — to the U.S.

Jacquin’s survived Prohibition by selling nonalcoholic cordials, vermouth, and cocktails, as well as wine-based culinary sauces and vaguely healthy tonics (imagine a vial of “Beef, Wine, and Iron”). When Hochstadter died in 1924, he willed a majority stake in the business to Emanuel Osterman, another New Yorker who had joined the company as a teen during its early years. Osterman moved the business to Philadelphia in 1933, the same year Prohibition ended. A year later, he took on a new partner, Maurice Cooper, who soon became Jacquin’s president.

Cooper, formerly an imported foods merchant and executive, presided over Jacquin’s expansion from its original Philadelphia headquarters at 16th and Callowhill to the Trenton Avenue factory in 1941. The Jacquin’s portfolio expanded to include gin, vodka, and whiskey, as well as imported European wines. Cooper took the company public in 1961 and spearheaded its expansion to Florida in 1969. Four of Cooper’s six children worked at the company during his tenure there, taking it over after Maurice Cooper’s death in 1973.

The 1970s also gave rise to one of Jacquin’s most famous products: Chambord, a black raspberry liqueur sold in a glass orb ringed with gold embellishments and capped with a crown. Chambord’s distinctive packaging was actually a spin-off of Jacquin’s Forbidden Fruit, a pomelo-flavored brandy liqueur developed and distilled in France. Chambord was advertised as the drink of French royalty, made with black raspberries from Burgundy. The brand was developed by Norton Cooper, one of Maurice’s sons, who took over as the company’s chief executive in 1979. It was an enduring success: Chambord was bought by Brown-Forman — the maker of Jack Daniel’s and Woodford Reserve, among other brands — for $255 million in 2006.

Norton Cooper steered Jacquin’s through a tumultuous era. The company ran afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the late ’70s amid accusations of bribing members of the state’s liquor control board (something various liquor companies were found guilty of at the time), as well as using company funds for personal expenses. The legal troubles prompted the Cooper family to buy out shareholders and take the company private again in 1981. The following year, Norton Cooper nearly closed the Kensington factory to relocate Jacquin’s headquarters to Florida during fractious negotiations with the company’s unionized workers, who went on a 16-week strike. The fate of the plant and its workers was secured only after the company and the 129-employee union settled on a new contract, with intervention from state and local government.

Chambord’s multimillion-dollar sale aside, Jacquin’s has kept a low profile for the past few decades. It subsisted on staples like blackberry brandy and Pennsylvania Dutch eggnog even as its new craft-distiller neighbors were slinging barrel-aged gin, bourbon made with heirloom grains, and canned vodka-sodas. In the last half-century, Jacquin’s workforce has slimmed down to roughly 70 workers, 28 of whom are in the union.

But the company has been making moves lately thanks to third-generation owner and CEO John Cooper, who bought out the rest of his family after Norton, his dad, died in 2020.

John Cooper has a promising liquor pedigree. He worked at Jacquin’s for six years as the brand director for Chambord, leaving for business school in 2003. After Chambord sold, he used his cut to start his own company, developing the ginger liqueur Domaine de Canton, which he sold to Heaven Hill in 2014. (Brand-development clearly runs in the family: John Cooper’s late brother, Robert, created the elderflower liqueur St-Germain in 2007.)

Jacquin’s longstanding expertise with flavoring and blending booze has inadvertently come in handy at a time when peanut butter whiskey and ready-to-drink cocktails have gained traction with consumers. Under John Cooper’s stewardship, the company has introduced a slew of new brands, including Union Forge vodka, Roaster’s Daughter, and most recently Juliette, a French peach liqueur in a sleek, striking bottle reminiscent of St-Germain and Domaine De Canton. New flavors — salted caramel, American bourbon cream, lemon cream pie — have been added to the Pennsylvania Dutch line. Classic Jacquin’s labels have been redesigned to better channel their vintage vibes.

“Our ambition is to grow Jacquin’s back and beyond where it used to be at its high point,” John Cooper says. “It’s complex because you’re managing a site and you’re managing the branded side of it. You also have a union element. You have a community element. All of these things require respect and attention.”

These creative efforts have coincided with physical upgrades to the factory, including investments in new equipment and new hires. (The union recently added two workers for the first time since 2017.) Last year, the company purchased an additional building in Kensington for a possible expansion — a decision prompted in part by the neighborhood’s development boom.

To Logan, the plant manager who has worked at Jacquin’s on and off since 1999, this all feels like an old friend getting a new lease on life. “I’ll be honest, I felt like we were kind of stagnant, we were just existing,” he says. “When John took over, there was definitely a new surge of energy, innovation. ... It was exciting to see after so many years of feeling flatlined.”

Logan is one of four brothers who’ve worked at Jacquin’s — a narrative you’ll hear over and over again as you tour the plant. Logan rattles off a handful of examples: There’s specialist Jennifer Rivera, whose dad, mom, grandmother, great-aunts, aunts, sister, and brother all did stints at Jacquin’s at one point or another. There’s lead technician Tony Sproul, whose mom worked there for three years. There are two brothers, James and Troy Langston, whose father worked at Jacquin’s for 40 years as a porter. Tommy and Gavin Bozarth, a father-son duo, work in the blending department — Gavin was just hired earlier this year. (Tommy’s sister has also worked at Jacquin’s.)

“It really has that rural-factory feel, nestled right here in Kensington,” Logan says.

Logan grew up two blocks away from Jacquin’s, on Tulip Street. He still lives here and has seen the neighborhood shifting around him. “The basketball court that I grew up across the street from, [it’s] condos now. As a lifer, I feel like we’re losing — we got the memories, but I feel like we’re losing a lot of the reminders," he says. “Sometimes I think Jacquin’s is one of the last places left in the neighborhood to remind me of my childhood.”

Will Logan feel the same way when a Jacquin’s tasting room opens up to the neighborhood’s newest residents? He says he’ll relish the chance to share some old-school Kensington history with them.

“You spend 25 years in a place, you live around the corner, it means something more than just a job,” he says. “Whether you’re conscious of it or not, you want to share that.”