For proprietor Andy Koenig, the idea to establish a distillery in Southwest Idaho has roots in Europe, where he lived for three years in his father’s hometown of Lustenau, Austria. There, pears and apples and plums were transformed into clear, distinctive spirits through the age-old art of distillation. At home in Idaho, some of the Northwest’s finest fruit was being grown on the Sunnyslope, near where his mother’s family had homesteaded and made wine during the Great Depression two generations earlier. The concept of traditionally distilling this high-quality fruit into world-class brandies provided the foundation on which Andy built Koenig Distillery.