Sangfroid Distilling, a Hyattsville-based artisan distilling company that makes fruit brandies, Dutch-style gins and grain whiskeys, is expanding with plans to open a production facility and cocktail bar in a historic bank in downtown Takoma Park, according to the company’s owners.
Sangfroid Distilling was founded by brothers-in-law Jeff Harner and Nate Groenendyk, who discovered a love for apple brandies that are produced in the Normandy region of France, Harner told Bethesda Today on Friday.
The two opened their first distillery and cocktail bar in March 2020 at 5130 Baltimore Ave. in Hyattsville and have been looking for a place to expand ever since.
At the Hyattsville location, “we have about 1,000 square feet, which includes both our production space and our cocktail bar. And we more or less maxed out our capacity in terms of production on Day One,” Harner said. “We’ve been in earnest looking for additional space for the last four or five years.”
Harner said having more space at the new location will give the distillery more opportunities to “play a little bit more” with different fruit brandies.
“I’ve been wanting to do apricots for years and years and I just don’t have the tank space [in the Hyattsville location],” he said. “So having that additional capacity allows us to start doing those other cool things that we’ve been wanting to do for a really long time but haven’t been able to.”
The distilling company purchased the building at 6950 Carroll Ave. in August for $1.75 million, according to The Source of the Spring. Built in 1927, the property operated as a bank until Bank of America closed its branch there in 2021. According to a Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission Staff Report, the building was constructed in a Beaux Arts architectural style.
Harner and Groenendyk were interested in the bank because zoning rules for Takoma Park’s business district allow for artisan manufacturing and production, including spirits. Harner, a 15-year resident of Takoma Park, also noted that for 12 years he would walk by the bank almost every day as he headed to the nearby Metro station to work in downtown Washington, D.C.
“It was just king of the stars aligning in some sense,” Harner said.
According to Harner, about one-third of the bank will be used as a cocktail bar and tasting room and the rest of the space will be used for production, distillation and grain milling. The main floor measures nearly 5,000 square feet, providing far more production space than the Hyattsville distillery and more room for guests to sip on cocktails, he said.
Harner also said he looked forward to guests in the tasting room getting a view of downtown Takoma Park by looking through the bank’s “giant, 14-foot-tall windows,” which provide plenty of natural lighting.
Construction at the bank is expected to take eight to 10 months, Harner said. In early January, the Montgomery County Department of Permitting Services approved a commercial building permit valued at $642,722 to “alter [the] bank,” according to the department’s database.
The distilling company shared the news of the permit approval on social media with the message: “Things are happening, folks.”
Harner said he hopes the production space and cocktail bar will be open to the public by the end of 2025.
“There’s a lot of moving parts,” he said.
