Festive Spirits Craft Cocktails

Big Spring Spirits, Centre County’s first craft distillery, makes it easy to enjoy some of their signature cocktails this summer while supporting the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. 

During the Festival, take a virtual trip to Big Spring Spirits. We’ll drop a different video each day, where master mixologist Brandon Wagner shows us how to make cocktails so good, they’re worthy of a French statesman, not to mention the seven governors who have called Bellefonte home.

Each cocktail is available in kit form so you can make your own with Brandon. The kits contain everything you need except the ice and glass to make a delicious craft cocktail.

Proceeds from the sale of the kits for our three specialty cocktails benefit the Festival. Buy them here.

Mojito (July 8, 2021): This traditional Cuban cocktail is, along with Desi Arnaz, one of the island’s best known exports.  This delightful drink is made with rum, lime juice, mint syrup and garnished with fresh mint. Watch the video here.

Tom Collins (July 9, 2021): This classic cocktail is made with Seven Governors gin and sparkling lemonade and is traditionally served in a tall, narrow glass.  While you can buy  pre-mixed “Collins mix”, making it from scratch makes a tastier beverage. Watch the video here.

Orange Basil Crush (July 10, 2021): This “double muddled” cocktail, a riff on an Old Fashioned, is made with fresh orange, basil, and rye whisky. Watch the video here.

About Big Spring Spirits

Located in Bellefonte, just a few miles from State College, Big Spring Spirits opened in 2014 as a community focused craft distillery. Founded by Penn State alums, its products are made from grains sourced from local farmers, and of course depend on the town’s famous water.

That water flows from the big spring at the heart of Bellefonte. Only steps away from the distillery, it produces millions of gallons of water a day. Indeed, the town owes its very name to the spring, which was called “la belle fonte” by the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, during a brief exile to the United States in the 1790s.

In 2014, the Big Spring’s water was named “Best Tasting Water” in Pennsylvania by the Pennsylvania Rural Water Association. In fact, Bellefonte’s water rivals the legendary limestone water of Bourbon County, Kentucky. It’s so good that multinational companies bottle it and sell it under their own names.

Big Spring Spirits produces over a dozen products in the former Pennsylvania Match Factory complex. Once one of the leading producers of wooden matches, the factory closed in 1947 as changing consumer tastes made its products less popular than cigarette lighters and cardboard book matches.

The distillery’s products include vodka, several whiskeys, rum, and gin. In early 2020, in the beginning of the COVID pandemic, the distillery added hand sanitizer to its product line. Its most popular product is Talleyrand Cream Bourbon named for, who else, Charles Talleyrand.