THE LOCALS
DISTILLER PROFILE
FATHER & DAUGHTER DUO RHINE HALL
By Leigh Kunkel | Photos by Tony Hughes
When you think about brandy, Chicago probably isn’t the first place that comes to mind. But Rhine Hall, run by fatherdaughter team Charlie Solberg and Jenny Solberg Katzman, is looking to change that with their small-batch fruit brandies. A former professional hockey player, Charlie was living in Austria as an expat when he was first introduced to the local schnapps. Years later, when he brought his own family over to live in Germany, he passed his love for the local liquor along to them as well. Upon returning to the United States, the Solbergs found the local brandy scene to be severely lacking, leading them to build a bicycle-powered apple chopper to distill their own. The business built from there, and Rhine Hall officially opened its doors in 2013. The distillery is fiercely, almost obsessively local: all of its fruit is grown in the Great Lakes region, and the
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water used to cut the spirit down to proof is sourced from Lake Michigan. The custom-made distilling vats were built by Jenny’s brother, an engineer, and Jenny even hand-selects every piece of fruit that eventually makes it into the brandy. Rhine Hall has always played with experimental flavors, like its signature mango brandy, but its success over the last few years has allowed it to expand into even more unusual spirits. Its collaboration with Goose Island’s Bourbon County last year to produce a stout bierschnapps was so successful that it’s doing another limited run this year. Those playful varieties don’t mean that Rhine Hall has forgotten its roots, though. The heart and soul of its business is still its traditional flavors like apple, plum, and cherry. And above all else, Jenny says, is the taste: “There’s nothing added: no sugar, no grain, no neutral spirit. It’s the purest expression of the fruit.”
Father-daughter team Charlie Solberg and Jenny Solberg Katzman