KC ORIGINALS words by ANNE KNIGGENDORF | photos by CHASE CASTOR
Let There Be Gin. Meg and Jeff Evans are a youngish Midwestern couple living in Kansas City. Meg taught high school English for a while, then she worked in higher ed. Jeff was a mechanical engineer who did machine design for full scale manufacturers like GM, Tesla, and Nissan – he made machines and integrated them into assembly lines. A story-lover and a machine guy. But throughout those now-gone workdays, the couple had a shared history causing an ancestral itch that demanded to be scratched – a history that spurred them to forge a product unique not only to Kansas City but to all of the United States: an award-winning gin crafted from agave rather than from the traditional distillates of barley, corn, and rye. With no escape from family stories on Meg’s side about a mean
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mule in rural Missouri warning away inspectors from the false floor hiding the bootleg, and stories on Jeff’s side about a man with a perfectly legal prescription pad ladling gin from his bathtub into pharmacy bottles for whoever “needed” it, fate tempted them away from their day jobs in 2016. They’d set up a still and join their foremothers and forefathers but with their own personal touches involving Meg’s flare for storytelling and Jeff’s ability to build a machine. However, Missouri is not light on distilleries. As recently as 2020, the Show Me State was number 16 in the country for most in operation. With 40 others already doing business across the state, the market wasn’t quite as saturated as in bigger states like California (220) or New York (145), but enough existed that the Evanses would need to find a way to distinguish their run at the market.
