Meet The Distiller Bringing Kentucky Bourbon To Camden NJ

When James Yoakum first had his big idea, more than a handful of people thought he was crazy. Downtown Camden, after all, seemed an unlikely place to build a whiskey distillery. But Yoakum knew the city was ready for a new idea, and his risk paid off. Yoakum started Cooper River Distillers, the first legal distillery in Camden (and the second in the state) since Prohibition.

Yoakum, a Kentucky native, didn’t know much about bourbon, ironically, until after he moved to Philadelphia. “Everyone assumed I knew all about bourbon,” he says. “So at some part I started trying to learn about [it], started really enjoying the drink and its history. Then I started getting more interested in spirits in general—the history, the people, the laws—and I realized I wanted a job where I made something with my hands. It all came together from there.”

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Yoakum looked for a location in Camden for two main reasons. First, NJ’s laws are friendlier to distillers than the laws in Pennsylvania, where he was living at the time. Second, he knew that everyone in South Jersey has ties to Camden. “Most other towns are cookie-cutter suburbs,” he says. “Camden is not. ‘Made in Camden’ carries some weight because everyone in the area has some kind of Camden connection.”

“It’s totally different from anything else out there,” Yoakum says. “Good and unique are hard to get right together, but it’s always what we’re shooting for.”

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