Crittenden Distillery

James and Matt Crittenden opened a legal distillery in 2015 in the last place you'd expect to need one. Kiln had been Hancock County's moonshine capital — the term is historical fact, not folklore — and the Crittendens brought the tradition above board. They built grain-to-bottle production twenty miles inland from Bay St. Louis: mashing, fermenting, distilling, aging, bottling all happen on the same property on Highway 43. The flagship is Cut Above Whiskey, both bourbon and rye. Everything starts and finishes here. No contract batches, no bulk spirits trucked in and relabeled. What they make, they bottle. Kiln sits in the piney interior, a different Mississippi than the beachfront casinos that remade the coast when gaming was legalized in the early nineties. This is older industrial patience — crop, barrel, time — now legal for the first time in a place that had been doing it in the woods for a century.