The gin used to be named after a crook

Here’s how this story started: our verification desk (the boring, beautiful process of re-checking every Kansas City business’s public information against its own website) flagged that something had changed at Tom’s Town Distilling Co. The bottle names we had on file were gone. McElroy’s Corruption Gin: gone. Eli’s StrongArm Vodka: gone. In their place, a tidy roster of house-branded spirits: Tom’s Town Botanical Gin, Tom’s Town Double Grain Vodka, Tom’s Town Barreled Gin.

For about an hour we thought we had a scoop. We did not have a scoop. What we had was better: a trail that leads back through a 2018 rebrand, a pair of founders whose own families fought the machine their bottles celebrate, and the strangest little truth in Kansas City branding: this city’s most decorated craft distillery spent its first years naming its spirits after the bad guys.

So no, this isn’t breaking news. It’s something The Stare likes more: history worth keeping on the record.

The names, and who they belonged to

Tom’s Town is named for Tom Pendergast, “Boss Tom,” the saloon keeper turned political machine who ran Kansas City through Prohibition so thoroughly that the era’s nickname for the city was “Tom’s Town.” While the rest of America went dry, Kansas City famously didn’t. Asked why he ignored federal law, Pendergast gave the answer that’s now blown into the glass of every bottle the distillery sells: “The people are thirsty.”

The original lineup leaned all the way into that history, naming spirits for the machine itself rather than for founders or rivers or botanicals:

• McElroy’s Corruption Gin honored Henry McElroy, Pendergast’s city manager and the man who kept the machine’s books, creatively. A Western-style gin with a name that said exactly what it meant.
• Eli’s StrongArm Vodka carried the era’s muscle in its name: the machine’s “strong-arm” enforcement made elections in this town a contact sport.
• Pendergast’s Royal Gold Bourbon went straight to the top of the organization and, notably, is the one machine name that survives on shelves today.

The spirits were good, too. This wasn’t a gimmick carrying bad liquor. The vodka took gold and the gin silver at the American Craft Spirits Association, and USA Today named Tom’s Town the best craft vodka distillery in the country in 2017.

The part that makes it art

Here’s the detail that turns a branding story into a Kansas City story. The two founders, Steve Revare and David Epstein, childhood friends who opened the distillery in the shadow of Pendergast’s old political headquarters at 1908 Main, the first legal distillery in downtown KC since Prohibition, both descend from the other side of the war for this city.

Revare’s great-uncle was Maurice Milligan, the federal attorney who prosecuted Tom Pendergast and brought the machine down. Epstein’s grandfather, Herman Epstein, ran liquor as a rival to the Pendergast operation. The grandsons of the boss’s enemies built a shrine to the boss’s thirst and named the gin after his accountant. If you wanted to explain Kansas City’s relationship with its own past in one sentence, you could do worse than that.

Then the names got simpler

In October 2018, the distillery unveiled a full redesign: a custom art-deco bottle developed with Salt Lake City designer and typographer Kevin Cantrell, its lines borrowed from the Power & Light Building and the Chrysler Building, with the Tom’s Town monogram and “The People Are Thirsty” blown into the glass (BevNET, Beverage Dynamics).

With the new bottle came new names, a “branded house,” in the trade’s language. McElroy’s Corruption Gin became Tom’s Town Botanical Gin. Eli’s StrongArm Vodka became Tom’s Town Double Grain Vodka. The Machine No. 1: Barreled Gin became Tom’s Town Barreled Gin. Epstein was plain about the reasoning: “We have a lot of equity in the name Tom’s Town and it’s memorable. We wanted to capitalize on that, and simplify the names of our spirits so that customers know exactly how to ask for them.”

Revare’s read on the new bottle was softer, and better: the design was “very optimistic,” inspired by the beacon atop the Power & Light Building — something for people to “look up to, and be inspired and hopefully raise their expectations of what their life could be out of the Depression” (Startland News).

Which is its own quiet arc, if you think about it: the brand began by winking at corruption and settled into selling the thing Kansas City actually took from that era: the conviction that the good times are a civic right.

What’s on the shelf now

Today’s official lineup runs Tom’s Town Double Grain Vodka, Botanical Gin, Barreled Gin, Garden Party Gin, Double Oaked Bourbon, Straight Rye — and still, at the head of the table, Pendergast’s Royal Gold Bourbon. The accountant lost his gin. The muscle lost its vodka. The boss kept his bourbon. Some hierarchies survive every rebrand.

The names McElroy and Eli now live only in old reviews, back-bar bottles, and, as of today, this page. Which is roughly the point of The Stare: somebody in this town should be keeping the record.

A note on how this piece happened: our change-detection process compares KC businesses’ current public information against our own dated records, and it flagged the missing names this week, about eight years late, which we find funny and are telling you anyway. Everything above is drawn from the linked sources and Tom’s Town’s own site, verified July 24, 2026. Corrections: tell us.