Our Story
We didn’t set out to build a whiskey brand. We set out to share what we already loved.
Derek Accurso, Mike Kelly, and Tony DeYoung have spent the better part of the last decade, separately and together, immersed in whiskey: tasting it, teaching it, selling it, and arguing about it over a shared glass. AKD Spirits is what happens when three people who built their own platforms for talking about whiskey decide to start bottling it themselves.
The Founders
Derek Accurso
Co-Founder
Derek is a certified scotch professional and executive bourbon steward who co-founded Neat Notes, a whiskey intelligence platform and tasting journal. Derek also co-founded Buffalo Happy Hour, a multimedia production company focused on whiskey, education, and video production. Derek prefers dark, fruit-forward finished whiskey, whether that's bourbon or scotch.
Mike Kelly
Co-Founder
Mike is an executive bourbon steward and the other co-founder of both Neat Notes and Buffalo Happy Hour. Throughout the years, Mike has had a passion for the marketing and sales side of whiskey, including the purchasing decisions of consumers. Mike prefers a full-bodied, nutty bourbon at all levels of proof.
Tony DeYoung
Co-Founder
Tony is a WSET II certified whiskey professional with over 20 years of experience in the industry. Tony has extensive knowledge in brand development and whiskey blending, which has helped a number of the companies he's worked for find success. Tony prefers higher-proof finished whiskey that still holds true to traditional tasting profiles.
Why AKD
A name built from three, standing on its own.
AKD Spirits Ltd. is intentionally separate from the platforms and ventures each of us built before. Those projects taught us how to talk about whiskey and who to talk about it with. This company exists to do something different: put our names behind bottles we chose ourselves.
As a non-distiller producer, we don’t operate a still. Instead, we search out barrels and small runs from distilleries we respect, evaluate them against our own standards, and bottle only the ones that make it past all three of us. It’s a slower way to build a whiskey company. We think it’s the right one.