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For avid whiskey lovers, few events are more eagerly anticipated than WhiskyFest, an enormous tasting that touches down in several American cities throughout the year. But when sponsors of the New York festival suddenly moved it last year from Tuesday to Friday and Saturday, many regulars were unable to attend.

An alternative arrived suddenly in the form of a new one-night event, held on the eve of WhiskyFest. Despite little time to advertise, it drew a crowd of 250 to its unlikely Manhattan location: the West Side Institutional Synagogue.

These whiskey devotees, it turned out, were Jews shut out of the big event because they observe the Sabbath. And to drive home the point of the tasting, its founder, the fledgling Jewish Whisky Company, called it Whisky Jewbilee.

Whiskey has numerous fan bases, but few are more devoted — and arguably less noticed by the press and public — than Jews, particularly observant Jews. Synagogues are increasingly organizing events around whiskey, and whiskey makers are reaching out to the Jewish market.

Retailers have long recognized Jews as valuable customers. “Jewish men are very interested in the selection of whiskey available at a wedding or bar/bat mitzvah,” said Jonathan Goldstein, vice president of Park Avenue Liquor Shop, a Manhattan store known for its whiskey selection. “They very often will pick up a special bottle to offer close friends or relatives.” Of the Friday before the Jewish holiday of Purim, last February, he said, “It was like Christmas in here.”

Part of the spirit’s appeal to many Orthodox Jews is that most whiskey is naturally kosher. In contrast, wine, owing to its long connection to Jewish tradition, must satisfy many regulations to earn a hechsher, the symbol of kosher certification.

But that hasn’t stopped prominent Scotch producers like Glenrothes, Glenmorangie, Ardbeg, Bowmore and Auchentoshan from courting the Jewish consumer by obtaining official kosher certification for certain bottlings.

Bourbon producers have even less to worry about, because by federal law their spirits must be aged in new casks, rather than in the sherry, port or wine barrels that some whiskey distillers use, and that give some kosher drinkers pause because of their exposure to wine. Yet the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Kentucky recently enlisted the help of the Chicago Rabbinical Council in laying down more than 1,000 barrels of three styles of whiskey, all certified kosher and set for release in five or six months.

In a smaller-scale but similar enterprise, the Royal Wine Corporation, a New York producer of kosher wine and grape juice, asked Wesley Henderson two years ago if he would be interested in making a kosher-certified version of his boutique bourbon, Angel’s Envy. “We were looking for a bourbon line in general,” said Shlomo S. Blashka, a wine and spirits educator at Royal, also the New York-area distributor of Angel’s Envy. “The Jewish community is a very big bourbon community.”

Mr. Henderson did not have to be told. “You’d have to be blind not to notice it,” he said. “I thought, if you had a kosher bourbon, that would be a great thing. It seemed a no-brainer.”

For the new whiskey, Angel’s Envy was aged for six months in barrels that had held Kedem kosher port for 20 years. The run sold quickly, Mr. Henderson said, and may become a permanent addition to the bourbon maker’s line.

In 2011, Jason Johnstone-Yellin and two partners founded the Jewish Whisky Company, which has bottled barrels from six Scotch distillers. “We had the opportunity to purchase casks, where not everybody would have that opportunity,” said Mr. Johnstone-Yellin, who was born in Scotland and whose American wife is Jewish.

During a recent trip to the Victoria Whisky Festival in British Columbia, he said, he buttonholed a representative of a well-known international whiskey distillery and asked if it would let the Jewish Whisky Company bottle one of its casks.

“The response was: ‘We’re very protective of our brand. We don’t do that,’ ” said Joshua Hatton, another partner in the business, who also founded a popular blog, Jewish Single Malt Whisky Society — now renamed Jewmalt.

Mr. Johnstone-Yellin, not giving up, gave the man his card and pointed to the word “Jewish.” “This is our market,” he said. “These are our customers and members.”

The man paused, he said, then agreed to talk to them.

The bond with whiskey goes way back. Mr. Blashka said early Jewish immigrants to America, unable to trust the provenance of local wines, turned to certain distilled liquors, including whiskey. “Because the wine was an issue, typically spirits was their avenue for drinking,” he said.

As recent decades have ushered in a revival in Scotch, bourbon and other whiskeys, Jews, like many other groups, have moved beyond the usual blends and have developed more sophisticated tastes. “Now we have many whiskeys that we know are kosher,” said Rabbi Aaron Raskin of Congregation B’nai Avraham in Brooklyn Heights, whose preferred whiskey is the smoky Laphroaig, a single malt from Islay. “It is used to add to our joy.”

“And it helps attendance at synagogues,” he added.

Whiskey-centered events at temples are a lot more common than they used to be, said Joshua London, a lobbyist for the Zionist Organization of America who regularly writes about whiskey for Jewish publications. For the last three years, Mr. London has been asked by his Orthodox synagogue in Potomac, Md., to pull together bottles for an annual pre-Passover whiskey and barbecue night.

This year, 350 people attended the sold-out event. One rabbi, Charles Arian, began developing an interest in bourbon 10 years ago, after he married a woman from Kentucky. When he moved from Connecticut to a new post at Kehilat Shalom in Gaithersburg, Md., he began organizing bourbon tastings. “There are two things I am passionate about besides Judaism,” he said. “Bourbon and Georgetown basketball.”

For him, a big attraction of whiskey is its handmade origin. “It can only get so technical because of the barrel,” he said. “A barrel is made by a human being, just like a Torah scroll can only be made by a human being. We’re not importing Torah scrolls from China.”

The extent of a congregation’s, or congregant’s, embrace of whiskey can vary. “It all depends on what rabbi you hold by,” Rabbi Arian said. Some are content with whiskeys that are kosher by nature; others like the extra insurance of a hechsher. Aging or finishing in wine barrels will disqualify a bottle for one drinker, while another isn’t troubled by the distinction.

For years, there was no greater yardstick of Jewish interest in whiskey than New York’s WhiskyFest, sponsored by Whisky Advocate magazine.

“If you went years ago, you’d see that close to 50 percent of the people attending were wearing kippot,” Mr. Blashka said, referring to skullcaps. When WhiskyFest became a two-day event in 2012, held during the Sabbath, many Jews who wanted to attend were not pleased. “I wish I could tell you the sheer number of e-mails I received from my readers, distributors, importers, distillers,” Mr. Hatton said.

He said an importer and a distributor entreated him to assemble a pop-up festival for the disenfranchised customers and many producers in town for WhiskyFest.

Whisky Jewbilee will return this fall, at a larger site, and a second date in Westchester County will be added. “There were a couple distillers that we didn’t reach out to” last fall, Mr. Johnstone-Yellin said. “They said, ‘You will have us be part, won’t you?’ They’re smart people. They know who’s not going to be standing at their table on Friday and Saturday night.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/dining/whiskey-producers-court-their-jewish-market.html?pagewanted=all