How McClintock got its name
I love craft beer, and I love the stories behind it just as much. I started Uncapped in late 2011 as a blog covering craft beer, and it lasted a few years until life got in the way of keeping it going. During that time, the craft beverage industry in Frederick and all of Maryland began to grow rapidly, and in October 2016, UnCapped was resurrected as a podcast. During the podcast, I always ask guests how their business got its name. In episode 3 of “UnCapped: The Distillery Series,” co-owner Tyler Hegamyer explained where the name McClintock Distilling came from. Here is an excerpt from that podcast.
Chris: Not only do I find your location to be perfect, McClintock just sounds like a distillery that has been around forever. So, one, it’s just amazing that the name wasn’t already taken. So where does the name come from?
Tyler: It actually wasn’t even our first pick. We were full bore on a different name but complete with doing advertising and almost designing a logo, then last minute we found out that name happened to be taken three days before we had submitted our trademark on it. So, we flip-flopped to McClintock a little bit later on. It was actually a name that we had come up with initially. We kind of were young guys so we didn’t think it fit us very well, kind of sounded a little bit too old-school.
So, McClintock is actually the first name of a man named McClintock Young. He’s an old Frederick inventor. If you know the McCutcheon building over along the creek, it has a bunch of ‘Faces of Frederick’ on there, he’s actually one of the faces on there. A really interesting guy. Ties in really well to what we do. So, he has over a hundred patents that he had. Most of them were from when he worked for the Ox Fibre Brush Company, which was a 5-acre plant where the present-day Goodwill is. He did everything, from a whole slew of inventions, everything from making Diamond Matches’ early match-stick making machines, that he sold them, all the way through making all of Ox Fibre brushing machines that would take a wood block all the way through a finished brush. Was responsible for moving the crank on the velocipede from the front wheel to the back, which is the present-day bicycle. His first invention when he was 12 years old was a fire engine that would throw water 35 feet — steam-powered fire engine. So, he was a really interesting guy for his time so we kind of tied it all in to the products we produce, trying to kind of capture that spirit of his innovation and put that into what we produce.
Chris: That’s really cool. So, you just, for one, the guy has a super-interesting story but did you decide you just wanted to have a Frederick source name?
Tyler: We actually got tied in to him. I grew up in Frederick my whole life. In fact, I lived right up against Gambrill State Park. And about five, six years ago, the same time we were planning all this, we — my brother purchased a piece of property at the end of the street I grew up on and on that property was an old stone house that I had been going to my entire life, that’s the haunted house. We had never gone inside it. It had always been boarded up. But on that property was that house and we got the opportunity to finally go through it. And when we went through it, one of the first things we found in this old chest was a deed of sale to Diamond Match for one of their initial machines that would take something from a wood block all the way to a finished match … Then from there we just uncovered all sorts of things as we began researching it and it just ties in really well with the Frederick community. And it’s also a name, when you see McClintock, it has a great tie to the Frederick community but, at the same time, once we started and grew it beyond that, it’s not limiting us just to the Frederick community.
Check out the entire podcast, plus other episodes, including our recent interview with Guinness, at uncappedpodcast.com.