Motor City Gas

Motor City Gas is a whiskey obsessive’s happy place hiding on a side street in downtown Royal Oak. This is a whiskey-only distillery — no beer, no wine, just a constantly rotating cast of grain-to-bottle bourbons, single malts, and stranger experiments, with as many as twenty single barrels to sample at once. Almost none of it is sold in stores; owner and head distiller Rich Lockwood built the business backwards from the usual model, which means the tasting room is essentially the only place to drink it. Travel + Leisure has named it one of the country’s top distilleries, and it wears that lightly.

The room is small and unpretentious — a whiskey bar with a still attached — so weekend nights you may end up standing, drink in hand, chatting with a distiller who can walk you through every pour. Even the non-whiskey person in your group gets looked after, with a house-made ginger ale that’s a genuine draw. It’s firmly on our list as one of the metro’s most serious — and least fussy — whiskey rooms.