A pair of twenty-something Brooklyn booze makers are warring over a secret vodka recipe — infighting that’s threatening to sink the lucrative distillery that landed the business partners on Forbes’ “30 under 30” list.
Peter Simon, 25, claims in his $3 million suit that fellow Industry City Distillery co-founder David Kyrejko, 29, has been “extraordinarily guarded about the vodka-making processes that he claimed to have uniquely engineered.”
And their differences over the matter led to Simon’s ouster earlier this week. “We don’t think the termination was proper,” Simon’s lawyer, Gabriel Berg, told The Post.
Kyrejko owned 51 percent of the Sunset Park-based company and Simon owned 20 percent before he was ousted and lost all control. Simon claims in his suit that according to the firm’s governing documents, his ownership couldn’t dip below 10 percent, thus the ouster was a breach of contract.
Kyrejko is so tight-lipped about his distilling method that he refused to teach a lab assistant the ropes, claiming “the process was too experimental to teach anyone,” according to court papers.
Kyrejko’s insistence that he work alone to produce the 80-proof spirit — made from raw beat sugar — meant the distillery couldn’t keep up with demand for its popular No. 2 Vodka, the suit says.
When Simon protested, Kyrejko “threatened the physical destruction of the entire manufacturing space.”
Simon says he was the brains of the operation who secured funding and the city permitting process. Without his business acumen, Simon says, he worries the company will founder.
In his suit, Simon dismisses Kyrejko, a Cooper Union graduate, as “an eccentric artist, lacking interpersonal skills.”
He claims the Sunset Park resident sabotaged their startup by hogging the manufacturing process, driving away employees, ignoring his lab assistant and failing to meet production demand.
In 2012, Forbes lauded the founders for “building a distillery from scratch” and “transforming beet sugar into a flavorful and delicate vodka.”
Reps for Kyrejko did not return calls for comment.