Kings County’s bottles are easily distinguished from those marketed by big corporations. They are plain glass flasks adorned only with thin labels that appear to have been typed by hand.

On Mr. Spoelman’s label, the word Brooklyn appears only on the mandatory warning label in back, despite the cachet that seems to attach to so many products made in the borough these days. Mr. Spoelman said he and his co-founder, David Haskell, saw the distillery as a part of the city, not just of Brooklyn.

As low-key as their sales pitch has been, the partners have attracted more than $1 million in financing. The most recent piece came in the form of a $400,000 loan commitment from the Partnership for New York City Fund, which was created by a group that represents the city’s biggest private-sector employers.

Maria Gotsch, who oversees the investment fund, said distilling was a new twist on the specialty food-making sector, one of the city’s better sources of job growth in the past several years. The fund has invested about $5 million in food-related start-ups and nonprofit agencies.

“There’s an interesting community in Brooklyn of people doing food processing,” Ms. Gotsch said.

She said that she was “not a big hard-alcohol person,” but that her staff had checked with liquor stores around the city to confirm that the distillery’s limited production had been selling well. She said only interest payments — at a rate of 7.5 percent — would be due for the first 18 months of the five-year loan, allowing time for the bourbon to age.