When Daric Schlesselman had the idea to start a distillery several years ago, a related notion followed on its heels: He’d buck the trend by making a malt whiskey. He’d always been partial to scotch, which is distilled with malted barley, and he figured putting an American spin on a malt whiskey would set him apart in a market awash in bourbons and ryes.

“I saw an opportunity to bring an American approach to this very classic whiskey,” says Schlesselman, owner of Van Brunt Stillhouse in Red Hook, noting that at the time only a very few stateside distillers were making such whiskeys.

It seems quite a few others spied the same business opportunity. Lately, the number of American craft distillers making malt whiskeys — a style long dominated by the Scots — has boomed.

It’s still a minuscule share of the bourbon-dominated American whiskey market, but there are now dozens of small-batch American makers where only a handful existed just a few years ago.

“It’s exploding,” says veteran whiskey maker Dave Pickerell, who works with a number of craft spirits makers and is master distiller at Hillrock Estate Distillery in Ancram in upstate New York. “All of a sudden the malts are just breaking off.”

And they’re giving their whiskey cousins across the pond a run for their money. At the American Craft Distillers Association competition in February, where Pickerell served as a senior judge, there were more malt whiskeys entered than bourbons or ryes for the first time ever.

In New York alone there are at least a half-dozen relatively new varieties, including Pine Barrens Single Malt from Long Island; Hudson and Hillrock single malts from the Hudson Valley; 287 Single Malt from StilltheOne Distillery in Port Chester; and Schlesselman’s Van Brunt Stillhouse Malt Whiskey.

The current spike is an outgrowth of the American craft spirits movement that’s led to a boom in small distilleries in recent years. The malt flavors appeal to such distillers, in part, because it’s a way to stand out in a saturated market.

“Being new, you have to set yourself apart,” says Ed Tiedge of StilltheOne in Port Chester, who released his first bottling of single malt last December. “There are a lot of good bourbons out there, so you ask yourself, what other things can we do? Malt whiskey is something the big producers aren’t doing.”

The definition of what is Scottish malt is very tightly controlled, and that’s not true here, so distillers can do all sorts of funky things. We’re much more geared toward innovation. - Allan Roth, beverage director at Char No. 4

And, notes Allan Roth, the beverage director at the whiskey-centric Brooklyn bar Char No. 4, many fledgling craft distillers have backgrounds in brewing beer — “so they’re used to working with malted barley. There’s a natural synergy.”

A handful of American distillers are doing their best to mimic the venerable single malts from across the pond. Pickerell, for example, has a whiskey in the works for Hillrock for which he’ll smoke the barley with imported Scottish peat and aim to reproduce a “nice Highland Scotch.”

But most are taking a New World approach to an Old World form and creating something that’s new and distinctly American.

“As much as I like scotch, it’s a tradition-bound product — there’s almost no innovation,” says Schlesselman, who calls his malt whiskey “decidedly American.” He tweaks his blend to get “a lot of caramelized and roasted flavors that just don’t exist in scotch”; while the oak barrels give it some bourbon character, that’s “drier and spicier, with a lot more complexity.”

With their “rustic charm,” American malt whiskeys “hold their own category,” says Heather Greene, the whiskey sommelier at the Flatiron Room, who once lived in Scotland and served on the Scotch Malt Whisky Society Tasting Panel. “You get such strong individual character shining through.”

That’s the beauty of American malts, agrees Roth, who points to envelope-pushers like Triple Smoke from Tennessee’s Corsair, made from barley smoked with cherry and beech wood as well as peat.

“The definition of what is Scottish malt is very tightly controlled, and that’s not true here, so distillers can do all sorts of funky things,” says Roth. “We’re much more geared toward innovation.”