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Tulsa’s first legal distillery since Prohibition is planning to open this year.

Red Fork Distillery, 3310 Southwest Blvd., will be distilling vodka, whiskey, gin and moonshine if all goes as planned.

Michael and Dana Hoey have been in the planning stages for nearly four years and wanted to locate their distillery on historic Route 66. It will sit in the Red Fork district where Tulsa County’s first oil well, the Sue A. Bland, was completed in 1901. The oil well brought nationwide publicity to Tulsa and Indian Territory. Red Fork was a town that was founded in 1883 as a railhead on the Arkansas River. Tulsa annexed Red Fork in 1927.

Starting a distillery in Oklahoma isn’t the easiest thing to do. There are a lot of regulations, and every piece of government wants to be involved.

“It is a very regulated industry, so you have to have federal licenses, you have to have state licenses, you have to have local licenses and that whole process, one is depending on the other to get approval and so it takes a long time,” Michael Hoey said. “We have been working about three and half to four years to get to the point where we are now. We are hoping to have products on the shelves by the end of the this year, that is our goal.”