With a crystal glass, a beaker of red-gold whiskey and a fragrant spiral of orange, served on an elegant silver salver at the Omni William Penn Hotel, I propose a toast to the soft-spoken godmother of Pittsburgh’s boozy history. While supporting her nine children with a popular – albeit highly illegal – bar in 1888, widow Kate Hester actually coined the term “speakeasy,” hushing the customers to keep the cops from the door. So this afternoon, I’m day-drinking in her honor. An upscale Old Fashioned, made to my exact written order, seems appropriate.

At the confluence of three famous rivers – the Allegheny, Ohio and Monongahela – Pittsburgh is a city that has never gone thirsty. But the city clearly prefers whiskey to water. Its current craft cocktail boom inspired its own sold-out weekend talkfest last August, Three Day Blow. Critics from around the country flocked to debate and report on local ryes, grappa, cider, vodka and beers at the Hemingway-inspired festival.

The current national buzz about the local spirits scene builds on a tradition that dates back to – anyone? – America’s Whiskey Rebellion. Since the 1790s, western Pennsylvania’s whiskey business has gone underground twice. One downtown joint where it has resurfaced is the Wigle Tasting Room, a new tasting emporium that opened at the end of April at the century-old Pittsburgh property in the Omni collection of hotels.

Wigle, an upstart distillery, is a natural addition to the Omni William Penn Hotel, a grand dowager that has been on the cutting edge of hospitality innovation for more than a century. When it opened in 1916, it launched with a long list of lavish, high-tech firsts – like telegraph service, en suite bathrooms, the first commercial radio broadcast, even bandleader Lawrence Welk’s bubble machine – that made it downtown’s undisputed tastemaker.

At the sleek, marble-topped tasting-room bar, I find a fellow Kate Hester fan. Meredith Meyer Grelli, the 32-year-old cofounder of Wigle Whiskey and an organizer of Three Day Blow, comes to the craft liquor business with degrees in business and urban history. She tells me that her 21st century distillery, the first in Pittsburgh since Prohibition, is just a dram of the region’s first mega-industry.

“By 1808, Allegheny County was producing half a barrel of whiskey for every man, woman and child living in America. There were 4,000 documented stills” locally, she tells me. Wigle (pronounced “wiggle”) makes its organic Monongahela rye in copper pots, same as the farmers who made Pennsylvania the country’s first whiskey capital. It’s named for Phillip Wigle, a rebellious farmer who tangled with tax collectors. Convicted of treason, he was pardoned by George Washington.