Koval was founded in 2008 by academics Robert and Sonat Birnecker. In Yiddish the name Koval refers to a black sheep, or someone who forges ahead or does something new or out of the ordinary. Sonat's great-grandfather earned Koval as his nickname in the early 1900s when, at the ripe old age of 17 he emigrated from Vienna to Chicago to start a business. The brand was named as such to honour him.
Koval was Chicago’s first distillery since the mid-1800s, and the couple wanted to make organic spirits from scratch, equipped with a grain-to-bottle mentality and only bottling numbered single barrel whiskies.