Located among 80 acres of lush vineyards in the Chautauqua area of Western New York, Five & 20 Spirits & Brewing is a rare find. New York’s first combination winery, brewery and distillery, Five & 20 Spirits & Brewing  represents the latest outpost of Mazza Vineyards, a 45-year old Pennsylvania winery famous for growing grapes and producing wine across state borders  in the Lake Erie region.

For the Mazza family, New York’s range of business incentives and support for wineries, farm brewers and distillers make the Empire State fertile ground for expanding – and reinventing – existing operations.

The business began 13 years ago in the Mazza Chautauqua Cellars in Mayville, N.Y., where it operated a small batch distillery to make fruit brandy, grappa and other spirits for its fortified wines. In 2013, as the craft beverage boom gained momentum, the Mazza family decided to co-locate its distillery – now called Five & 20 Spirits – with their Mazza Chautauqua Cellars wine operation at a newly constructed facility in Westfield. Set among Mazza’s existing vineyards, the distillery brought its “grain-to-glass” small-batch approach to beer, making it the state’s first “trifecta” distillery, brewery and winery.

Chautauqua County occupies a significant portion of the multistate, 50-mile Lake Erie Wine Trail. The county alone produces approximately 65 percent of New York’s annual grape harvest, and now, thanks to passage of the state’s farm brewing bill, hops are being reintroduced to the region. Five & 20 General Manager Mario Mazza buys the majority of the hops for the new facility’s brewery from local farmers: their “purposefully unfiltered” offerings aim to preserve the local flavor of these ingredients.

But that’s not all that makes this producer unique. Last fall, Five & 20 collaborated with TimberFish Technologies to create a sustainable fish farm within the facility’s treatment-production system. Part of an effort to slow the impact of rising energy, feed and waste costs in traditional fish farming, the renewable concept transforms some 1,000 gallons of unused brewery wastewater and discarded grain into alternative fish food. It will also save Five & 20 a lot of money: the cost to remove unused brewery wastewater can run upwards of six figures per year. That kind of overhead, says head distiller Joe Nelson, led Five & 20 searching in earnest for a solution.