FAQs

  • ANNX is distilled in Lawrenceburg, IN and bottled in Silverton, OH.

  • ContacPinnacle in Missouri and Vintegrity in Kansas.

  • ANNX Spirits Co. is now available for purchase at The Belfry in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District.

    You can also find ANNX at stores in the Kansas City metro, Lawrence, and Wichita. Check our map for an updated list of locations.

  • Currently, you can get a taste of ANNX in Kansas City at The Belfry Lounge, Chartreuse Saloon, RecordBar, Swordfish Tom’s, and Hi-Dive Lounge. Check our map for an updated list of locations.

THE ROOTS OF ANNX

You might wonder how all of this led up to ANNX Spirits. The thing is, all of the talk of her success as a chef and restaurateur can easily leave out the long thread of her love of beverages and, in particular, whiskey. It leaves out her sneaking sips of Wild Turkey with her private Quaker boarding school friends (she insists she never consumed alcohol on campus). It leaves out her blending beer and doing beer collaborations with the brewers at New Belgium and Jolly Pumpkin. It leaves out her choosing widely popular single barrel picks exclusive to her restaurants, starting with two different selections of Van Winkle Family Reserve 12 Year and continuing on to Eagle Rare 10 year, 1792, Elijah Craig, two Buffalo Trace picks, and several others. And it leaves out her slowly but deliberately assembling one of the largest collections of whiskey in the Midwest at The Belfry.

The fact is, Celina Tio has been honing her skills as a whiskey taster for almost as long as she’s been honing her skills as a chef, making ANNX Spirits Co. a logical endeavor for Celina and her partners. She now uses her lifetime of training as a chef, a whiskey expert, and most of all, a taster to curate top-shelf, custom blends of whiskey, gin, and vodka. 

Celina has never lost sight of the people and events who helped make her who she is. Her first restaurant, JULIAN, is named for her two original cooking inspirations, her grandfather and Julia Child. The Belfry is named for her Quaker boarding school. You can find bits and pieces of that school reflected in the artwork hanging inside the restaurant today.

ANNX spirits follows this same pattern, being named for The Annex, the part of her school that joined together the dorm rooms, East End and the West End. You can see this connection conveyed in the label art of each bottle, painted by her talented classmate and artist Abby McClure. Celina consigned her to go back to their former campus and paint “en plein air” to capture the beauty of the school and memories it envokes. These scenes are revealed through the spirit on the inside of the back labels.  

ANNEX: late Middle English: from Old French annexer, from Latin annectere ‘connect’, from ad- ‘to’ + nectere ‘tie, fasten’.

With that sentiment and Celina’s desire to connect with her roots as much as possible, ANNX Spirits Co. was born.

CHEF CELINA TIO

Celina Tio was that interesting kid in elementary school who would go to her babysitter’s house and volunteer to make dinner. “…at the time I was ripping opening Lipton packs of noodles and following the instructions, but I would still cook dinner”, she recalls. Though she couldn’t give you the same answer twice if you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, Celina was still always cooking. “I can’t even imagine what I’d be if I wasn’t a chef.”

It began when she asked her father for a Holly Hobbie Oven – a toy similar to Easy Bake Oven, “but the cheaper version,” she describes, laughing. Instead of giving in, her father got her a little step stool and frankly replied, “Why would you want one of those? There’s a real oven right there.”

This deep-rooted love of cooking followed her through her school days at a Quaker boarding school, then on to Drexel University where she earned a degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management. From there she worked her way through the industry, opening and managing several restaurants at Disney World, then moving to Kansas City to lead its premier restaurants, The American Restaurant. It was here where she was awarded the Chef Magazine’s 2005 Chef of the Year and then the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef: Midwest in 2007.

In 2009, she left The American to open the first restaurant of her own, JULIAN, translating her passion and by now considerable expertise into what has been described as “global feel good food”. By then her reputation had grown tremendously, helped in the next few years by a number of high-profile television appearances, including Bravo TV’s Top Chef Masters and Food Network’s Next Iron Chef and Iron Chef America.

Her success at JULIAN led her to her next project, The Belfry, in 2014, a cozy and relaxed bar and restaurant in the Crossroads Arts District. It’s here where you can likely find her today, sipping on a whiskey, planning her next move.

“I’ve been drinking Pappy 20 for longer than Pappy 23 has been in the barrel.”

The story of ANNX Spirits Co. is a bold one—blending age old distilling techniques with new world sophistication, tastefully curated for your drinking pleasure.