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Ja Rule's friends call him Rule.
“What should I call you?,” I ask the all-star rapper, Queens native and businessman on a recent visit to the Time Out New York office. “Mister Ja Rule?”
“Whatever you like,” he answers. “I don't like Mr. Ja Rule. It's too formal, it makes me feel old.”
Ja—a shortening of his initials, Jeffrey Atkins—it is.
After decades in the music industry, Ja has officially stepped into the alcohol business, co-founding the whiskey brand Amber & Opal with his lifelong friends Herb Rice, Sandy Sandiford and Kelvin Barton. The project brings him to midtown Manhattan on a spring-like March afternoon, to promote the brand’s new honey-infused spirit—something he’s especially excited about—the day after a tasting event sponsored by Charlie Fox Dispensary at Mediterranean restaurant Amali.
“It's for the whiskey curious and the whiskey enthusiast,” he says. “We had bought a warehouse filled with barrels of whiskey but [...] some of our guys started making personal bottles and we thought, why don't we do something special?”
Realizing that the whiskey they had purchased had aged enough to work better as a standalone premium bourbon, the partners decided to work with a distillery in Baltimore to create their now signature honey-infused bottle. Those barrels of bourbon? They’ll eventually be part of the Amber & Opal family, likely as a premium bourbon aged eight years or so.
When asked about his decision to embark on a whiskey-fueled adventure, the 49-year-old Ja recalls the “different stages” of spirit preferences he’s lived through.
“That's is the beauty of alcohol and music,” he says. “People can kind of pinpoint where they were in their lives by what they were drinking and what they were listening to. You have a soundtrack to your life and then the cocktail of the moment.”
Partial to cognac at a younger age, Ja recalls moving onto vodka and wine until landing on whiskey “in my wisdom, older age.”
“This whiskey thing wasn't by accident,” he says. “It was definitely something that happened organically.”
Speaking of music, Ja reveals his intention to release his new album Can We Watch the Sunrise Together? later this year. “It's still a work in progress,” he says about the project, which he has teased since early 2024. “I'm adding new sounds but I want to release that album this year. Whether it's as singles or a whole work, we'll see. Either way, I'll be putting music out.”
Until then, you’ll likely catch the award-winning artist at some of his go-to spots around Manhattan—including Catch, Zero Bond and Chez Margaux (“it's one of my new favorites”)—or in his native Queens for pizza.
“If I'm going to get a slice of pizza, I'm going to go to Queens, my hometown, my backyard,” he says. “I'm going to get me a slice from Gaby’s Pizza. It’s all in the crust for me, if the crust is really soft and buttery and you can eat the back end when you finish, that's an amazing slice of pizza.”