Whiskey River: Uncovering Distilling Heritage in the Land of 10,000 Lakes

How a whiskey trip inspired one man to start a distillery in his home state

When thinking of whiskey, the mind usually wanders to places like Scotland, Ireland, and Kentucky. But in an unassuming Upper Midwestern state, one aficionado of the ‘water of life’ wants the world to know a relatively unknown part of the story: Minnesota is whiskey country.

“Minnesota has the best whiskey ingredients in the world,” Phil Steger, owner of Brother Justus Whiskey Company in Minneapolis, tells me on a Sunday afternoon at the airy, cathedral-like distillery overlooking a sylvan golf course. “The barley, the white oak, the peat, the water. The land is teeming with raw materials. So naturally I wondered why there isn’t a legacy whiskey distillery in this state. Then I discovered that during Prohibition, moonshine distillers did exist across Minnesota and were taught the art of distilling by a rebellious bootlegging Benedictine monk named Brother Justus. And by then I was already hooked.”

I had met Steger at a whiskey dinner earlier in the year and was taken with his story, his reverence for the land, his thoughtful approach to a life lived well, and I knew I had to take a deeper dive. Steger’s whiskey journey aligns with that of his distillery’s namesake, both of whom discovered their calling in unlikely places. The former William Trettle became Brother Justus in 1907 and refined his blacksmithing and distilling skills at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville. Justus did not regard distilling or whiskey as immoral; rather, he saw it as a way to lift people in rural areas out of poverty. His challenge was to teach them to distill at a high level, stopping the prevalence of exploding stills and ‘moonshine blindness,’ a condition that resulted from consuming excess methanol from improper distillation.

Steger came about his whiskey epiphany a little differently.

In 2007, on a break from an early career as a holy manuscript preserver, where he traveled to the world’s far-flung, war-torn places, he and his wife took a trip to Kentucky and stopped by the Jim Beam Distillery, taking in the requisite tour. “As I was going through the tour, lights popped off in my head,” he recalls. “How is whiskey made? Water and grain. And I immediately thought of Minnesota. I learned about the importance of limestone to filter the water and thought about the limestone in Minnesota, the stretches of rivers. I thought of the grain and prairie environments. Then I started asking questions.”

The questions yielded revelatory answers.

“I learned that the distillers first made beer from corn. I thought of beer like Grain Belt—simple, sweet, not complex. Then I thought of the complex beers of Europe with flavors of banana, coffee, chocolate, beer made from malted barley, not corn. Then we talked distillation. Then the oak barrels. I asked about oak and the tour guide talked about the sugars in wood. I never thought about oak trees having sugar! I knew Minnesota has native white oak forests and then said to myself, ‘I bet our oak tastes better.’ Steger mentally arranged a patchwork of ingredients to make premium whiskey—water, oak, barley—and concluded that everything he needed was available in his home state. As the manuscript work was drying up, Steger searched for a new mission, one that could be rich and full of meaning, and knew he wanted to start his own distillery.

“Manuscript work is about place, people, land,” he says. “Sourcing ingredients for good whiskey is about place, people, land. I found my calling; I had to grow where I was planted. But I needed money.” Steger got a law degree and worked at a law firm while studying the laws and regulations around the spirits industry, and arranged the pieces and the people to start distilling. After leasing space, buying the necessary equipment, and experimenting with recipes, Steger waited 18 months to receive his license. “Our first space looked like the ‘Saw’ movie,” he laughs. “But during the wait we tested and tested our recipe, which is like a code. The code breaks at a certain scale. We needed to know how to eliminate everything that wasn’t the cause of the break. You can only do that when you scale. So we abandoned the ‘Saw’ space and found our current space which had housed a defunct charter school.”  

In 2019 Steger left the law firm to work on his whiskey dream full-time. After surviving the pandemic closures, and transitioning from a micro-distillery to a larger enterprise including a cocktail room, Brother Justus reopened in February 2021 and made its first distillate on their new still, designed in Minnesota and Nebraska, in April of the same year. 

The way Steger and his Master Blender, James Jefferson, approach distilling reminds me of a winegrower approaching the vineyard and a winemaker approaching the winery. From where an ingredient hails, the unique effect terroir has on an ingredient, the struggle to gain flavor complexity, and the ratio of flavors in a blend are all considerations the winery and the distillery must make. The product, the whiskey itself, showcases the result of these careful decisions.  

We tasted the sake-inspired Silver, a clear whiskey that sees no oak except for a quick run through a barrel—a process Steger refers to as being “kissed by the barrel,”— in order for it to be called “whiskey.” The whiskey is unexpectedly delicious, full of fruit, chocolate, flint, minerals, and butterscotch, its mouthfeel pearly, round on all sides. The de facto entry-level spirit is called American, and put Brother Justus on the whiskey map. “This tastes like what American flavors are all about,” Steger exclaims. The malt in the barley, sourced from Minnesota-based Rahr Malting, brings out the richness of the Minnesota oak, whereby all of those sugars that the cold Minnesota climate renders layered and complex become notes of caramel, butterscotch, fruit, and cereal. Cold-Peated includes notes of Minnesota peat harvested from the Boreal Forest, but not smoke like its Scottish counterpart. “We do not smoke,” Steger explains. “We do direct filtration. Peat is a fossil fuel that hasn’t been fossilized like coal. We don’t have a tradition of smoking peat in Minnesota. I’d rather keep the carbon in the earth.” There is peat on the palate but it is subtle and integrated. Two versions of the spectacular Founder’s Reserve ended the afternoon: Founder’s One full of Luxardo cherry and chocolate like a Manhattan cocktail, and Founder’s Two dancing with the orange and cinnamon of an Old Fashioned.

Steger is an approachable, quietly confident man, driven yet gentle, a consummate ambassador for not only Minnesota whiskey but Minnesota as a whole.  As we walk around the stills, Steger, strolling placidly around the plucky original old still and the gleaming majestic new ones, like a priest marveling at the expanse of stained glass windows in his church, expresses gratitude for what he has.  “I wanted an immersive life, one that was creative and multi-level,” he says “I had that with the manuscripts. I wanted to replicate that richness and meaning, somehow and somewhere, and I believe I have done so with Brother Justus.” The original Brother Justus, the bootlegging monk who saw an opportunity to lift spirits with spirit, would wholeheartedly agree.