An hour west of Chicago, in Dekalb, Illinois, Whiskey Acres farms corn, rye, wheat, and barley, some of which is used to make its bourbon, rye, and vodka.
In the far reaches of northern Minnesota, just 40 miles south of the Canadian border, Michael Swanson’s family has been farming its 1,000 acres of land for over a century near the town of Hallock. A farm kid through and through, Swanson spent his childhood among fields of wheat, sugar beets, barley, canola, and sunflowers, and in a home surrounded by the sprawling Minnesota plains where his Swedish immigrant great-grandparents had settled. While both sides of Swanson’s family were in agriculture, neither had backgrounds in distilling, so it was a leap of faith when in 2013 he decided to devote some of his harvest toward something new: whiskey. “It made sense to me—to distill whiskey from grain that you grow just outside of the distillery itself. It gives you utmost control over the raw materials and their quality, as well as a story with an authentic feel,” he explains.
Before getting Far North Distillery off the ground, Swanson turned to the late craft whiskey guru Dave Pickerell. “I told Dave that above all else, I value the agricultural component in distilling—it’s the part that matters much more than what most might’ve thought in the past,” he says. Swanson kicked off his whiskey program with rye, specifically a Canadian variety called AC Hazlet, which is bred for winter hardiness—an obvious choice for the bone-chilling cold and wintry weather that bears down on northern Minnesota for nearly half the year. Soon enough, Swanson would begin exploring the nuances of other varieties as well.
It was Pickerell who had the seminal idea that determined Far North’s path. “Dave thought there would be something to say about grain varieties when it comes to flavor, though neither of us knew much about that at the time,” he says. In 2014, he reached out to a grain specialist at the University of Minnesota, asking if there was any research on rye varieties and their individual flavors—there was none, and so began Swanson’s own exploration into whether individual rye varieties changed the flavor of distillate, eventually culminating in a grant-funded study. He grew, milled, mashed, fermented, and distilled 15 varieties of rye, and was able to prove that, all other things being equal, the variety of rye alone did change the flavor of the whiskey.
The idea that grain quality, variety, or location will translate to a whiskey’s final flavor is met with different opinions depending on whom you talk to in the whiskey world, but the widely held belief tends to be that most of a whiskey’s flavor comes from fermentation and the barrel. The grains used in a whiskey’s mashbill are sometimes underappreciated, with American distillers relying primarily on commodity grains for commercial operations. These days, however, farmers-turned-distillers are pushing back against that notion.
From Field to Glass
“Grain quality matters more in making whiskey than we’ve given it credit for,” says Jamie Walters, president and CEO of Whiskey Acres Distilling Co. “We manage our grain more intensively to reduce any pathways to poor flavor, far more so than if I was feeding a hog or making fuel ethanol. Ultimately, great whiskey isn’t made—it’s grown.” Across his 1,600 acres of family farmland in DeKalb, Illinois (about 60 miles due west of Chicago), Walters grows anywhere from 10 to 12 different varieties of corn alongside rye, wheat, and barley. Just 10% of the farm’s crops are used by the distillery, appearing in a variety of bourbons and ryes, and a vodka.
This thinking also rings true at North Carolina-based Southern Distilling. Co-founder and CEO Peter Barger has farming in his DNA, and knew early on that no matter the size of his distillery, he’d prioritize the grains going into the mash. “I grew up on a family farm in a rural agrarian community, so suffice to say I was in the farm business long before I got into the distilling business,” he says. “Because of that, I knew when we first started out and were sourcing our grains from a big multinational that the results were troubling as the quality was inconsistent, and inconsistent grain produces inconsistent whiskey.” Concerned, he took those grains to a local university lab and discovered that they contained high levels of nitrogen. “That had an impact on the distillate, and I realized then that if I wasn’t controlling the farmland, then I couldn’t control the condition of the grains, which was ultimately going to impact the quality of my whiskey,” he explains. “We made the decision to do everything ourselves, and that included the grain.” Today, Barger owns, contracts, or leases around 1,000 acres of North Carolina farmland, planted predominantly to corn, with smaller lots of rye and barley. The majority of his business is in contract distillation, with some 20,000 barrels of whiskey produced annually (he estimates around 1% of that goes into Southern’s house brand of bourbons, rye, white whiskey, and bourbon cream liqueur).
To the west, in the high desert country of northwest Nevada, Colby Frey’s family has worked the land since 1854. Today’s Frey Ranch covers 1,500 acres and cultivates a great many crops, including wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, and alfalfa. While Frey began tinkering with whiskey making in the early 2000s and is now no stranger to distillation, he considers himself a farmer first and foremost. “There’s a disconnect between farmers and distillers, which is why I think it’s so valuable to understand both sides of the equation,” says Frey. “As with anything, better inputs will lead to better outputs. The saying goes that you can’t make good wine out of bad grapes—well, by starting off with better grains, [it’s likely] you’ll end up with better whiskey. We [farmers who distill] understand both sides, and that’s allowed us to make not only fun products, but better products.” Frey has explored a wide variety of grain types, growing what has worked well for the family over the years, but also trying new things. Last year, for instance, he grew 12 different varieties of corn, looking at how each one matured in the field, how it milled and fermented, and, most importantly, how it tasted once distilled.
A newer field-to-glass whiskey maker in Nevada is Minden Mill. Situated in a valley that’s bordered by the Sierra Nevada mountains to the west, Minden Mill (previously the mothballed Bently Heritage Distillery) was purchased by entrepreneur Bill Foley in May 2023, and released its first whiskeys last December. The distillery has hung its hat on its mashbills, focusing on estate-grown grains sourced from Bently Ranch, which is located just five miles down the road. For master distiller Joseph O’Sullivan, the whiskeys that spring from the high desert are something special. “Where we are is a difficult place to grow grain—we can get frost as late as June and as early as September— but these harsh conditions make for really rugged, hearty, and unique-tasting grain,” he says. “Our ryes, for instance, aren’t as spicy; they’re more floral and citrusy, even though they’re made from the same winter rye you can grow anywhere else. For all the farming difficulty, it creates a uniqueness and character of spirit that leads with terroir.”
This idea of terroir is furthered through the distillery’s choice of corn: Earth Tone dent, an heirloom varietal. With metallic-hued kernels of green, pink, blue, brown, and bronze, the corn is striking, especially when compared to the standard No.-2 yellow dent corn, and O’Sullivan says there’s even more going on than meets the eye—Earth Tone yields site-specific savory and cola qualities that are uncommon in bourbons made from yellow dent corn, and are further emphasized by the local growing conditions.
Heirloom Varieties
Odds are you’ve heard of heirloom crops before, but perhaps not in relation to whiskey. Heirloom grains are open-pollinated varieties developed pre-World War II that have been passed down for generations or sourced from seed banks, and are not subject to genetic modification. Whiskeys made from these grains have appeared on shelves with greater frequency in recent years, as more distillers, and particularly craft operations like Minden Mill, forego the commodity grain system in favor of varieties that are reflective of the places where they’re grown, and thus are most always hyper-local to the distillery using them.
That’s certainly the case at Charleston, South Carolina-based High Wire Distilling, which has prioritized heirloom grains from the start. Its bourbons are made from Jimmy Red corn, a variety that was nearly extinct in South Carolina when owners Ann Marshall and Scott Blackwell got their start. “We’re a coastal community, and Jimmy Red is a coastal maize; it belongs here in this beautiful place, and it’s thrived here—that’s what makes it special, and the whiskeys by association,” says Marshall.
The same goes for High Wire’s rye, which is made from Abruzzi, an Italian variety that made its way to the Carolinas in the early 20th century and is prized by bakers. For Marshall, the heirloom varieties separate the distillery from what would otherwise be a crowded field. “Our bottles, in a grand whiskey economy, are always going to be different from the pack—they’re so rooted in place, and have a breadth of complexity and community,” she says.
Out west in Atwater, California, David John Souza’s family has farmed Merced rye, an heirloom variety native to the Golden State, in the same place for well over 100 years. For much of that time, the rye was used as a cover crop—not planted for harvesting, but instead to improve soil health and manage a host of other issues like erosion, pests, water absorption, and more for succeeding crops. That changed in 2007, when Souza bought a book on distillation and taught himself how to make whiskey. The spirits he’s ended up making at his distillery, under the Corbin Cash label, are distinct to both him and his region, in large part because of how and what he farms.
Corbin Cash rye is typically dry and spicy, but occasionally other parts of the farm inform on how the whiskey tastes. “We own a little over 1,000 acres, and we rent a little over 1,000 acres,” he says. “We rent from neighbors who have almond orchards, and when they pull [the trees] out, they like to do some rotational crop with our sweet potatoes. We’ll plant the rye first, then farm sweet potatoes on it for a few years, and then give the land back to our neighbors, who farm trees. One year, we tasted these barrels that were…different, to say the least, from our usual rye, which generally gets its characteristics from the grain and the aging temperature.” Souza explains that the rye was drinking like a scotch malt, with sweet cereal notes that overshadowed the usual spiciness of the rye, and the culprit appeared to be the sweet potatoes that had shared the same earth. “The only difference that year was the soil—everything else was the same, down to the amount of rain,” he observes. “Rye that comes out of the sweet potato fields gives us more mouthfeel, more dried fruit notes versus the rye from a field that’s planted to almonds first.”
The experiment is similar to Swanson’s research at Far North, though certainly less intentional (at least at the beginning). These days, Swanson is intent on taking his theories of farm-rooted flavor variation, and those of similarly minded farm distillers, even further. “I’m convinced that pollinators, burrowing insects, soil health, soil type, crop rotation—all these things contribute to the flavor that’s within the rye I grow here, and it all comes out in the whiskey” he says. “Place really makes a difference. It’s so important for this process, the same as how you treat that place.”
The farm distilling mindset has certainly led to some lively (and often endless) discussions about terroir among whiskey lovers, but all of that has contributed to greater focus on quality, and not just among farm distillers, but across the entire whiskey world.
Gaining Standards for Estate-Made Whiskeys
The tiny Hudson Valley hamlet of Ancram, New York is a picturesque place punctuated by lush green pastures, forested hillsides, and small-town charm. The area’s first settlers were Scottish farmers (in fact, the town takes its name from founder Robert Livingston’s hometown of Anchoram, Scotland), and today that agrarian nature is alive and well, with 73% of the land still farmed. Taking full advantage of this pastoral backdrop is Hillrock Estate, a distillery that opened its doors in 2010 and has evangelized the gospel of estate-grown whiskey ever since.
Together with his wife and Hillrock co-owner Cathy Franklin, Jeffery Baker has built Hillrock’s farm holdings from just 10 acres in 2010 to nearly 1,000 acres today. The distillery has played a critical role in bringing barley and rye back to the region—both were major crops in the area throughout the early 1800s—and it’s also now set to be part of estategrown whiskey far beyond the Hudson Valley, by way of its involvement in the Estate Whiskey Alliance (EWA).
The EWA officially came together in September 2024, with Hillrock as a founding member alongside American distilleries Heaven Hill, Maker’s Mark, Thousand Acres Distilling Co., and Western Kentucky Distilling Co.; Canadian distillery Black Fox Farm & Distillery; the University of Kentucky; and Kentucky-based Peterson Farms, a family farming operation that works 16,000 acres in the state. At the heart of the Alliance is a push to elevate estate-grown whiskey to a category of its own, by giving it guidelines akin to those that rule estate-grown wine, and espousing the tangible flavor differences that farm-to-glass whiskeys have over their commercial counterparts. “The mission is to create standards—right now, there are very strict guidelines with the Tax and Trade Bureau for estate production in wine, but there’s nothing of the sort in whiskey,” Baker explains. “It’s also mind-boggling to me that a lot of the commercial whiskey industry has been saying terroir doesn’t matter, and it’ll be one of our priorities to start doing some testing, just like what Mike Swanson has done at Far North, and prove that there are actual chemical and flavor profile differences that stem all the way back to the farm.”
Thus far, the EWA has created a certified logo that distilling members can use on their labels. In order to become a member, distillers must be milling, mashing, fermenting, and distilling on-site, and at least two-thirds of their grains must come from land that’s owned or otherwise controlled by the distillery. Though still very much in its nascent days, the EWA has attracted a number of new members, including Minden Mill, Whiskey Acres, and Frey Ranch, and more are poised to join this year. In time, Baker believes the EWA can put estate whiskey on the map in a serious way. “With more industry support, this is going to become a more mainstream concept in the whiskey world, and whiskey drinkers are going to gravitate toward it,” he says. “We want to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact terroir does exist in whiskey, and it does matter.”
