Constructed in 1976 to produce Michter's whiskey in Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, the stills have come full circle and are now in use at Michter's Fort Nelson Distillery.
In 1975, Pennco Distillery, a contract distiller in Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, was on its last legs and facing liquidation. At a sheriff’s sale, a group of local investors pooled their resources to buy Pennco for $175,000—less than $1 million in today’s money. One small brand for whom Pennco still made whiskey was Michter’s, owned by an entrepreneur named Lou Forman. That arrangement continued under the new ownership, and ultimately the Michter’s name would become attached to the distillery itself.
The new Pennco owners were Dr. M. Dale Yocum, attorney Philip Davis, and scrap metal dealer Abe Grosky. With Forman’s assistance, the group got creative quickly. Yocum’s son Marty was named director of tourism, and instituted an ad campaign that included billboards to draw tourists. It was a big success, with 2,000 people in attendance on the first day alone. Encouraged, the investors decided to give visitors “something else to see,” according to Marty Yocum. They would install a pot still distillery in the original Bomberger Distillery building on the Pennco property, adjacent to the company’s massive glass-encased column still tower. No American distillery had used pot stills since Prohibition, so it was certainly a novelty.
Louisville’s Vendome Copper and Brass Works was commissioned to fabricate the stills needed to re-create a Pennsylvania pot still whiskey. Vendome president Tom Sherman designed the equipment. “It consisted of a mash pot and a condenser and a hi-wine still with reflux trays and condenser,” he recalls. A quote from Vendome was drafted on December 6, 1975, for eight pieces of equipment, including a 550-gallon mash still and a 110-gallon “whiskey still” for a total cost of $21,360 (about $120,000 today). The equipment left Vendome’s facility headed for Schaefferstown on February 20, 1976, and was installed in time for the nation’s bicentennial summer tourism crush. The plan worked; the distillery received over 100,000 visitors in 1976. At its peak, Michter’s hosted more than 200,000 visitors annually, remarkable numbers by the standards of the day.
The whiskey from these stills was first offered as white “quarter whiskey,” an homage to colonial low-alcohol drinking habits. The only fully aged whiskey from these stills was filled into 500 shiny gold-plated decanters shaped like the stills and were offered to the Michter’s collectors’ club.
The process of distilling on the pots was also carefully calculated to appeal to visitors. Though grain for the column still was trucked in, the “mini stills,” as they were known, used bagged grain transported in a cart pulled by “Mick the mule.” After he delivered the grain, Mick would be attached to a rope slung over a pulley and hoist the sacks up to the production floor.
Tom Sherman sets the next scene: “After another owner or two, the distillery closed [in 1990] and the equipment went at auction [c. 1991]. A guy in eastern Kentucky bought the stills and was going to open a distillery with David Beam as the master distiller. That fell through and Beam wound up with the stills.” For 20 years those stills languished in a garage next to his motel in Bardstown.
2011 brought two people to this tale who had no idea the other was considering the same eventual outcome for the equipment. Chagrin Falls, Ohio-based Tom’s Foolery Distillery owner Tom Herbruck wanted to begin making whiskey, while Joe Magliocco had acquired the Michter’s brand and was working on rebuilding it as a Kentucky-based company. Magliocco contacted Beam, only to learn that the equipment was sold to Tom’s Foolery the day before.
In 2015, Herbruck contacted Magliocco to let him know he was willing to sell the setup. Michter’s now had the Fort Nelson visitor center underway, and it would be the stills’ new home. Everything was dismantled and moved into storage until construction was complete. All the copper was refurbished by Vendome except for the worm tub condenser, which was replaced with a shell-and-tube condenser in order to increase the whiskey’s copper contact.
On January 15, 2018, the stills were installed, but it wasn’t going to be easy.
Rob Sherman of Vendome was there: “We installed the equipment on a Monday morning at 4:00 a.m. Early that morning we had an ice storm and sleet was falling; it was around 17° F out when we started. The forklift we had rented could not come up the icy hill on 8th Street. One of our guys went back to Vendome, 2 1/2 miles away, and drove our forklift down Main Street in the freezing rain. When he pulled up, his eyes were frozen open, and he was covered in a sheet of ice. After that we moved everything into the building and the guys wrapped up around lunchtime.”
This was a hard-earned homecoming in every regard. The stills were built in Louisville, moved to Pennsylvania to make Michter’s whiskey, and have now been reinstalled in Louisville to once again produce whiskey under the Michter’s brand. When Vendome reworked the equipment, there were sons and grandsons of the stills’ original fabricators involved with their rebirth. Even David Beam reenters the story, as his grandson Ben, then the distillery operator at Fort Nelson, was the first to run the system in Kentucky.
Their smaller size provides the flexibility and experimental nature of a pilot system. Magliocco says, “What we’ve learned from the stills at Fort Nelson has influenced some of our innovations at [Michter’s Distillery in] Shively,” so these amazing pieces of handcrafted copper continue to influence American distilling nearly 50 years on, but we can’t even begin to calculate the miles they’ve traveled to get there.
