How Ari Sussman helped shape Michigan spirits and why he thinks the best whiskey stories are still ahead
DISTILLER, BLENDER, STORYTELLER W R I T T E N BY M AG G I E K I M B E R L /// P H OTO S P R OV I D E D BY A R I SU S S M A N
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ri Sussman can probably be best described as the Johnny Appleseed of Michigan spirits. He has lent his expertise to more than 100 brands in the production of more than 300 products and has worked directly with distilleries including Ann Arbor Distilling, which he co-founded, Mammoth Distilling, where he is the whiskey maker, as well as Traverse City Whiskey Co., Detroit City Distilling, Three Chord Bourbon, and Outsider Spirits. He’s also worked with Michigan farm distilleries and spent several years working at Michigan State University with Kris Berglund, a professor of food science, agriculture, and distilling, who Sussman considers his mentor.
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“I was an itinerant bartender and occasional winemaker in my 20s,” Sussman recalled. “I discovered at a place called the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a collection called the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, which contained many first-edition cocktail books from the 1890s, 1880s, even before, as well as menus from restaurants throughout the 20th century.” As Sussman pored through the historic cocktail books, he began to wonder where he could find some of the long-forgotten ingredients. He eventually decided he would need to learn to make the ingredients himself and began searching for classes on how to make distilled spirits. His searches kept coming up with Dr. Berglund at MSU. He signed up for a weekend workshop, and the two became fast friends.
“I remember coming home and telling my wife after the workshop, ‘These are my people, I found them,’” said Sussman. “I went there with the intention of recreating old liqueurs and spirits, and I ended up leaving with a job. He brought me in as a project manager working with craft distillers and trying to bring their visions to life through his lab. It was an incredible opportunity to be mentored by Dr. Berglund for about five years.” During his tenure there, Sussman and Berglund helped to shape the landscape of Michigan distilling through work with distilleries across the state. But it was in his role with Mammoth Distilling that he discovered one of Michigan’s almost-forgotten secrets: It was once the top rye producing state in the nation and the epicenter of a long-forgotten rye varietal once favored by distillers including Seagram’s, Schenley, and Michter’s in Pennsylvania: Rosen rye. “We had decided at Mammoth that we wanted to focus on Northern spirits, and to us, that meant, among other things, focusing on rye whiskey,” Sussman said. “I went to Michigan State and started looking in the archives. We knew that Michigan State had a very long, 150-year tradition of agricultural W W W . ARTISANSPIRITMAG . C O M