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PINK BENCH DISTILLING Turns Bear Bait into Beverages with a Taste of Place
Written by Gabe Toth /// Photography by Amanda Joy Christensen
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ink Bench Distilling in Troy, Montana, is trying to help reduce human-bear conflict in their area. Spirits just happen to be the avenue that presented itself to owners Shawna Kelsey and Kris Boyd. The pair worked together at a local nonprofit and were tasked with creating community projects to help reduce the dangerous interactions occurring when bears would come into town to forage. “One of the biggest issues is fruit trees in people's backyards,” Kelsey said. “We have tons of fruit trees here, and a lot of them just don't get picked. So we started this apple festival with the farmers market, and the purpose of that was to celebrate the fruit and give people a reason to pick their trees and press cider and make apple pie and do all this fun stuff while learning about bear safety and electric fencing and all that.” The festival was a hit and recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, but she said even pressing 1,200 pounds of apples into cider is a drop in the bucket when it comes to reducing the amount of fruit beckoning the local wildlife into town. Boyd explained that Troy is the lowest-elevation town in Montana, and the surrounding Kootenai Valley had been marketed as the fruit basket of Montana due to the mild climate. “The initial settlement focus was timber industry and mining, but also potentially fruit production,” she said. “Everybody's got some fruit trees in their backyard, four to six, or some people have 20. There's a lot of small homestead backyard orchards around.” As the property owners age and are no longer able to manage the trees, she said, the fruit doesn’t get picked and the trees themselves get overgrown, “and you can only use so many apples in a year,” Boyd said. Meanwhile, as property transfers to new hands, the trees don’t get cut down but are allowed to go rogue. “We just have a lot of feral old apple trees that need some care in order to allow people to get them picked again,” she added. 32
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