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MINNESOTA DISTILLED
Phil Steger’s love of the state led him to create the first whiskey made purely from Minnesota’s land, water and woods. WRITTEN BY FRANK BURES | PHOTOGRAPHY BY THE RESTAURANT PROJECT
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n weekends in the early 1990s, Phil Steger would drive his truck to Duluth, park it, then stand on the road with his thumb out along Lake Superior. “Hitchhiking was my escape,” he says. “I would crawl up on the side of the road, pitch my tent in the underbrush, then go back and hitchhike. It was a way to meet people I would never meet, and to just walk the shore.” After his sophomore year of college, Steger took a year off school and hitched all the way to Grand Marais. Since it was fall, a local outfitter let him stay in one of their off-grid cabins, as long as he maintained the ski trails. The owner would drop off supplies now and then. “I would walk these trails,” Steger recalls, “and come to these areas of grass that looked like a meadow. But I would step in and start going down. Then I realized: ‘Oh, this is a bog!’ That's how I discovered how much bogland Minnesota has.” Steger actually grew up on the state’s southwestern plains in the town of Marshall. His family lived in the last house within the city limits. After their lawn, it was just alfalfa, corn and soybeans. But in his senior year of high school, Steger left those plains for northern England as an exchange student. He lived in a village called Whitworth, on the edge of the West Pennine Moors, where he encountered his first vast boglands. “It was this incredibly cool, gloomy, atmospheric landscape,” he recalls. “A very desolate place.” Whenever he went hiking there, his host family would warn him not to stray from the path because people sometimes disappeared in the moors. Historically some of the peat—the dense layer of undecayed plant matter found in bogs—was burned in the process of making whiskey. Peat smoke is what gives “peated” whiskey its rich, earthy flavor. When Steger came home and lived in the woods outside Grand Marais, it dawned on him that Minnesota has about the same amount of peatland as the whole of the United Kingdom, according to The Nature Conservancy and the UK Office of National Statistics. In fact, Minnesota has more than any U.S. state besides Alaska. “There are six million acres of bogland in Minnesota,” Steger says. “That’s more than Scotland. More than Ireland. This could be called the Republic of Peatlandia instead of Minnesota.” Eventually, Steger went back to school and got his theology degree at St. John’s University. After that, he worked a variety of jobs: managing a communal home for unhoused people, importing humanitarian aid to Iraq and working as the director of Friends for a Non-Violent World. Then in 2007, a rare opportunity presented itself: He was hired by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in Collegeville to photograph ancient manuscripts of remnant Christian communities across the Middle East. These were under threat from the instability caused by the Iraq War. For two years he traveled widely, taking photos of sacred texts. “It was the coolest, most meaningful job ever,” Steger says, “but I knew it would end. So I tried to think ‘What am I going to do after this?’” Working with 800-year-old texts started him thinking about things like community and identity and connection. Those books had survived wars, floods, fires and much more. For Steger, they became a touchstone for thinking about how to take simple things—animal skins, crushed plants, crushed minerals—and make them into a piece of culture, alive with meaning. “I knew I could never create something that important,” Steger says, “but I wanted to put my energies into something that could hold a
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connection to land and community and history.” Such were the thoughts rolling through his mind in 2007, when he took a tour of the Jim Beam factory in Kentucky. The guide talked about how the whiskey was made: where the water, barley and oak barrels come from. Steger thought: Minnesota has plenty of water, oak for barrels, and barley. “Why,” he wondered, “don't we already have a world-class whiskey?” And there’s peat galore. “Minnesota has peat that Kentucky doesn’t have,” he says, “that Tennessee doesn’t have, that Texas doesn’t have. It’s this unique place where the continents and landscapes and the bioregions meet. And I thought we could—through whiskey—create a microcosm of what it means to live here.” In 2011, the “Surly Bill” was passed by the Minnesota legislature, and it suddenly became feasible to start a “micro-distillery.” By then, Steger had been studying the whiskey-making process, the industry, and the regulations for several years. He also went to law school and earned his degree in 2013. That same year, he made the first tentative steps toward what would become Brother Justus Whiskey. He named his fledgling business after a Benedictine monk in central Minnesota who, in the 1920s under Prohibition, taught people how to make moonshine safely so they wouldn’t kill their neighbors. Steger was keenly aware of how precious peatlands are to the health of the environment. The plants in them don’t decompose, so they store huge amounts of carbon. While peat has long been a coveted source of fuel, burning it—as conventional whiskey makers do—releases all that carbon back into the atmosphere. One estimate holds that 5 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are caused by degraded or burned peatlands. However, a 2022 study published in the journal Frontiers in Climate argues that figure might be underestimating the real impact by 200 to 300 percent because of the growing phenomenon of peatland wildfires in Canada and elsewhere. So while Steger loved the tradition and the taste of peated whiskey, he knew he couldn’t burn Minnesota’s peat. “I didn’t think I had a right to dig it out, set it on fire, and turn all those 8,000 years of carbon back into atmospheric carbon. So we had to invent something else.” Steger started writing to Minnesota peat producers asking for samples. Much of it was too rooty, or with plant structures that made it hard to use with whiskey, unless you like drinking mud. But one company, American Peat Technology in Aitkin, had developed a product that comes out like coffee grounds with a rich, smooth, earthy aroma. APT uses peat from wetlands that were drained around 1900 to create farmland. The peat they harvest from the ground has roughly 84 percent moisture content. To bring the moisture content down to 10 to 14 percent, APT dries the peat in a furnace heated with wood chips. The company sells most of its dried peat to farmers as a soil additive, or to wastewater facilities. When Steger got the APT sample, he knew it was a breakthrough. “This is it,” he thought, “we can do something like this.” For several years, Steger experimented with different ways to infuse his whiskey with the peat—in tea bags, or loose grounds, or by cold pressing. But one morning in 2019, Steger woke up with a strange feeling. He turned to his wife. “I have to go to the bog today,” he said. “What?” she asked. “I have to meet face to face with Doug [Green] and Peggy [Jones, at American Peat Technology]. And I have to do it today.” “Why?” she asked. “They need to know what we're doing,” he said, “because I need more time to get there.” Steger emailed Doug and Peggy, and asked if they could meet at 1pm. 46 | NORTH
EXPERIENCE
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EXPERIENCE
They said, “Sure.” So he drove to Aitkin. He said: “I think your peat product could be to whiskey what hops was to craft beer. And I think cold-peated whiskey could be what IPA was to craft brewing. And we solve a major environmental problem with traditional peated whiskey.” Then he said, “Here, taste it.” The whiskey was earthy and full, with hints of dark chocolate. There was a sweet edge like caramel, as well as a hint of sea salt. It tasted rich like the soil, but smooth like a river. And at the very end was an unusual tingle on the tongue. Steger went on to explain how he was going to build the market. He said he needed five years. Peggy looked at Doug. Doug said, “You got it. As of today, we’re exclusive for five years.” “Great,” said Peggy, “now I know how to answer that email.” The email had come that morning from Diageo, the alcohol giant that owns Johnny Walker, Seagram’s and Crown Royal, among many other global brands. They’d asked for a sample of APT peat. After the meeting, Peggy wrote back and told them no. Since then Brother Justus has grown. The company moved into its second distillery in Northeast Minneapolis, complete with a cavernous
tasting room. Steger’s team figured out how to run whiskey through the APT peat using an active, steady flow cold-press. They call it the “Aitkin County Process” and they have patents pending in several countries. They sold their first bottle of Cold-Peated American Single Malt in 2020. In 2023, the prizes really started rolling in: a Platinum Medal at the 2023 ASCOT Awards; a Gold Medal at the North American Bourbon & Whiskey Competition; a Gold Medal at the Craft Competition International Awards and more. The list of awards, at the time of this writing, is 20-some deep. Currently, Brother Justus has 46,000 gallons of whiskey aging in oak barrels that are crafted in Avon, Minnesota. Once ready, the aged whiskey will be cold-pressed with 8,000 years of Minnesota’s botanical heritage. Once the peat has done its job, some of it is made into a highend soap for sale in the Brother Justus gift shop. But most of it is composted back into the soil. “My hope,” says Steger, “is that if we can connect people to where our food comes from, and where our whiskey comes from, we'll care about it and take care of it. That’s why I feel so much passion about this: because I love this land, and I want it to be here for 8,000 more years.”
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