Wine & Spirits - April 2021 - 20

IKE SWANSON PLANTED his first
rye crop back in the fall of 2012.
By spring, the field was already
green, and he started to notice
pickup trucks slowing down as
they passed. Swanson's farm is
in Hallock, Minnesota, 150 miles
north of Fargo and 20 miles south
of the Canadian border. The rubberneckers turned out to
be other farmers, old timers who hadn't seen rye grown in
the area in more than half a century.
Swanson is among a new crop of craft distillers making
rye whiskey from locally grown grain-in fact, he grows his
own. These small distillers and farmer-distillers are part of
the larger story of rye's resurgence, which includes Canadian whisky's revival and big bourbon brands releasing new
rye expressions. According to the Distilled Spirits Council,
rye production is up 1,275 percent since 2009. But small
producers like Swanson are a special breed, guided by provenance and agricultural acumen. They focus on heritage
whiskey styles and select rye varieties in an effort to create
a spirit with a sense of place.
Far North Spirits, which Swanson started on his family
20

WINE & SPIRITS

APRIL 2021

ABOVE: THE HARVEST AT FAR NORTH
SPIRITS, WHICH
EXPERIMENTS WITH
DIFFERENT VARIETIES

farm in 2013, makes rye from several varieties. His greatgrandfather, who immigrated from Sweden, bought the
now 1,200-acre farm in the early 1930s to grow wheat and
barley. Swanson's grandfather farmed flax, which was used
in textiles and cigarette papers. His father grew sunflowers, sugar beets, canola and soybeans. Swanson envisioned
making something from what they grew on the farm. He
settled on growing rye to distill his own whiskey, an agricultural model that predated the founding of the country.
" I guess you could call it an epiphany, " Swanson says.
" Like, wait a minute, I know what you make out of grain.
This was the original value-added ag business. "
Rye, a wild grass native to the Euphrates River valley and
domesticated some 10,000 years ago, came to the United
States along with German, Dutch and Polish immigrants
settling in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Many
were farmers, who either had a still or had a neighbor with
a still. By the early 19th century, thousands of farmer-distillers were scattered across the country. In the Northeast,
they made rye whiskey. Pennsylvania alone, which popularized a rye style named for the Monongahela River valley,
produced three times as much whiskey-mostly rye-in
1810 as there was bourbon made that year.
Prohibition ended most whiskey production in the U.S.
After it was repealed, the government introduced farm subsidies, incentivizing the production of corn whiskey, but
not rye. The large operations of Kentucky and Tennessee
flourished, but distilling wouldn't return to many parts of
the country until the 21st century. Rye disappeared not just
from whiskey production; wheat won out as the preferred
grain for baking. And generations of farmers who had used
rye in crop rotations and as a cover crop to enhance soil
health abandoned those practices as industrial agriculture
replaced family farms. The demand for rye dried up.
No one in the Swanson family had ever grown rye.
Hardy and able to thrive in just about any type of soil, rye,
it turned out, grew well on Swanson's land. " Flat as a tabletop, " as he describes it, the land was once underwater, when
the prehistoric Lake Agassiz extended from North Dakota
to Minnesota and up into Manitoba and Saskatchewan. It
deposited thousands of years of sediment, leaving the soil
jet black.
For his rye whiskey, Swanson chose Hazlet, a Canadianbred variety that could stand up to northern Minnesota's
harsh winters. He loved its lush vanilla character and subdued spice, instead of rye's characteristic sharp black pepper. But he wondered how other varieties might differ. In
2015, Swanson and a researcher from the University of Minnesota secured a grant to study which rye varieties grow
and, ultimately, taste best in the state.
For the study, they planted 15 strains, distilled them
using identical methods, then gathered tasting data. The
results, released in March, showed that varieties bred for
climates like Minnesota's also made the best tasting distillates there.
" I was prepared for the null hypothesis, as in, we can't
find any statistically significant differences in flavor
between these varieties. Rye is rye. And that would be a
result, " says Swanson. " But there's actually a pretty dramatic difference. "
Swanson was curious how the distillates from the study
might age. He controlled for wood variations by using bar-

Wine & Spirits - April 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - April 2021