Microdistilleries are thriving around the state and country
By Matthew Miller
Lansing State Journal
EAST LANSING (AP) — Kris Berglund, the father of Michigan’s distilling industry, was on a talking jag: the etymology of Swedish surnames, Finnish road signs, the family farm he owns in Illinois corn country. He’d flown across six time zones the day before. His head hurt. It was, he pointed out as he cracked a beer, after five o’clock in Sweden. In East Lansing, it wasn’t quite noon.
Berglund is in his mid-50s, gray bearded and blue eyed, the founder or co-founder of a half-dozen companies. That’s alongside his academic appointments at Michigan State University, where he is a university distinguished professor of food science and chemical engineering, and at Luleå University of Technology on the Swedish coast not far below the Arctic Circle. He is the head of MSU’s Artisan Distilling Program, the author of a popular (and free) practical guide for small distilleries, and “our only guru in the business,” Bill Owens, president of the American Distilling Institute, told the Lansing State Journal.
Berglund wears his guru status lightly. What he exudes is enthusiasm.
“We’re going to have 24 seats and another five to eight at the bar.” The topic of conversation had shifted. He was talking about his latest project.
The venture is called Red Cedar Spirits. It’s a partnership with Uncle John’s Fruit House Winery that brings together the St. Johns cider mill’s distilling license, MSU’s German-made stills and Berglund’s expertise. It operates out of former public works building that was shuttered by the city of East Lansing in 2004 and purchased by Berglund and his wife, Ingham County commissioner Dianne Holman, in 2011 for their biochemical company, Working Bugs.
MSU’s distilling equipment now occupies space on the building’s south end. There is a new wooden bar in a former garage bay. If inspections go well, the garage will be a public tasting room. Bottles of rye whiskey, apple brandy and vodka already lined a shelf on the wall behind the bar.
Berglund said he wants the tasting room to be “almost like a portal on this industry for Michigan.”
He wants the company to continue the work of incubating it.
Microdistilleries are thriving around the county, but their success in Michigan has a lot to do with a slow dismantling of the barriers to entry. A distilling license in the early 1990s cost $10,000. In 1996, in part as a favor to the state’s fruit farmers, the Legislature created a new class of license that allowed winemakers to distill fruit brandies. That license cost $100 a year.
In 2008, Berglund approached then-state Rep. Barb Byrum with a proposal to create a small distilling license that would allow distillers to make whatever sort of spirits they cared to and allow sales on site. It was, Byrum said, a clear opportunity to boost agritourism in the state.
The Legislature passed it with near unanimity. The fact that the economic impact of the change was estimated at $400 million probably didn’t hurt.
There were no small distilleries in the state in 1996. There were perhaps 10 a decade later. Now there are more than 30 license holders, though not all of them are selling their wares, and others still in the process of starting up.
Unlike beer and wine, there is no amount of distilled spirits that can be made legally without a license, and, to get a license, it’s first necessary to set up a fully operational distillery.
