A Decade of Whiskey at Glacier Distilling

In 2013, two years after Glacier Distilling Company first started making spirits, the fledgling business ran out of whiskey. 

“We closed the doors and put a sign out that said we were out,” owner Nic Lee said to a small group of people gathered in the company’s barrel room on the first day of October. “We had some serious discussions about whether we should open the barrels we had left.”

Instead, Lee and his partners decided to keep the few barrels they had left in storage from the distillery’s initial batches in 2011, including the first full-sized 53-gallon barrel of North Fork Rye Whiskey. 

“This barrel has moved around the warehouse through each expansion and it’s seen some crazy stuff,” Lee said, standing over the barrel. “It’s a miracle we kept it for this long.”

Glacier Distilling Company began distilling whiskey in 2011, and to celebrate its decade milestone, it is bottling the first 10-year whiskey to be distilled, aged and bottled in Montana. 

“This does mean it’s going to be the best bottle of 10-year whiskey distilled, barreled and bottled in Montana,” Lee said as he prepared to remove the bung from the barrel. 

The spirit, put in the cask on July 18, 2011, is an 117-proof version of the flagship North Fork Rye Whiskey, which the distillery also sells as a two- and five- year spirit. 

Only 120 bottles of the 10-year rye will be filled, with 118 for sale to the public for $235 each. Bottle No. 1 was auctioned off during the 10-year celebration for a winning bid of $10,000, with proceeds going to the Boys and Girls Club, the bidder’s choice charity. 

The idea for the distillery came to Lee and his friends one night in a snowstorm during a discussion over whether they could survive an apocalypse. The general consensus was that the while everyone felt they could keep their families safe and survive off the land, the one amenity they wouldn’t have access to would be a supply of whiskey. 

The only obvious solution was for someone to start a distillery. 

The plans for the distillery were drawn on the back of a napkin, and by the end of 2010 the company was licensed for operation. 

“In those early days we would be sleeping at the still because we couldn’t figure out how to make it work,” Lee said. “We were just winging it in the beginning.”

As the distillery slowly expanded, it added to its liquor lineup each year, starting with a clear, un-aged whiskey inspired by Josephine Doody’s moonshine operation in the 1920s, then expanding to the mainstay North Fork, Bad Rock Rye and Wheatfish whiskeys. 

In recent years the distillery has embraced a line of brandies that allow the distillers to experiment and show off their skills. 

“We like to make spirits because they’re fun to make,” said operations director Pat Cattelino.

The Coram tasting room offers the distillery’s full range of spirits, many of which can only be purchased onsite. The tasting room also benefits from its proximity to Glacier National Park, providing a steady stream of tourists driving past the Whiskey Barn. 

“We’ve started to lean into the tourism part,” Cattelino said. “We’ll get lots of visitors who don’t really speak English, but luckily it’s alcohol — you toss it down and call it a good time.”

Lee said that the enormity of the occasion hit him this past spring when he was looking at the dates stamped on the barrels in the store room and realized one was about to surpass the decade mark. 

“It feels really lucky that we got this far,” Lee said. “We just had one lucky friend and one lucky neighbor after another to get us this far.”

“In the world of whiskey, 10 years is not a terribly long time, but for us, it has been,” he added. “Hopefully, in another 10 years we’ll be able to try this again and taste the 20-year version.”

Glacier Distilling Company is open from noon to 6 p.m. Thursday through Sunday during the winter.

For more information, visit www.glacierdistilling.com.