2022 ARTISAN SPIRIT OF THE YEAR

2022ARTISAN SPIRIT OF THE YEAR

Johnny Jeffery AND John McKee

Two years ago the team at Artisan Spirit Magazine announced our first ever “Artisan Spirit of the Year.” The annual recognition is not chosen by the team at Artisan Spirit directly, instead, a group of industry peers takes on the monumental task of nominating and selecting an individual who personifies the aspects of quality production, mentorship, community building, innovative thinking, and leadership. The industry is full of exceptional people and supremely talented distillers, which makes it extremely difficult to choose an individual who deserves to be highlighted. So this year’s committee of distilling peers didn't pick an individual. Instead they selected two incredible people to share the honor. It is our great honor to recognize Johnny Jeffery and John McKee as the 2022 Artisan Spirit(s) of the Year.

The first time Johnny Jeffery visited his new friend John McKee in Butte, Montana, he quips that John took him “cold springing” — a frantic dash through subzero weather to plunge into a promised hot spring that turned out to be more lukewarm than toasty.

Consider it a highly effective instance of trauma bonding. The two are still fast friends — close enough that they volunteered to answer one another’s interview questions when we sat down with them, the co-recipients of this year’s Artisan Spirit Distiller(s) of the Year award. Read on to learn more about how both got into distilling in the first place, why personal values belong in business, and how the landscape of the inland West inspires their work. “A lot of the old-school in distilling is about finding and keeping the secrets. We built community on information-sharing, not on the intellectual property we built and kept in a vault.”

— JOHNNY JEFFERY

“I don’t care what kind of mountain man or hermit you are, somebody made your axe blade. You can’t do it alone, and as soon as you think you can, you’re doomed to fail. You need collaboration.”

— JOHN MCKEE

How did you each get into the distilling industry?

John: Can I answer for Johnny? OK good. Johnny was in music, mostly in the background — rigging, the production side, not on the front side making it. Also, at some point in his past he was a hardcore endurance runner, and he used to do product reviews so he could get free shoes. During that time he decided to go to Michigan State University’s master’s program. When he got in, he was trying to get an artisan distilling program going, and it wasn’t flowing the way everyone wanted to go. So then he went and launched Death Door’s massive expansion and did a kickass job there. After that he went down to Santa Fe and started making some of the best whiskey out there in the guise of Colkegan. He had been consulting in the industry forever, and that led him to Bently Heritage, where he’s been since the very start of the idea. He’s taken abandoned buildings and dry ground and turned it into a massive distillery with a bitching backstory. Now he lives in Reno with his wife and kids who are tragically, tragically smart, and he’s currently the general manager of Bently Heritage Estate Distillery in Minden, Nevada.

Johnny: You did pretty good! All right, so John grew up in Butte. He moved around and eventually studied environmental engineering and was doing biofuel stuff, like building truly massive municipal plants to turn cities over to sustainable fuels using waste oil and grease trap oil and butter. And coming out of that, he had a little bit of a collision with a personal dream where his “retire-at-40” mission kind of fell apart. So he went back to Butte with his lovely wife and said, ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ There they were, looking around at this community they both adored, and said, what if I took that experience and started something to support this community and create jobs and build wealth and employ people and clean things up a bit? So they launched Headframe [Spirits], based on their idea of making spirits and building something cool for the community to center around, and here we are. He is a pillar of this community. I have seen the way people react to him cruising around town.

SELECTION GUIDELINES

Base Selection Standards: › An individual (not a business) › A distiller (active or retired) › Having the fundamental skills in distilling, blending, fermentation, aging, etc. › Recognized as a quality producer › Distillery size is not a consideration (craft or macro) › Distillery ownership is not a requirement

Education & Values: › A steward of knowledge who educates passionately › Fosters community › Collaborates › Not a “jackass” (aka, no history of shouting people down, pretentiousness, bigotry, sexism, etc.)

Innovation: › Willing to push boundaries while still understanding and learning from tradition › Not afraid to learn from failure

Advocacy & Leadership: › A leader in legislative or community issues and regulations (state/ federal/guilds/associations) › Industry advocacy to customers and others outside the boundary of the distillery › Celebrity status within the distilling industry is not a selection requirement

SELECTION COMMITTEE

Nicole Austin

GEORGE DICKLE 2020 Artisan Spirit of the Year

Chris Montana

DU NORD SOCIAL SPIRITS 2021 Artisan Spirit of the Year

Amber Pollock

BACKWARDS DISTILLING COMPANY P.T. Wood

WOOD’S HIGH MOUNTAIN DISTILLERY

Courtney McKee*

HEADFRAME SPIRITS *Self recused during final round of selection

Jake Holshue

ROGUE SPIRITS You’ve both been really active in the Good Guys Distillers group. Why has that organization been so meaningful to you?

John: It matters to the people who are in it. That’s been the reason for its longevity and ongoing success. The people in it care to be there, and care to give their time. A phrase I steal from my wife all the time is that it allows for professional vulnerability. We’re all known in the industry in one way or another, but we all make mistakes, and you don’t want to go onto a random forum and say, ‘I didn’t ferment this right.’ You want a place where you can ask questions and trust the answers and that the people you’re communicating with have your back.

Johnny: We were all seeing each other at conferences, chatting each other up, making phone calls, but this was a way we could maintain those relationships with people we were seeing year after year. At first, we needed a place to maintain relationships. Then it became apparent there is this need to share information in a safe place. And now, we’re finding there’s a need for meaningful work outside of professional development. We’re starting to piece together some projects to work on as professionals that support the industry. Like the Good Deeds project.

What’s something important you each learned from the Good Deeds project?

John: What I learned is that it was way too long in the making. Somebody should have been doing this five or ten years ago. This should have happened a long time ago. Hopefully other people will take note and try to duplicate it, or do other versions or projects with the same impact.

Johnny: A big thing I learned is that a lot of people feel helpless to make meaningful differences with issues that feel huge and intractable. When you present a concept and offer to be the avenue through which some good can be done, a ton of people immediately step up because they’re looking for ways to contribute and they don’t know where to put the energy they have to offer. There’s so much desire in people to try to fix the world we’ve broken, and just taking the first steps is what gets things moving.

You’re both located in the Intermountain West — John’s in Montana, and Johnny’s in Nevada. How do those locations impact your approach to work?

John: I’ve lived all over, but I grew up here. There’s a map I saw once, it’s a major streets map of the United States. You go east of the Mississippi, there’s this grid system that goes all the way to the East Coast. West of the Mississippi, it follows the rivers. It looks more like a tree. We’re just a little more spread out, and it yields a different ethos. My brain works differently when I’m here versus in upstate New York or in Indiana.

Johnny: I grew up in Chicago, in the city, and it took me a while after leaving Chicago to recognize the changes that happen when you’re surrounded by space and can see the sky. As much as I love cities for the generative energy they provide, there is something about the fact that in most of these Western cities, you can hop in the car and in half an hour be where there are trees and rivers and mountains and let your brain lose from the grid John was talking about — which is more than physical. It’s a metaphysical grid, it structures your thinking. It’s human creation, not nature-oriented. There’s a beautiful kind of openness in having access to raw nature out here.

Both Headframe and Bently Heritage have important values-based aspects: environmental sustainability, community and corporate responsibility, and various third-party certifications. Why is that important to each of you?

Johnny: In every aspect of the world we have built we’re seeing the consequences of doing things without a values-based approach. Economically, socially, we fall to our knees at the altar of capitalism and national interest and all the things built up as the monuments of our cultures. It’s not working very well. We can’t come together around crises. We can’t come together to decide we don’t want people to be homeless. All of the waterways are polluted. We’re surrounded by mines and superfund sites. What I would hope from a 300-year lens looking back, people would say there was a cultural transition here, where people started considering the long-term consequences of anything they did, from the almost-meaningless act of composting banana peels to the communities we build to do things for one another. John: I really believe in the value of collaboration. We don’t do anything solo. Nobody can actually do anything on their own, period. I don’t care what kind of mountain man or hermit you are, somebody made your axe blade. You can’t do it alone, and as soon as you think you can, you’re doomed to fail. You need collaboration. That’s why there was all that cool energy when we did the ask with Good Deeds. People couldn’t help but say yes, they were all like, ‘Me! Me! Me! I want to do it!’ There’s a thing there we all look for. When we were coming out of the caves, we were coming out in groups. We weren’t going out onto the savannah by ourselves. We would go out as a team.

What’s something you believed early in your career, but feel differently about now?

Johnny: At the beginning, I thought I was going to learn all the secrets and then succeed based on the secrets I had. And the thing I learned quickly at MSU was that my value in the industry was in what I could figure out and tell people that they didn’t know, not the secrets I keep. It’s not an industry where a lot of information is easily available. A lot of the old-school in distilling is about finding and keeping the secrets. We built community on information-sharing, not on the intellectual property we built and kept in a vault.

John: When I was with the biodiesel company, we were publicly traded on NASDAQ. It was like, fine, I’ll work six months in a row without a day off living in a hotel in Chicago with this concept that there would be some early retirement payout, like I could just be done. But there’s no reason to retire now. Now what I’m enjoying is this constancy of something new I have to learn every single day. Two days ago, it was a little thermostat on a radiator in my tasting room that wasn’t working. Now I know how to fix it. It’s a stupid little example, but it’s something I appreciate. I am wicked, wicked happy when I am not the smartest person in the room, because that means I have the right people in the room because I’m going to learn something. It’s been a super-long day at the distillery, you worked through lunch, and now it’s 6:30 and you’re starving. What’s on the menu?

John: First, I’m putting on a song. Fridays, when I’m blowing out and I’m tired, I go put on Song for Shelter by Fatboy Slim. Then I lean back in my chair, and usually by this point I also have a whiskey. Then we’re going to cook something. It’ll be something light, fun, easy, and it’s going to be started off with Song for Shelter in the back of my brain.

Johnny: My mom’s family is Italian and it never mattered what you were eating, you were in the kitchen all day, things were getting cooked, food was appearing, whatever it was was delicious, but whatever it was was just what you were doing together. As long as the room is full of people you love, it doesn’t matter what you’re eating. The food is just the vehicle.

John: You should take his answer and make it my answer.