MADE in Downstate Illinois

Stumpy’s Spirits Distillery

COLUMBIA

Southern Illinois native Adam Stumpf has dreamed big his entire life. One of his biggest goals was to own a distillery, even if his wife Laura wasn’t quite aware of it from the beginning. “You put the business plan together, married me, and then said I want to open a distillery,” Laura Stumpf says while sitting elbow to elbow with her husband on a warm July day. “It worked,” responds Adam with a sly smile.

In November of 2013, the couple bought a distillery going out of business in Grand Junction, Colorado. They hauled all of the equipment back to the family farm in Columbia, Illinois for the licensing and construction process. The Stumpfs officially opened Stumpy’s Spirits & Distillery in July of 2015 by using Adam’s business plan, which included using their family farm to grow basically everything that goes into their products. They use fresh limestone well water and grain grown on the 8th generation family farm, to give them full control of the process. Stumpy’s is able to plant, harvest, mill, mash, ferment, and distill their spirits from grain to glass. Not a lot of other distilleries can say that.

“That’s really a labor of love,” Adam explains. “The biggest thing to us is quality and transparency if you had to boil it down to two words. Quality of course, we can control what is going into your bottle all the way from the moment that a seed goes into the ground,” he adds. From a transparency standpoint, Stumpy’s goes out of other way to put their batch number on every bottle. “You can go and see what the mash bill of a particular batch is, how old it is, etcetera,” Adam says. “So really wrapping the farming piece to it is probably the biggest thing for us.”

That approach has helped Stumpy’s grow exponentially from when they started. Now, they’re on countless shelves in grocery stores and liquor stores around the region. The Stumpfs say that being able to make a name for themselves from a small town in Downstate Illinois is amazing.

“We’re both from southern Illinois, it’s home,” Adam admits. “It’s so important to us that we put it on our logo, look at our Stumpy’s Spirits logo, it’s got the state of Illinois right up on the top of it. It’s super cool to be able to show people what we can do in southern Illinois. Great bourbon doesn’t have to come just from Kentucky, look what we can do right here in southern Illinois. It’s a super unique area where we’ve got the benefit of agriculture, we’ve got all of the forestry and barrel manufacturing, we’ve got everything we need to make fantastic whiskey in southern Illinois,” Adam adds.

Word of this Illinois made whiskey has certainly spread, Adam and Laura are constantly amazed at where visitors are coming from. “It’s awesome,” Laura says with a smile. “Especially when we ask people when we do our tours, where did you come from, where did you hear about us? It’s really neat to see just how far people travel just to come see us, it really is.”

Those tours that Laura mentioned are something of legend as well. If you look at their Google page, Stumpy’s has received a perfect fivestars from EVERY SINGLE review, with a majority mentioning the tour as a highlight. Talk about impressive!

“I would put them up against any other tour that you’ve been on in Kentucky, it doesn’t matter where they are, they’re going to blow you out of the water,” Laura says enthusiastically. “That’s one thing that we’ve heard consistently – your tour was better than tours in Kentucky, and that’s obviously not because of us or our system, that’s because of our team and their ability to verbalize and interact with customers and those types of things. So I mean you’re going to get treated like family when you come here, that’s for sure,” Adam says. “And you’re going to have fun, that’s huge to us, just come and have fun on the weekend –bring your family out, your friends out, make a day of it,” adds Laura.

It's easy to see that the Stumpfs have had great deal of success with Stumpy’s in less than a decade’s time, so what exactly does the future hold for the business and the family?

“Growth as long as we’re still having fun doing it,” Adam admits. “Whiskey by definition is not a get rich quick scheme, so it’s not the intention to build something and flip it and sell it – in our minds distilling is a lot like a family farm. It’s like a generational thing, especially if you look at those distilleries in Kentucky. So, we hope to build something that hopefully our family if they’re interested in it, something they can take over in the future.”

For more information on Stumpy’s, head to their website at stumpysspirits.com. There you can get more information about the tours, as well as information about where the nearest location is that carries Stumpy’s products.