Journeyman Distillery

The Free Bacchus Story

In 2000 Bill Welter went to St Andrews for the golf and came home with a taste for Scotch and a friend, Greg Ramsay, who later turned an old grain mill in Tasmania into a distillery. In 2010 Welter went back to Tasmania to learn, then distilled his first batch of rye in Chicago under Robert Birnecker, whose own distillery, KOVAL, is also in the cellar. That year he and his father, Chuck, bought part of the old Featherbone Factory in Three Oaks, Michigan, and Journeyman opened there in 2011 with his wife, Johanna, as co-founder.

Bourbon, the best-known American whiskey, must by law be at least 51% corn, and reads sweet and round. Rye whiskey puts rye in the lead instead, and tastes spicier and drier; wheat whiskey, rarer again, is soft and bready. Journeyman makes all three from organic grain bought from farmers in Indiana and Michigan, with water from an aquifer under the village.

The factory was built by E.K. Warren, who changed the corset trade by replacing whalebone with featherbone, and who was a staunch prohibitionist. MOSA certifies Journeyman organic and lists its whiskeys, gins, vodkas and rum one by one on the USDA register. The seven limited Freedom Series whiskeys released for America's 250th anniversary are not on that list.

Last Feather Rye is the whiskey Journeyman calls its flagship: 60% organic rye and 40% organic wheat, distilled once and bottled at 45%. It had to be renamed after a cease and desist, and every bottle still carries a small RR as a tip of the cap to the name it lost.