Reneé Bemis may be the only sculptor/distillery owner in the known world. Bemis is a busy artist, sculpting large-scale animals and people. But she’s also part-owner of the Driftless Glen Distillery in Baraboo, WI turning out award-winning bourbons and ryes.
What whiskey first made you say fuck yeah?
Let me back peddle and tell you I did not know whiskey when we started the company. My husband is a car dealer and I’m an artist and his marketing person said we should open a distillery. I didn’t even know about whiskey. They first whiskey I ever tried was our rye whiskey—22 months—a young rye. We did a roundtable and the meeting would start with 7 blind taste tests of rye barrels to pick which barrel we’d bottle at 22 months.
If you weren’t making whiskey, you’d probably be . . .
I’d still be sculpting. I do large monuments—I just finished a piece for South Carolina. It’s three life-and-a-half-sized bobcats, otters, and fish, all going into Boyd Island Park.
What’s a fucked up way you drink whiskey you probably wouldn’t tell anyone if you weren’t filling out this questionnaire?
I drink it over crushed ice. My husband has beautiful ice balls so they don’t melt too much. Doing a Wisconsin Mule-except I use diet ginger beer.
What’s a fucked up way someone you know drinks whiskey that makes you want to throw them off a cliff and seriously, Jesus Hashtag Christ, why, Darryll? Why?
Putting it in diet coke.
What song will get you onto the floor no matter what?
Give a quote from a movie you obsess over:
“Failure is not an option.”
Apollo 13
Besides making whiskey, what do you do right?
I treat people right.
Sum up the essence of great whiskey with a single word.
Complex
What moment during your process strikes you as perfect?
There are times when I’m sculpting when my vision is one thing but the sculpture tells me it’s something else. It takes its own mind and when that happens I let it go and it comes from somewhere else. I was doing an elephant piece, six inches by six inches and it just kept growing and ended up being a piece that’s 40-inches tall by 40-inches wide. It just morphed . . . I said ok. I’m going to let this happen. It’s what the clay wanted.
Name the single most underrated or overlooked distillery in your state.
45th Parallel
What was your most embarrassing mistake making whiskey?
Flavored rye whiskey to bring it to a younger generation. Like a shooter. We did four flavors. Rock and rye. Cherry cola, root beer, spice, and orange. To get there we had to do a distillate of rye and our still is pretty big so we did 9 barrels to send off to a flavoring company. So we stuck it in the rack house. So they lost the barrel so we did it again. The flavors weren’t good. So we had to do a third run so now we have 27 barrels aging in the rack house. But we didn’t continue the flavors. The 27 barrels, we tasted them about two years later and it was amazing and now it’s what we call our 51 Rye because it’s a Maryland rye and it was really just a mistake that failed into a success.
What are you reading?
Dog & Gun. I love to read the pieces about training your dogs and puppies. I’m a wildlife artist and we have a bird dog.
Who would you like to see answer these questions?
Margie Lehrman American Craft Spirits association. She’s one of the biggest advocates for craft spirits.
