Distill life in Wisconsin

NEW RICHMOND, WIS. - In his knee-high rubber boots, Paul Werni doesn't look like a trend-setter. But every morning he says goodbye to his wife and three kids in Minneapolis and drives an hour east.

In a steel-skinned shoebox of a building he built behind the New Richmond Wal-Mart, Werni goes to work distilling his own vodka.

"Sometimes I wonder what the heck I got myself into," he says. "But if it works, it will be fun."

Werni's 45th Parallel Vodka is part of a national boom of small, start-up, batch-by-batch distillers making top-shelf spirits. In stores and bars for only a few months, Werni's hand-crafted vodka will make its first big splash this weekend at the 14th annual Twin Cities Food & Wine Experience -- a 250-exhibit, $65-a-ticket gourmet fair at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

"The micro-distilling industry is precisely where the micro-brew business was 20 years ago," said Bill Owens, president of the American Distilling Institute in Hayward, Calif.

As a brewmaster and photojournalist, Owens was credited with sparking the micro-brew craze. Now, his www.distilling.com site is trumpeting what Time magazine last month called "a renaissance of high-class hooch and hand-crafted artisanal American spirits."

Only a handful of these mom-and-pop distilleries were in business in 1990. Now there are more than 100.

"It's happening in the coastal towns of Oregon and New York and is just starting to hit the Midwest," Werni said.

Owens stopped by Werni's operation recently and liked what he tasted -- amid the Willy Wonkaesque-factory of copper stills, stainless steel fermenting tanks and buckets of finely ground corn from his neighbor's farm.

"I'd rank him one or two in the nation in having his act together," Owens said. "He planned and built a free-standing building from scratch and Werni's got the vision of a craft distillery entrepreneur of the highest level."

Unique but not alone

Not that Werni, 42, is the only Minnesotan making vodka. Among others are farmers outside Benson, who helped retrofit an ethanol plant in 2003 and poured their wheat into the wildly successful Shakers vodka.

Owens, however, scoffs at any comparison.

"In Benson, there's a half-dozen workers and the cooling towers roar like jet engines and everything's automated," he said. "When you walk in Werni's door, his dog is sitting by him at his desk."

Werni has two employees, including his father. After 27 years as a telephone repairman and a short stint owning Paul's Pub in his hometown of Merrill, Wis., Paul Werni Sr. has come out of retirement to stir his son's mash, liquefy his yeast and add enzymes to the concoction.

"I work cheap," the elder Werni said. "I thought it was a great idea until I realized how much work was involved. But it's pretty interesting and I hope he makes it. He's got a lot of IOUs but he's paying his bills."

His son sold his share of a landscape business three years ago, pumped nearly $700,000 into his heavily mortgaged dream and did his homework.

Father and son attended distilling seminars in Kentucky, visited startups in New Hampshire and went to Germany to buy the top stills and rectifying towers. There were tedious federal and state permits to obtain in the richly regulated world of vodka-making 75 years after Prohibition was repealed.

Becoming a vodka geek

Werni picked the 45th Parallel name because New Richmond, a western Wisconsin town of 7,000, sits just off the line that runs halfway between the North Pole and equator.

Over time, Werni has blossomed into a full-fledged vodka geek. He jots down notes in a spiral notebook for each batch and orchestrates the whole process, from fetching his corn at neighbor Arlen Strate's farm to bottling the stuff one bottle at a time with a pair of unsophisticated vacuum-pump bottle fillers.

He climbs a ladder to dump the corn into a swirling, steel mash tank. As it runs through tubes and up into a 22-foot fermenting column, the alcohol is carefully heated and cooled so the yeast isn't stunted.

The result is a 95 percent alcohol liquid that is blended with water until the alcohol content is 40 percent. A carbon filtering process absorbs impurities and minerals.

"If you do too much filtering, you're left with a vacant spirit with ... more of medicinal smell," Werni said. "The craftsmanship comes when you try to make sure each batch is similar in taste. Knowing when it feels right and what's acceptable for the market."

U.S.-made vodka has grown into a $10 billion market thanks to the ultra-premium brands. All told, the spirits industry is worth about $58 billion, but big brands such as Smirnoff outsell the small distilleries such as Werni's in a week.

Each bottle sells for about $30, and Werni is elbowing his way onto the crowded shelves. He has been selling about 600 bottles a month and hopes to boost production to 1,000 bottles a month.

"There's a plethora of vodkas," Werni said. "The only thing that makes us different is we are truly, 100 percent hand-crafted. That's our niche and that's what we're banking on."

Curt Brown • 612-673-4767