Four years ago, Bartley Blume was aiming to get in on the ground floor of Minnesota's craft-beer renaissance. The aerospace industry salesman and avid home-brewer was ready to "shed the shackles of corporate bondage," and he had a business plan for a brewery. But he was beaten to the brewhouse.
"When Fulton opened up [in 2009] I said, 'Damn, I'm too late,' " Blume recalled. "Since then, 20 have opened up."
While Blume's Bent Brewstillery might not be a first- (or even second-) wave Minnesota microbrewery, it has an important distinction. As the name suggests, Bent will both brew beer and distill spirits, namely whiskey.
"[The] beer definitely came first, but as we all know, whiskey is what beer wants to be when it grows up," Blume said. "To me, it felt like the next logical progression."
Though not yet commercially available, Bent debuts Saturday at St. Paul Summer Beer Fest with Dark Fatha — an American "emperial" stout bearing a pimped-out Darth Vader logo. Initially not a fan of the style, Blume first brewed Dark Fatha to please his stout-fond friends and after three months of maturation it proved to be a hit at a barbecue party.
"I threw a bunch of stuff together that was stout-like and tasted it before it was done fermenting and was like, 'Oh, this is horrible — they're going to love it,' " he said.
Blume recently began contract brewing at Pour Decisions Brewing Co. in Roseville. The Southern-reared Shoreview transplant is hunting for his own taproom-tailored site in Arden Hills and hopes to have Unpure, an unaged whiskey, on the market this fall.
While white whiskey (a k a moonshine) is popular among upstart distilleries because it is unaged, Blume plans to give his smoked-malt spirit a "deep honey color" by filtering it through oak barrels and charred applewood. Eventually he plans to roll out a gin with help from Bittercube — the Midwest bitters maker/restaurant-consulting team — as well as a bourbon. In July, he'll begin brewing an amber blonde ale.
