Bi-Local Distilled Products From Local Crops

Century Farms Distillery in Northwest Iowa has found a niche to partner with corn farmers to create whiskey and bourbon highlighting the farmer and their story. CEO and Founder Ryan Bare spoke with me during the recent Commodity Classic.

“We offer a unique program where a porn producer can bring us 40 or 50 bushels of corn grown on their family's farm, usually transporting in a probox So probox a corn that actually makes about 1,000- 1,200 bottles of bourbon so about three or four big barrels of bourbon is what we'll make from each family's corn. Most people don't want 1,000 bottles of bourbon that's a bit more than they can can deal with. So we sell that as our flagship Century Farms brand bourbon, but we sell that in association with their name, the state, and county where the corn was grown. We put a biography of that family on our website. So a consumer who buys that can read a story of that family read their history, but what it is is really a biological product that we can make in Spencer, Iowa and sell you know, anywhere that that the corn came from.”

All product that they bottle is made in their own custom designed to still.

“We’ll mill the corn we mash it we ferment it, we distill it, you know we put it in a barrel agent for you know, at least two years to make straight bourbon whiskey. We also make the corn whiskey.”

Ryan Bare with Century Farms Distillery.