Legend to legal
New rules allow Iowa distillery to sell on site
By Douglas Burns
Templeton Rye Spirits president Scott Bush says the future of this southern Carroll County town can be seen in Lynchburg, Tenn.
While TR Spirits (the legal distiller of the famous and once-bootlegged booze from this area of Iowa) is more of a niche product and Jack Daniels — famously produced in Lynchburg — is something of a Goliath in the booze business, Bush thinks Templeton can become a destination.
The draw: a rich mix of history and agriculture. And new rules ushered in by the Iowa Legislature just weeks ago.
“We’d like to help turn Templeton into a Lynchburg where the whole town is involved,” Bush said, adding that in terms of product, TR Spirits looks to Woodford Reserve, a premium bourbon from the Kentucky county of the same name, for inspiration as well.
New state rules will allow Templeton Rye, the legal incarnation of the infamously bootlegged product of the Prohibition era, to sell up to two bottles a day to visitors on site at the distillery starting July 1.
Bush and the company’s management team had long advocated for some measure allowing whiskey sales on site, believing that such an option will be a boon for tourism at the distillery in Templeton.
Bush said Rye Spirits has had discussions with restaurateurs, and can envision other businesses spouting up around the facility in the future. There could be a significant boost to tourism later this year when the law goes into effect and Rye Spirits has more product available, he said.
Tonya Dusold, communications director for the State of Iowa’s Alcoholic Beverages Division, said the recently passed legislation created a micro-distillery permit that will allow Rye Spirits to sell up to 1.5 liters of product a day to people 21 and over. That equates to two bottles of Templeton Rye as it is now distilled.
Dusold explained that the whiskey will still cycle through the state’s three-tiered system of alcohol sales, with the liquor initially being sold wholesale to the state and then coming back to Templeton Rye for sale on site, after Iowa booze fees have been assessed.
For the near future, Templeton Rye Spirits is focused on getting its supply for loyal Iowa and Illinois providers boosted.
The release of the fourth batch of rye whiskey scheduled for November, in time for the holiday season, will go a long ways toward that, says Bush.
“There’s a lot of demand out there,” Bush said, adding that Rye Spirits ages its whiskey four to five years.
As for the rule change that allows sales on site, Bush sees this as a boost for other local liquors.
“It really opens the door for additional micro-distilleries in the state,” Bush said. “Making booze is the quintessential value-added agricultural business.”
The first bottles of the trademarked legal rye whiskey were produced in 2005. Seventy percent of the product is still sold in Iowa but the company is expanding its marketing.
“We certainly hope to become a legitimate national brand,” Bush said.
In a fusing of its rich history with a contemporary ambition to break out of a niche as something of an Iowa novelty, Templeton Rye Spirits launched its product into the Chicago market with a classy, nostalgic affair in August 2007.
With a growing reputation in bars and liquor stores around the nation, Templeton Rye has the very real potential of pulling tourists to Carroll County, Bush said.
This would include interactive tours in which visitors could select their own grains and other ingredients for a personalized batch of rye whiskey. Having lived in Chicago, New York City and Boston, Bush said he’s convinced well-heeled whiskey lovers, and others with interest, will trek to Templeton for this.
He sees Lynchburg as a model for this plan.
“Lynchburg, Tenn., isn’t a place you ‘pass through’ on your way to somewhere else,” reads the city’s official Web site. “It is so off the beaten path, it’s either your destination or you are lost. It is a tiny little town in a tiny little county with one big industry — the Jack Daniels Distillery.”
Bush, 34, is a graduate of Wall Lake View Auburn and the University of Iowa. He later earned his master’s in business administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge after spending some years in the banking industry with JP Morgan Chase in New York and Chicago.
Bush, a son of well-known Wall Lake attorney Warren Bush, said his family has roots with Templeton Rye.
“My great-grandfather actually was involved, and it was interesting hearing those stories,” Scott Bush said. “Once we got old enough we would sit around and drink some, and they would tell old family stories. We had always talked about it. A lot of people from where we’re from have talked about doing this.”
Now living in Norwalk and commuting to Templeton, Bush and his wife, Jessica, a native of Boston and an employee of Principal Financial in Des Moines, have three children: Adrian 4; Xavier, 2; and Mary, 8 months.
As a child Bush lost his left arm below the elbow in a car accident. He’s comfortable joking about it now.
“Dude, it’s been 28 years,” he said, laughing at an apologetically worded inquiry about the arm. “I got run over by a car when I was 7 years old.”
After losing the arm, Bush nonetheless excelled in sports in western Iowa, playing shooting guard for Wall Lake View Auburn High School and defensive back and receiver in football.
“It certainly put a fire in me,” he said of the disability. “I always had to work a little harder.”
For its part, Templeton Rye Spirits has trademarked the name “Templeton Rye” and is treating the recipe for Prohibition-era single-barrel rye whiskey as a trade secret, much like the formula for Coca-Cola or Kentucky Fried Chicken.
But one relationship is very much out in the open now: the Chicago-Templeton whiskey connection. Instead of whispers and rumors and surreptitious transactions, commerce between these two unlikely booze-buddy cities is now the stuff that PR firms and distributors are hired to hawk and market.
One of the more skilled at this is Carl Carlson, president of California-based Infinium Spirits.
“This is an American story,” Carlson said. “This town (Templeton) is a very special place. Big companies spend millions of dollars to find a story that has a semblance of this. This town is too good to be true. Our owner felt that the industry is based on great stories.”
Infinium has served as Templeton Rye’s distributor and also markets Seagrams vodka.
Carlson talks about “enterprising residents” making it through the Great Depression on the strength of their hooch — which came to be known in surprisingly far-flung places as “the good stuff.”
They poured it in Chicago and Denver and San Francisco. TR lore has it that a bottle or two (or more) of the rye made its way onto Alcatraz Island, the infamous federal penitentiary that once housed mobsters and is now a major tourist attraction.
As for the product itself, Carlson sees it standing on the two strong legs of taste (a smooth noose with a nice finish) and a delicious back story.
Prohibition of alcohol spanned from 1920 to 1933 in the United States. Congress repealed Prohibition on Dec. 5, 1933. Templeton Rye actually is thinking of officially releasing a batch on Dec. 5 this year to leverage the history.
The fact that Prohibition failed turned Templeton into a celebrated small town in speakeasies and boozy underground venues across the nation.
Templeton-area residents buoyed the local economy with the production of illegal rye whiskey during Prohibition and after. Now a trademarked product with a very much legal distillery, Rye Spirits is not shy about promoting its defiant past.
Forbes Traveler magazine recently named Templeton Rye one of the world’s hot new “deluxe distilleries” — and paid homage to Carroll County’s bootlegging past.
“Itsy-bitsy Templeton never cared much for Prohibition,” Forbes Traveler writes. “Townsfolk ignored it and continued creating their proprietary hooch, Templeton Rye. The spirit was affectionately known as ‘The Good Stuff,’ and its well-lubricated fans included Al Capone who sold it at his Chicago speakeasies — and reportedly had Templeton smuggled into his Alcatraz prison cell. The resurrected, and now legal, Templeton Rye is as spicy as it is smooth.”
In the 1920s, Carroll newspapers ran a number of stories about Prohibition-related incidents as the county developed a reputation for being decidedly “wet.”
On Jan. 15, 1925, The Carroll Times paper reported that the local grand jury handed down 19 indictments, the most in any one term for “many, many years if not in the history of the county.”
Several of the charges were related to illegal consumption or sales of alcohol.
In a major booze case that spring, State of Iowa vs. Heires, the jury dismissed the charges.
The Times said it was “the first case” in which state agents have tried to convict Carroll County residents for “making and selling booze.”
“Judge McCord experienced some difficulty in maintaining order as the crowd seemed to want to applaud many of the points brought out by the attorneys for the defendant and it was very evident that the sympathy of the people who filled the courtroom was with Mr. Heires. Not for such a long time have such outbursts of applause been heard in the district court room in Carroll,” the paper reported.
Grand jurors sitting in the Carroll County Courts in February of 1927 heard cases of illegal sales of liquor, chicken thefts and a case of an alleged illegal gambling house in Coon Rapids.
Now the law is working for Templeton Rye.
Templeton Rye is well aware it emerged as what The Des Moines Register termed earlier this month “a winner” in the 2010 Iowa Legislature. The new alcohol rules allowing the on-site sales passed as part of a massive state reorganization bill in March.
Bush said the ability to sell on site should help attract more bus tours. Rye Spirits is also eyeing some distilling classes to get more visitors.
“I think our tours are going to get a lot better,” Bush said.
Then, there’s the opportunity for more business development near the distillery, and in all of Templeton for that matter, as Rye Spirits expects to draw more people to the city.
“I think it’s classic economics,” Bush said. CV
New state rules will allow Templeton Rye, the legal incarnation of the infamously bootlegged product of the Prohibition era, to sell up to two bottles a day to visitors on site at the distillery starting July 1.
For the near future, Templeton Rye Spirits is focused on getting its supply for loyal Iowa and Illinois providers boosted. The release of the fourth batch of rye whiskey scheduled for November, in time for the holiday season.
Templeton Rye president Scott Bush, 34, is a graduate of Wall Lake View Auburn and the University of Iowa. He later earned his master’s in business administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge after spending some years in the banking industry with JP Morgan Chase in New York and Chicago.
In a fusing of its rich history with a contemporary ambition to break out of a niche as something of an Iowa novelty, Templeton Rye Spirits launched its product into the Chicago market with a classy, nostalgic affair in August of 2007. Here, a waitress slings drinks for the 1920s-themed event.
