Before Bentley Gillman was an award-winning distiller, he was just a kid in the woods. Now, he’s the distillery manager at River Falls’ award-winning Tattersall Distilling. Gillman grew up between La Pointe, on Madeline Island, and Wausau, where he spent much of his time exploring local fields and forests, picking wild fruit, grains, mushrooms, and medicinal herbs.

In the Gillman household, July 4 isn’t just Independence Day. It’s Black Raspberry Day.

That’s the day Bentley Gillman, distillery manager at Tattersall, goes out foraging with his family for ripe blackcap raspberries at the peak of their season.

“The kids obviously love it and I feel like it really hearkens to that innate knowledge of understanding: ripe fruit, in season,” Gillman said. “Because when you see a raspberry in the wild, your body and your mind and everything else just knows, ‘OK, this is a raspberry.'”

RIVER FALLS – Distilleries come in all shapes and sizes, from tiny mom and pop shops to industrial behemoths.

While Tattersall Distilling, which inhabits a former Shopko store in River Falls, near the Minnesota border, isn’t anywhere near the largest – that title would likely go to a Kentucky giant like Heaven Hill – it is surely among the biggest and most varied distilling facilities I’ve seen in the craft world.

Opened in late 2021, the nearly 80,000-square-foot building has a restaurant, a large events venue, pre-function areas, a spacious stillhouse, barrel storage, warehousing, three kitchens, meeting and event rooms (including an evocative “barrel room”), bride and groom rooms, a classroom for cocktail classes, multiple large outdoor patios, a shop, staff dining room and locker room, and offices, as well as the kind of parking lot you’d expect at a former department store.

When the crowds in seersucker suits, floral prints and fancy hats pack Churchill Downs on Saturday for the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, the racetrack’s managers estimate Derby-goers will down some 120,000 bourbon-based mint juleps.

That’s a lot of drinks for a two-minute horse ride.

Maplefest is this Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Tattersall River Falls, explains Bentley Gillman, head distiller, and Kodi Satra, beverage manager.

On February 24, the Slumberland American Birkebeiner will take place in Wisconsin. The Birkie is the largest cross-country skiing race in North America, with participants starting in Cable and skiing their way through the forest on the Birkie Trail, gliding across Lake Hayward, crossing over the American Birkebeiner International Bridge and heading toward the finish line on Hayward’s snow-covered Main Street. This year, the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation (ABSF) partnered with Tattersall Distilling to commemorate the race’s 50th anniversary to release a limited-edition spirit.

WI-SKI is a straight rye aged in used maple syrup barrels. Made in the spirit of the Birkie and traditional Nordic skiing, it’s a peppery sipper with a hint of sweetness that tastes even better after a day on the trails. I don’t ski, but I still had the pleasure to try mixing this in a cocktail and the result was a drink that I think is absolutely perfect for winter.

If you’ve glanced around the whiskey aisles recently, you’ve probably noticed an increasing number of whiskeys touted as being “finished” in rum, pinot noir or sherry barrels. You’re not imagining things: what was once a technique more common to Scotch than American whiskey has blown up in recent years.

The matchup for Super Bowl LVIII is set, but when our favorite teams are out of contention, we become more interested in what’s on the table than who’s on the field. However, we’re still fans of the game. So let’s embrace a football state of mind as we plan our game day party with these tips and recipes.

This boozy take on classic wings is from chef Corey Picha of Tattersall Distilling in River Falls, Wis.

In an interview with Beverage Master, head alchemist Alan Bishop of Spirits of French Lick, a craft distillery located in West Baden Springs, Indiana, said, “Aquavit (taken from the Latin aqua vitae, which means “water of life”) can trace its roots under various names back to the Aquavitae Treatises of the 1400s to 1600s. It has deep connections to Sparagyic medicine,” he explains, “so three of my major interests were piqued: alchemy, history and complex botanical distillations.”

For the second chapter in the 2023 edition of our annual Best New American Whiskeys—see yesterday’s focus on ryes—we shine a light on American single malts (ASMs). It’s hard to imagine a category in all spirits more energized at the moment. Finally “recognized” (although not yet officially certified) by the TTB last year, unofficial ASMs have been defining some of the most interesting whiskeys bubbling from America for a couple decades now. While places like Texas and the Pacific Northwest lead the category, ASMs from across this great nation of ours are releasing innovative, terroir-rich expressions boasting a wide spectrum of flavors. Here are seven favorites for 2023.