The Great Lakes are home to their fair share of shipwrecks, with some from recent years and many more from past centuries. One of these occurred in 1878, when the James R. Bentley, a wooden schooner from Chicago bound for Buffalo, sank. Recently, divers visited the site of the shipwreck for an unlikely reason: to collect rye, which the ship was carrying, for the purpose of trying to revive the variety.
It all started when Mammoth Distilling, a Michigan-based distillery, wanted to explore more varieties of rye to make their whiskey products. Starting with prohibition, the banning of alcohol in the United States, the whiskey industry started using homogeneous, commodity crops.
Ari Sussman, a whiskey maker at Mammoth, said the company initially discovered that Rosen Rye was considered the premium variety. They successfully revived the variety using a seed bank, with the variety now growing on the same South Manitou Island farm that it did 100 years ago.
"We're continuing to grow Rosen rye across the state of Michigan. We're making whiskey with it as well, which is absolutely fantastic and delicious,” Sussman said.
Recently, Mammoth Distilling and Consolidated Rye and Whiskey set their sights on even older varieties, particularly those that predate seed banks. They discovered that the Bentley went down with just what they needed: rye.
“One of the most incredible things is … all the ryes that we've been looking at and making whiskey with and evaluating through sensory panels, it's mostly from the 20th century and the 21st century,” Sussman said. “What Bentley offered us was the ability to go back even further in time and to get to know grains that essentially predate seed banks.”
A dive team went down and collected the Rye from the wreck, and safely shipped it away to East Lansing. There, Eric Olson, an associate professor at Michigan State University and a wheat breeding and genetics expert, was waiting to receive it. He’s working with Mammoth to create a new variety of Rye based on the samples. The project will also help him and his lab learn about the genome of the crop and its origin.
The researchers weren’t able to germinate the seeds, but Olson said the information they’re gaining is valuable.
“That didn't deter us from taking the next steps here. So we're still, I'm still very excited about about the process, the ongoing process here,” Olson said.
Mammoth Brewing hopes to keep creating spirits using different rye varieties, primarily from Michigan. But for them, this isn’t a new thing for Michigan – rather, it is returning to Michigan’s heritage as a leading rye whiskey producer.
“Michigan is reclaiming its sort of rightful place as the center of rye production and in rye whiskey in the U.S.,” Sussman said.
Hear more about how researchers and distillers are working together to revive an ancient variety of rye, and their hopes for Michigan’s future in the whiskey industry, on the Stateside podcast.
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GUESTS ON THIS EPISODE:
- Ari Sussman, whiskey maker at Mammoth Distilling.
- Eric Olson, MSU associate professor and expert in wheat breeding and genetics.
