Butte is as authentic as it gets.
Evel Knievel was born here, and that quintessential American daredevil, who dressed in a Stars and Stripes jumpsuit, held a Guinness record for most bones broken in a lifetime, and once said “pain is temporary, glory is forever,” could well be the poster child for the place. Perhaps not quite famous, Butte is at least notorious.
A mile above sea level, it sits atop a catacomb of mine shafts, some more than a mile deep. Old headframes rise above the buildings in the city skyline. An open scar called the Berkeley Pit, located immediately on the outskirts of town, is filled with water so toxic it borders on acid. When a migrating flock of Canada geese landed there to rest, they all died, garnering national attention and cementing Butte as one of the world’s premier venues for environmental research.
Like its prodigal son, Butte has a reputation for being tough. It might get knocked down, but the town, founded on the indomitable spirit of the miners who built it, seems to always persevere. By all accounts, Montana’s first electric light was lit at the nearby Alice Mine, only a year or two after Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. The mines of Butte quite literally supplied the copper that lit the world.
It is a city of extremes, with fortunes founded firmly in the cycle of boom and bust. Since the end of mining’s glory days, Butte’s population has hovered around thirty thousand, but prior to 1900 it was the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco, and likely the most ethnically diverse. Immigrants from the world over flocked to this frontier town, perched high upon the spine of the Rocky Mountains, to work in the dozens of copper mines that dotted Butte Hill, the Richest Hill on Earth.
Headframe Spirits, like all of Butte proper, is located on the hill’s southern flank, on the corner of Montana Street and Galena in one of many brick buildings that stand testament to the city’s heyday. It is odd to see so much capital standing idle; a legacy so palpable and well preserved as to appear ready to take up where it left off. Butte is the perfect Industrial Era ghost town, impatiently awaiting another influx of industrious immigrants willing to re-imagine its Gilded Age glory. The allure of the city, its magic, is its authenticity.
The tasting room at Headframe appears to have been built at the turn of the 19th century, because the building that houses it most likely was. The exquisite back bar is a treasured Butte artifact on loan from the World Museum of Mining, and a portion of the profits from Headframe’s popular Orphan Girl Bourbon Cream Liqueur are donated to that area attraction. Pieces from a local artist adorn the walls, flanked by a variety of tributes to the city’s storied past.
Like most good saloons, the tasting room is long and narrow, dominated by the bar along its north wall. Its south wall separates the hospitality side of the operation from the production side, dividing Courtney’s realm from John’s. Metal stars adorn the partition, engineering novelties that actually serve to hold the distillery together. They are a metaphor for Courtney and husband John, their leadership and the thing they are trying to accomplish, which begins with making spirits but is ultimately about much more.
Justin Aden, a former head distiller at Headframe who has since left to start his own distillery in Michigan, studied microbiology and ethanol fermentation at Michigan State University. As a grad student he was instrumental in developing that school’s Artisan Distilling Program, and it was there he met John McKee, who was prototyping spirits in a two week program. John lured Justin away from the ranks of academia the way he secures all his protégés, with clear genius tempered by humble confidence. That, and his still.
This unique still is, in Aden’s words, the “holy grail” of micro-distilling. It is a game-changer; a scaled down, more practical version of an ethanol refinery. Unlike the stills found in many micro-distilleries, Headframe operates a continuous distillation process that is not limited by standard pot still methodology. The stripping, or low wine, run is eliminated in John’s still, making it capable of “just rolling.”
What this means in lay terms is that Headframe’s production capacity is greater than most micro-distilling operations by several factors. “With this still, we can produce more in a week than all of the other distilleries in Montana combined,” Aden said. The company’s strategic plan calls for letting the business grow organically until it exceeds the production capacity of the still, which as Aden put it allows for “plenty of expansion”.
And expand it has. In August, Headframe Spirits made news when they announced plans to become the largest distillery west of the Mississippi. They have since opened a second facility with the capacity to produce 24,000 bottles every 8 hours.
How many proof gallons a distillery can produce and still be considered micro is determined by the laws of each state, which in the case of Montana is twenty five thousand. Whether production at Headframe Spirits will one day eclipse that mark is yet to be determined, but John and his crew don’t spend much time worrying about it. They are much more concerned with distillation science than with “craft” or “micro” labels.
For an artist, the creative process is special and unique. The same can be said of Headframe Spirits; however John is unwilling to take the analogy beyond the initial spark of inspiration. After that, he relies on science to mold his art into something palatable to the public.
“Operating craft as art, can you survive the expense of gaining experience for fifty years?” he asks. “It doesn’t matter how much passion or love you have, it’s about the science,” says John. “It’s hard for craft people to understand this. They want it to be learned, experiential. But the economics leave no room.”
“We started from the point of ‘if we distill it, they will come’,” he adds. “But that is not the way we wanted to play in the game.”
Consistency of product will always hit a nerve, he explains, and better allows Headframe to share what it is they are trying to say.
“Selling the first bottle is easy. We concentrate on selling the second,” John says. “We have a goal of making Neversweat taste the same next time as it was two years ago.”
In order to do this, the team at Headframe, like many makers of premium whiskey, blend their barrels. They test them with the usual organic techniques, sniffing and tasting the barreled spirit, but back it up with a gas chromatograph and what John refers to as the “craft of science.” It’s an approach that has allowed Headframe to produce a whiskey on par with those of master blenders who have thousands of barrels at their disposal using only a handful of barrels, analytical equipment, and some real smart guys.
John includes the craft of blending, the craft of science, in his definition of what entails craft distilling. He avoids the divisive camps arising from the use of neutral grain spirits or such industry demarcations as “grain to glass”, subscribing instead to the old adage that a rising tide lifts all ships.
“There are lots of people making things you’d want to drink,” says John. “If it’s booze worth drinking, tell your friends.”
Such unassuming manner provides a glimpse into the real key to Headframe’s roaring success. More so than craft or science, the actual stimulus has been John and Courtney’s thoughtful brand of leadership. A philosophy of stewardship, of the brand, the process, the business, the employees, even of the city and legacy of Butte itself, is built into their company plan. Their management style is to create the infrastructure of success, then allow their team to achieve it.
“We’re really smart at knowing what we don’t know,” John says. “Our thought was to hire people who are better at this than we are, give them the tools to do things, and get out of their way.”
“I am the person that makes sure things get done,” says Courtney. “It’s like I have 26 children to encourage, support, and be stunningly proud of. I really love that job.”
Courtney’s official title is that of ‘go-to girl’, a designation she applied to herself deliberately. It provides her with both the latitude and the authority to take responsibility for every facet of the Headframe operation.
“My responsibility is to use myself and Headframe to better my place and the world. We want to use our company to put a face on this community.”
Headframe Spirits was born, to a certain degree, out of necessity. The company that John and some fellow engineers had created, erecting commercial biodiesel plants onsite from a design they invented, had folded. He and Courtney were lying in bed, discussing what he wanted to do next. When the best he could offer was ‘stay at home dad’, she called bullshit.
“You know how to distill and you like hooch. How about opening a distillery?”
The idea galvanized John, so much so that he immediately got out of bed and began penning a marketing plan. It was built on the premise that distilling was the easy part, and intended from the outset to serve as a way for people to see beyond the Berkeley Pit.
“Headframe Spirits was born out of passion for this place,” Courtney says. “That’s why we didn’t call it McKee Distillery.”
Living in Connecticut after earning her degree in English from the University of Montana, she remembered the Big Sky State as romantic and far-away.
“Butte wasn’t on my radar before I moved here, but it’s an amazing place to be,” she says.
Butte is a snapshot of 20th century America, so much so that it has assumed the mantle and calls itself, simply: Butte, America. Its story parallels that of the greater nation at large, tracing the country’s path through the Industrial Age in bare bones, heart on the sleeve, all caution to the wind fashion.
The city itself stands as testament to a bygone era, one that Headframe Spirits celebrates loudly in its branding. References to local mines such as Destroying Angel and High Ore adorn their labels. But John and Courtney’s love for the town, much like the shafts of the mines themselves, runs much deeper than that.
“I want us to be mindful of where we are. The second we forget we are a Butte, America company we lose our integrity.”
Integrity is Courtney’s craft. Her job, as she explains it, is to ensure Headframe remains authentic, in product, message, and deed. Authenticity, integrity, attention to detail, and imparting that to the future, is her utmost concern. As she points out, there is no clear consensus on what makes a micro-distillery, but the same cannot easily be said of integrity.
“What is more important to me is maintaining integrity and authenticity over size,” she says. “We all have our roles and if my job becomes to be the gut check, I will embrace that.”
For John, maintaining that authenticity is purely a function of the production methods they employ. The unyielding logic of scientific method, he argues, ensures Headframe is always authentic.
“What is our flavor profile? We go to a gas chromatic graph,” he says. “No matter what we are, what we become, the one thing we must always do is put something worth drinking in a bottle. If we don’t do that, this will be employee owned, but there will be nothing worth owning.
“My exit strategy isn’t to sell out to Diagio. It’s to sell it to Audrey, and Heidi. I come to work smiling. Maybe we grow, maybe we don’t. If we keep doing what we’re doing, that’s enough.”
Butte has always been a socialist stronghold in otherwise conservative Montana, and that idealism is apparent in John and Courtney’s approach. They allow their vision to be shaped by employees and customers, which makes the scope of the enterprise larger than they ever could have imagined. Their business has scaled much faster than they expected. The plan called for having 14 employees at the end of the first year; they ended up with 23, because they were needed.
Rather than find it a source of anxiety, the couple revels in the prospect. They dig into each employee’s talents and interests, capitalizing on opportunities to engage them in a special way. They require that their permanent employees set tangible goals, and then help them achieve them. One was to learn Microsoft Excel, another to run a 5k.
“I am fortunate that things in my work day, things that are my responsibility, are things I enjoy,” Courtney says. “I am grateful to be in a position to encourage success.”
Under such palpable leadership, it is hard to imagine a limit to what Headframe Spirits might accomplish. Courtney loves the idea of partnering with local college Montana Tech to make Headframe an educational outlet and the thought of using the label to help promote Butte as a destination for preservation tourism.
There is significant interest in his still, and John spends a great deal of time working with other craft distillers to advance the industry. Still, the couple remains committed to a simple measure of success, which Courtney verbalizes as: “I want you to have a fabulous cocktail, hopefully a bottle in your hand, and a greater education and appreciation of what Butte is.”
They do that by steadfastly adhering to their doctrine of science and stewardship, creating a label that is as much the breadth and depth of Headframe as that namesake is to the mineshaft it serves.
“I am very proud of it. It has been a life-altering experience,” Courtney says. “So well executed, like a symphony. It’s humbling to be a piece of that. You cannot account for love, and passion and joy, in a spreadsheet.”
