If Hitchcock’s Vertigo were a Western, Lucas Huff could be its star. He’s climbing up the interior of a tower, looking almost suspended in air as he follows a dark iron–and–Douglas fir staircase that spirals through two old grain silos.
There’s no distillery like this anywhere.
The structure was first erected to mill grains coming off the Dangberg Ranch and nearby homesteads in northwest Nevada. After the mill was shuttered in the 1950s, its worn husk became the tallest spectacle in the little cow town of Minden — an empty piece of the past that motorists could gawk at as they drove north for Reno or south for Yosemite National Park. Huff grew up in this blue-collar hamlet of 3,000 people. The mill’s aged, half-haunted silos were a towering presence in his childhood. Then, in 2015, there was a major redesign and renovation that turned the sleet-battered behemoth into a state-of-the-art distillery (then called Bentley Heritage). Its upper-level tasting rooms have views for miles in every direction.
Huff, the brand ambassador for Minden Mill Distilling, is standing at the silos’ highest point, now a stylish bar deemed the Society Space. He pauses between its windows. Through one, he sees the hard, open flatness of the sweeping horizon. Through the other, he catches a sublime picture of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the peaks of their eastern slope dusted in gleaming snow.
“Seeing this gives people a sense of place,” Huff notes. “That tall peak right there, that’s the top of Sky Express at Heavenly Ski Resort. It’s especially spectacular today because it just looks really ominous and bright. It looks like Everest from here.”
Visitors to Minden Mill Distilling usually have a similar reaction. That’s because almost everything about the place is meant to echo the rugged terrain outside. It’s an estate distillery with its own wheat, rye, and corn in the ground. The water flowing into its spirits comes directly from Sierra snowmelt. The roughnecks who first staked out a life in Minden had to be fully self-sustaining. Now,the distillery at the center of their community is, too. Even its leather-bound cocktail menus come from hides that are sold by Carson Valley ranchers.
The pioneering ethos of Minden Mill Distilling is an immersive experience: Visitors want to see it, tour it, taste it — and leave with a piece of it. And the company’s team is making sure they can do that through intelligently planned merchandise that conveys what the distillery is all about. Many craft distilleries in other parts of the country are learning how to do the same.
When the Memory Is On Your Back
Patrons don’t leave the Minden Mill Distilling with banal bumper stickers, forgettable refrigerator magnets, or another pen to throw in the drawer. Instead, they leave with the kind of apparel designed for driving trucks through brushy sand dunes, or gear to take on long hikes up into the pines and boulders of the Eastern slope. That means heavy outdoor vests, sturdy flannels, thick hoodies, and trucker caps emblazoned with the distillery’s name, not to mention t-shirts with an insignia for the mountains known as “the range of light.” The company also sells branded leather-bound flasks along with stainless-steel water bottles for forest trekking.
“One of the things we try to focus on when we’re talking about the merch is that we’re in this Wild West community,” Huff says. “So, bringing in the things that give the feel of Minden itself is really important. What we want to convey through all of it is that we’re next to the mountains, up in an alpine area, but we’re also a high-desert cowboy ranch community, too. So, it’s blending those aesthetics into it.”
It might not be a surprise that Minden Mill Distilling is smart about its merchandise once you learn who owns the distillery. After the structure’s five-year redesign, it had a short stint at the Bently Heritage Estate Distillery. But in 2023, it was purchased by Bill Foley, the owner of the Vegas Golden Knights NHL team. Coming from the world of sports franchises, Foley knows a thing or two about the power of merchandising and apparel’s links to loyalty, identity, and a way of life.
Now, as Huff and the distillery’s manager, Elaine Shevlin, open the doors for a special couples cocktail hour, they welcome patrons they recognize from Reno, Gardnerville, and Carson City. These are regulars who not only love Minden Mill Distilling’s products; they’re also believers who wear the distillery’s clothing around with a sense of pride.
Beyond the sports fanatic-type behavior from local fans, the company’s carefully crafted merchandise has been a meaningful way to capitalize on its tours and tastings, which attract people from around the country and the world. And when they arrive, the company’s prominent merchandise display is among the first sights they see walking in the door. By the time their last sips go down, they’ve not only learned about the nexus of Minden culture and Minden Mill Distilling’s spirits, they’ve also learned about the union between the distillery’s ethics and its commitment to Nevada’s environment — something that’s also reflected in the merch.
“We have gold certification standards from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design,” Shevlin says. “So, we have reusable water bottles, because water, and our well, is so important to us. That’s really what created, and was the foundation, of this area.”
Reaping the Desert’s Bounty
Mylynn Vong was listening to live music at Austin City Limits when she spotted someone wearing a Desert Door ballcap.
Vong, who had just been hired by the distillery, rushed toward the man with excitement.
“Hey, I work at Desert Door!” she blurted at the stranger. She could tell from his response that he was a fan of the sotol-making icon located some 25 miles west of Austin in Driftwood, Texas.
“It was just one of those moments,” Vong recalls. “There’s nothing better than seeing a Desert Door shirt or cap out in the wild, especially at something like a music event. And, in that case, he was wearing one of our older designs from a couple of years ago. So, the fact that he still had that merch, and was able to wear it, was really awesome.”
She adds with a chuckle, “Now, I almost always say ‘hi’ when I see someone wearing our stuff; but I have to try not to scare them away too fast.”
Working at one of the only sotol distilleries in the United States is a huge point of pride for Desert Door’s team. Vong, who is the operation’s director of marketing, says Desert Door’s tours and tastings are meant to enlighten spirit connoisseurs about an age-old, but little-known Mexican drinking tradition.
“When you’re doing a tour, we’ll meet you in the front of the distillery,” Vong explains. “We’ll walk you through the different plants, so visitors can see that there’s a difference between a Blue Weber agave and sotol. You can see and touch the plants. Then, we’ll let them look at every phase of how sotol is made. After that, we always end up at the cargo space.”
The “cargo space” is where Desert Door displays most of its admired merchandise. It’s an illuminated alabaster and russet portal with a coyote mural over its selection of shirts and bright paintings of the badlands above its canteens and glassware.
“We try to create and design merch as unique as the brand itself,” Vong stresses. “We pride ourselves on sourcing premium products, making sure it’s high quality and it’s not going to fade after a certain wash: That’s also part of having that outdoor element — making sure that it can withstand the outdoors and being on adventures.”
Desert Door has kept some of the creativity behind its merchandise tied to talent in its region, too.
“We partnered with a local candlemaker to get a very specific scent, which our GM helped curate,” Vong says. “All the [merch] illustrations are designed in-house by our amazing artists. In the past, we’ve also worked with local artists in Austin to do limited-edition posters.”
Great Lakes, Great Ideas
“A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence,” the poet William Butler Yeats once observed.
That’s a truism that Renee Sinacola, the marketing director for Great Lakes Distillery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, understood on an intuitive level when she was tasked with revamping the company’s merchandise to capture what the distillery and its founder, Guy Rehorst, have brought to Wisconsin’s identity.
Rehorst was a trailblazer in the CD and DVD manufacturing business when his intense appreciation of spirits led him to create the state’s first distillery since Prohibition. He soon realized that the ghost of the temperance movement was still casting a grim shadow on the state’s laws and regulations. After coordinating with the American Distilling Institute to remove many of those legal roadblocks, he helped pave the way for his own distillery as well as the dozens that have come after.
Photograph and image courtesy of Great Lakes Distillery.
When Sinacola began contemplating new merch for Great Lakes , she wanted to capture a certain energy between the confluence of three rivers and the edge of Lake Michigan — and how visitors to Milwaukee can start their morning paddling alongside stunning shorelines and cap off their afternoon at Great Lakes’ big horseshoe copper-top bar.
To relay those moments, Renee and her collaborators dreamed up a symbol that merges the outline of a kayaker on water with the contours of Milwaukee’s skyline at sunset. The image has an elegant simplicity. It uses only three colors: black for shadow, blue for water, and apricot for twilight.
“Our main customer base, on a daily basis, are tourists, and that’s really an important way to spread our name outside of the Milwaukee vicinity,” Sinacola explains. “We’re really well-known in our own city, so it’s about getting our name out there to other places; and although we only distribute within Wisconsin… the idea is that when other tourists come here and meet with their friends, they’ll see whatever merch from the distillery people might be toting, and then, the next time they come to Milwaukee, they’ll stop in.”
Advertising or Revenue Stream?
Sinacola’s biggest piece of advice to new distilleries thinking about jumping into the merch game is to make the company’s geographic location part of its logo.
“That’s especially important for visitors who may not want to travel with alcohol as a souvenir,” she offers. “You want them to have something else to bring home to remind them of their experience.”
But when it comes to an obvious business question about merchandise — whether it should be planned for as a type of advertisement or a stream of revenue — Sinacola has a nuanced take.
“I think it’s definitely both,” she replies. “It’s somewhat of a revenue source on its own; however, it’s really about pushing that brand awareness and showcasing a location, basically making people a walking billboard for your company.”
Vong says that Desert Door has come to a similar understanding.
“It’s kind of both,” Vong agrees. “It started out as a simple way to add supplemental revenue for us, but it’s ultimately about creating brand visibility.”
While seconding those points, Nora Feeley, the senior vice president of communications with Minden Mill Distilling, says spending time in her distillery’s weathered but magnificently restored gain silos has made her see that its merchandise area as part of the interior beauty of the place.
“It really adds to the overall look and feel of the tasting room — it builds something visually,” Feeley points out. “Visitors appreciate that…. Yes, it’s advertisement, it’s revenue, but it’s also a broader element that people want.”
