The world’s earliest distillers were likely farmers, who were finding new ways to preserve and monetize their crops. So, there’s something that feels very fundamental about farmstead distilleries today.

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Fortunately, there are a few in Wisconsin, including Perlick Distillery in Sarona, north of Eau Claire, which is run by fifth- and sixth-generations members of a family that’s been farming in the Sarona area since 1920.

Father-son duo Tom and Scott Perlick run both the 2,000 acres of corn, wheat, barley, soybeans, sunflowers and other crops on the farm, and, since 2014, have been distilling some of that grain into vodka and single-malt whiskey.

The distillery’s main products are a vodka distilled from wheat and barley, and a version that’s blended with Wisconsin maple syrup to created a real taste of Badger State autumn. Perlick also periodically releases a single-malt whiskey, which typically sells out quickly.

All of the grain that goes into Perlick’s bottles is grown on the farm. The Perlicks even send their barley to Maltwerks in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, to be malted and sent back for use in their mash.

We caught up with Scott Perlick to ask about the distillery – which also has a tasting room that's open to the public – the farm, the family, the spirits and more.

OnMilwaukee: Tell us a bit about your family's history on the farm and how that led you to begin distilling.

Scott Perlick: My family began farming in the Sarona area in 1920. My Father, Tom, grew up on the current farm.  He became an agronomist as a profession, but when my grandfather passed away in the ‘90s, we moved back to Sarona so he could take over the farming operation. At that time the farm was a small dairy.  

Over the years my father grew the farm to nearly 3,000 acres at its peak ... just crops. But like anything with agriculture, you are always beholden to commodity prices, which are totally out of the producer’s control.  Because of this, value-adding – selling direct to consumer – became a big goal of my dad’s and the farm. This was done through various ways like selling 50-pound bags of corn, growing sunflowers to press into bio-diesel, now sold as birdseed, and growing specialty crops.  

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I graduated from Spooner High School in 2005, and immediately left for the Air Force where I became a SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape) Specialist.  I was active duty, then did Air Reserves in Minneapolis for a total of 11 years.  After active duty I attended UW-Stout where I received a degree in Applied Social Science.  From there I attended Law School at William Mitchell in St. Paul, Minnesota.  

As I was about to graduate law school, I really had to think about what I wanted to do. Although I had lived in the city, and traveled extensively, I always wanted to move back to rural Wisconsin.

Was the distillery your idea?

The distillery was my dad’s idea years ago; again, looking for ways to value-add to our crops.  He was never going to take the time to do it with the farm, but I thought maybe it would be an interesting experiment, and if it worked, great!  If it didn’t, I’d practice law.  

So, in 2014 we renovated a small barn on the farm, and I began figuring out how to distill. I had never made alcohol before; I didn’t know if we could make anything worth drinking, or if anyone would show up to drink it. Again, we’re in northwest Wisconsin; there are two stop lights in the entire county, and you can see them from each other in Spooner. We were originally going to do all types of spirits: vodka, gin, and whiskey.  But the vodka really took off, and I’ve been trying to stay ahead ever since.  

Over the years we’ve grown from that small barn into a larger facility just off-site from the farm. We renovated a larger barn at the site in 2017, and have continued to add on for seating and production capacity.  We now have two tasting rooms that can seat about 100 people inside and 250 people outside.  We’ve expanded our production area to about 6,000 square feet.  

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Over this time, we’ve stayed true to why we started the distillery: taking grain grown on the farm, and adding value to it to make really good distilled spirits.  All the grain that goes into the vodka is grown here, and we also grow the barley which is malted by Maltwerks in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota that is used in the vodka and in our American Single Malt Whiskey.  

Eventually we’d like to scale the farm down, and scale the distillery up, to the point where the farm only grows, with crop rotations, for the distillery, and I’d start to take over more of the farm operation as my dad retires.  But as of now, we could produce millions of bottles of alcohol with how much the farm can produce. We have room to grow, so drink up!. I also have a wife and two young children; it would be great if my kids showed an interest in continuing the farm and distillery someday!

The really cool thing about the farm and distillery is that we are able to take these grains grown in Washburn County (population: 17,000), and transform them into a really great product, right here, that can then be sold throughout the state in stores in places like Milwaukee.  And eventually, as we grow, we can do that throughout the United States.  

Speaking of selling throughout the state, we are relatively well-known in northwest Wisconsin.  But a few years ago we began distributing state-wide with Bill’s Distributing.  We are really trying to give people the opportunity to try our products where we might not be as well known, like Milwaukee and Madison; so I appreciate you taking the time to do this interview!  

Both our Yeoman Vodkas are carried by large stores like Woodman’s, Festival Foods, and Total Wines, and smaller independent stores throughout the state.  There is an interactive map of retailers on our website at perlickdistillery.com, and any retailer is able to purchase through Bill’s Distributing.   

What does the distillery mean to the farm in financial terms? How about in labor terms? I bet it keeps you busy.

Although the farm and distillery are totally separate entities with my dad controlling the farm, and me controlling the distillery, they are both beneficial to each other.  The farm gets to have consistent grain prices, and no transportation costs, selling to the distillery, and the distillery gets to have family control over the grain production.  With that being said, the farm is a successful operation on its own. But, back to the value added, the distillery helps by value-adding to the crops grown on the farm and vice versa.

We also get to expose people to modern agriculture. Many of our customers come from urban areas, and have no idea about agriculture. By getting them to the farm we can spark their curiosity and educate them on things like precision planting, no-till, soil conservation, cover crops, buffer strips, and perennial pollinator habitats that we’ve planted throughout our property.   

My father works full-time – farming full-time is far more than 40 hours a week – on the farm, and has about three or four part-time employees that help as well. I work full time – again much more than 40 hour work-week – at the distillery, and employ one full-time employee on the production side. 

In the tasting room side of the business, we have three part-time managers, and employ roughly 40 servers and bartenders throughout the year.  Many of our employees are less than part-time, and work when we have open shifts seasonally. We keep relatively short open hours: Thursday-Sunday.

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We also don’t retail food at the tasting room. However, we offer no-cost spots for local food trucks, and generally have a food truck on-site every day we are open from April-October.  In the winter months one of the food trucks stocks meat and cheese platters for sale in the tasting room.

I know the vodkas are the main part of the distillery portfolio, tell us about how the maple syrup expression came about.

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The maple flavored vodka is something we’ve done in the tasting room with cocktails for years. It really adds to the flavor of some cocktails if we can incorporate maple syrup. But, if we just add maple, it doesn’t dissolve very well into individual drinks. To get around this, we began blending it with the vodka itself at a 25 percent maple to 75 percent vodka ratio. This allowed the maple syrup to dissolve, but still maintain its flavor and sweetness.

We’ve been just trying to keep up with our regular vodka sales since we started production in 2014. However, in 2021 we significantly expanded our production capacity with a larger building and equipment.  Because of the increased capacity, we were able to introduce products in addition to our regular vodka.

In 2021 I was approached by Scott Holt and his wife Sherry with Compass Farms about possibly fermenting and distilling their maple syrup into vodka.  The production side of that isn’t something I really wanted to take on, and we also wanted to stay true to why we began the distillery: using only our grain to produce the spirits. But, because Scott was in the same boat as us, trying to add value to his agriculture products, I thought maybe we could use the opportunity to incorporate his maple syrup into our already popular maple syrup flavored vodka, and begin bottling and selling it.

Scott agreed and is now our exclusive supplier of maple syrup for our Yeoman Maple Syrup Flavored Vodka.  Compass Farms can guarantee a quality product all from one source, and even better, it’s another Wisconsin farm that’s adding value to their crops.

We began bottling the maple syrup flavored vodka in March of 2023, and it has been extremely popular just on its own, or in cocktails; you can find specific recipes on our website. We distribute the Yeoman maple syrup flavored vodka to retailers throughout Wisconsin with Bill’s Distributing along with our regular vodka. You can find store locations on our website.

I'd love to hear a bit about the single malt you make. Can you tell us a bit about it?

I started making American single malt whiskey in 2018.  We’ve let it age in barrels for five years, and released our first batch in September of this year. It was a tremendous success, and we sold out within the first week.

By definition, American Single Malt Whiskey has to be made with 100 percent malted barley.  When we started making whiskey, we had to first figure out what we would make.  It seemed like every distillery was making just an insane amount of bourbon, so we wanted to differentiate ourselves a bit.  American Single Malt Whiskey is a new classification of spirits in the United States, and seemed like a good type of whiskey to try. Unfortunately, ‘trying’ for us is a five-year process!

In addition, we already grew our own barley that we have malted for use in our vodka. If we did the American Single Malt, we’d likely be the only distillery growing our own barley used to make the single malt, hopefully making a truly unique product. Moreover, we have a unique climate in northern Wisconsin. It can go from 100 degrees and humid in the summer to -30 in the winter. 

Because of this, we don’t climate control the barrels while they age. The changes from season to season seem to give the whiskey a more unique flavor that can’t be had anywhere else.

Do you plan to expand the whiskey side at all? Maybe bring the single malt to distribution, maybe add a bourbon, etc.?

We’ll see. Ideally, we’d sell so much vodka that we won’t have the capacity to make whiskey! We’re almost there; I only have the capacity to make a very small amount of whiskey, maybe 2,000 bottles a year, and still keep up with our vodka demand. However, it’s been fun and interesting making the whiskey, and people seem to really enjoy it, so we’ll likely strive to make more in the future, but it will probably be 10 years before we have enough to retail throughout the state.  As a bonus, I’m a whiskey drinker myself, so it’s fun to compare what we can do here with what others are doing.  

So, all of the grain for the spirits comes from the farm? Have you ever considered malting – maybe traditional floor malting – on site?

Yes, every bit of grain that goes into making any spirits produced here is grown here.  We use hard red spring wheat and malted barley to produce the Yeoman Vodkas. In fact, every part of the process happens here: milling, mashing, fermenting, distilling, aging, bottling.

As I explained earlier, we grow barley, and truck it to Maltwerks in Detroit Lakes to be malted, and then bring it back to use in production. We have the barley malted into a pilsner malt for the whiskey. On a side note, we are attempting to sell our malted barley to breweries in the area.  Even though Wisconsin is well-known for making beer, it’s not very well-known for growing the barley used to make that beer. We’re hoping brewers will find value in brewing beers in Wisconsin that are made from barley grown in Wisconsin.

Eventually it would be great to incorporate our own malt house on site.  But, we’ve had our hands full the past 9 years with the distillery, and haven’t been able to focus our time or energy on the malthouse.  Hopefully as we continue to expand, it’s something we could do.  Fortunately, Maltwerks is a malthouse that has the same goals of quality that we do, and they have been really good to work with.

I know the new single malt is just about ready. Will it go quickly?

The first release was on Sept. 7, and it sold out in about eight days!  There is less coming out on this release, so I don’t expect it to last long.  We’ll have another batch coming out in late April. The home page of our website is updated with the next release dates.  We should have 300-500 bottles coming out every 3-6 months from here on. We don’t do pre-sales, so its first come-first serve when it’s released at the distillery!