March Discovery Club: Proof Artisan Distillers, North Dakota Straight Bourbon

I’m excited to share the March Lost Lantern Discovery Club release. After last month’s barnstormer of a hazmat triticale whiskey, we’re going back to bourbon this time, but from a part of the country that I’m guessing you wouldn’t expect.

This month’s release is a 5-year-old straight bourbon from Proof Artisan Distillers in Fargo, North Dakota. It will come as no surprise that this is our first-ever release from North Dakota, and I’m so excited to be sharing it at last – this one has been in the works for a while. 

Like most distilleries we work with in the Discovery Club, Proof’s whiskey is hard to find outside of North Dakota and parts of Minnesota – and since North Dakota is one of the least populous states in the country, that means few people have had a chance to try their whiskey if they aren’t from there. But that’s what the Discovery Club is all about!

North Dakota probably isn’t the first place most whiskey lovers think to look for great bourbon. But that’s exactly the point of the Discovery Club: to find exciting whiskey in places you might not expect. And Joel Kath and the team at Proof are doing some very cool things in an unexpected place.

And once you learn a little about what founder Joel Kath and his team are doing at Proof, it starts to make a lot more sense.

Proof Artisan Distillers: The Story

In summer 2024, I took a sprawling road trip across the Great Plains, visiting a wide range of distilleries and states that I had never been to before. The official purpose of the trip was to visit Far North Spirits in northern Minnesota, in preparation for the Estate Collection we launched last summer. And because the distillery is so far north, the easiest way to get there was to start my road trip by flying not into Minneapolis (6 hours south), but Fargo, North Dakota. Believe it or not, it only took one layover to get there from Vermont, but their airport is even smaller than the one in Burlington.

That same road trip ended up taking me to a number of great distilleries that have since appeared in the Discovery Club: Backwards Distilling and Pine Bluffs in Wyoming, and now Proof in Fargo. But Proof was actually the first distillery visit of the trip: after all, I had flown into Fargo, and the distillery is right downtown!

I had read extensively about the distillery before visiting, and it is clearly the most serious and ambitious distillery in North Dakota. They don’t have some wild story and family history – just a team of folks passionate about making a whiskey that reflects their home state, made (truly) grain-to-glass from local ingredients, aged in full-size barrels since the beginning, and reflecting a unique climate. They’ve absolutely succeeded at this.

Proof Artisan Distillers: The Whiskey

When founder Joel Kath started telling me all about Proof’s flagship whiskey, called Crooked Furrow bourbon, I got more and more excited. There’s a lot going on in this bourbon.

Start with the grain. Proof has sourced their corn from the same farmer — Joe Breker, near Rutland, North Dakota — since they launched their bourbon program in 2015. That name probably doesn’t ring a bell to you, unless you happen to know a lot about regenerative farming… but Joe is one of the original pioneers of regenerative, no-till farming in the modern agricultural environment. He has been using regenerative practices on his land for 58 seasons, and has long been an evangelist for new methods of farming that leave the land better off than it was before. I already knew about him from my own interest in regenerative farming,.so I was incredibly excited to hear that Proof got all their corn from this farming legend.

The malted barley comes from family farms in central North Dakota and is malted by Two Track Malting, a family-owned operation in Menoken. It’s about as locally rooted a grain story as you’ll find anywhere in American whiskey. The mashbill itself is 80% corn and 20% malted barley, a relatively high malt percentage that gives the whiskey a softer, rounder character

And then there’s the aging environment, which is where things get especially interesting.

When I told Joel that we like to talk about how whiskey ages in different parts of the country, he got very excited. Because he and the team at Proof are firm believers in an under-discussed aspect of aging conditions: barometric pressure. 

Joel told me something I hadn’t heard from any distiller before: that the barometric pressure swings of the Great Plains seem to have a real effect on how whiskey ages in the barrel. I am just going to share what Joel said about this directly:

“Aging whiskey in North Dakota offers a meteorological advantage that is often overlooked.  Swings in barometric pressure have a similar aging effect on a barrel of whiskey as does a seasonal change of temperature.  As a plains state, North Dakota experiences dramatic shifts in barometric pressure with passing weather fronts – oftentimes changing every 7 to 10 days.  A simple test of sealing a barrel during a low pressure system and opening it a week later during a high pressure system will result in a small but noticeable puff of air trying to enter the barrel.  A small but noticeable puff of air will blow out of the barrel when opening during a low pressure system if it was sealed during high pressure system.  The effect from the barometric changes are much more immediate than the gradual effects of changes in temperature.”

When we talk about aging climate, we usually talk only about temperature. Pressure is a new element…  but one that in truth we’ve seen from other distilleries before. Cedar Ridge in Iowa and Ironroot 

Republic in Texas are also in areas that see big pressure swings, and this may in fact have a major effect on their aging climate too.

Geekery aside, back to the whiskey: this is a claim I don’t often make, but this tastes older than it is, especially given that it comes from such a cold climate. Thank the pressure for that. The nose has dense oak and dried baking spices in a way I associate more with 8+ year old bourbon. The palate is warm and oaky, with notes of dried cherry, cranberry, old books, and leather. Rich, dense, and earthy at its natural cask strength of 114.3 proof.

I can’t wait to hear what you think about this month’s whiskey! And if you’re not yet a member and want to join us for future releases, you can sign up for the Lost Lantern Discovery Club here.