Justin Lee
Between the legend of Margaret “Molly” Brown and a modern Denver warehouse, Justin Lee’s story sits firmly in the practical world: pipes, pumps, controls, grain, and time. Lee is one of the co-owners and the head distiller behind Molly Brown Distillery, a small Colorado whiskey operation built with an unusually hands-on philosophy that is less “order a turnkey system,” and more “build the system you actually want.”
Lee’s roots weren’t in Colorado. He is from Mississippi, and he arrived in the Rocky Mountains long before what became his distillery had a name on the door. Lee earned a degree in chemical engineering, an education that later became central to how Molly Brown would be designed and run. While still in school, he was already testing the boundary between curiosity and craft, when, in college, he built what he described as a do-it-yourself distillery at home. It was early validation, at least to him, that the gap between hobby-scale experimentation and professional-grade process thinking was smaller than most people assume.
In 2011, Lee moved from experimenting to working inside the business. He began working with distiller Seth Johnson at J&L Distilling Company in Boulder, Colorado. That job taught him what he needed to know about production, but also lead to a serendipitous introduction. At J&L, Lee crossed paths with Stephen DeGruccuo, a Florida native who had moved to Colorado in 2010 after his wife took a job there. DeGruccuo also didn’t enter spirits through a formal distilling program. He volunteered at the distillery to learn, motivated by a personal interest in whiskey and a desire to avoid returning to a conventional office job. In a short time, J&L became their shared classroom, with Lee on staff, and DeGruccuo dependably showing up and helping.
By 2015, Lee was ready to move on. Both he and DeGruccuo left J&L and decided to build something of their own. The two launched Molly Brown Distillery in October 2015. At the time, there wasn’t a polished destination distillery waiting for them, only a dim warehouse on Denver’s north side described as a “white shell.” If the founders were going to make whiskey there, they would first have to make a working plant.
This is where Lee’s engineering temperament becomes more than a résumé line. The buildout was done on a shoestring budget, and the partners emphasize that nearly everything in the operation was done by them. Instead of buying conventional, high-gloss equipment, Lee assembled systems with what was available. One of the most vivid examples was fermentation: rather than relying on standard, purpose-built fermenters, Molly Brown used former milk containers sourced cheaply from a dairy. It is the kind of detail that can sound like a gimmick until you recognize what it signals, and that is an operation comfortable with chic improvisation, and one that gives spirit that is controlled and repeatable. Control and repeatability were, in fact, built into the plant’s “nervous system.” The distillery’s setup used computerized modulators to manage starts and stops, and Lee could monitor and run aspects of the operation from a tablet. That combination—repurposed vessels on one end, modern process control on the other—helps explain how Molly Brown could be both scrappy and exacting at the same time.
Naming the business brought its own set of decisions. The founders chose “Molly Brown” as a tribute to the strength and staying power associated with the “Unsinkable” legend, an image tied to Margaret Brown, the Colorado social activist who survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. The choice was also strategic: as Lee noted, the name had recognition beyond Colorado, even though it wasn’t their first pick from a much larger list. For a small whiskey producer, brand recognition can’t replace quality, but it can buy a first conversation—provided the liquid earns the second. The whiskey itself was built to be emphatically local. The distillery used Colorado water sourced from the mountains and grain supplied by Root Shoot Malting in Loveland, Colorado, with milling done on site. That grain-to-glass emphasis also carried a business logic: Lee argued that keeping nearly every step in-state meant more of each dollar stayed in Colorado—everything, he said, except the bottle itself.
Even after the 2015 launch, Molly Brown’s timeline followed the pace of whiskey rather than the pace of hype. In April 2019, the first whiskey spirit was put into barrels. Nearly a year later it was ready for bottling, timing that collided with the statewide shutdowns at the start of the Covid pandemic. Like most producers, the business had to adapt. The team temporarily paused making whiskey to conserve resources and manage space, but they still managed to place bottles in local liquor stores and begin building a reputation with early reviews. By 2021, Molly Brown’s lineup was presented as two main whiskeys: a bourbon, and a “high rye” bourbon. Retail listings for the high-rye expression commonly describe a three-grain mash (51% corn, 35% rye, 14% malted barley) aged in new, charred oak barrels and bottled at 90 proof—specs that fit the distillery’s “bold but practical” positioning in the market.
The most public sign that the business had stabilized post-Covid came in October 2021, when Molly Brown finally opened its tasting room. The same build-it-yourself approach showed up again: much of the furniture was repurposed from a closed Colorado inn, and the space was designed for people to sit with a pour and stay awhile. For a distillery that had spent years building its plant before it could fully welcome visitors, the tasting room represented a shift from production-first survival to something closer to a complete public-facing operation. But what ties Lee’s arc together is less a single breakthrough than a consistent method: learn the work from the inside, design systems that match your goals, and keep the process tight enough to repeat. In Lee’s own words, the “art” is in understanding flavors and producing consistency. At Molly Brown, that idea is presented as the job.
Sources:
Westword, “Molly Brown Distillery Rises to the Occasion With Unsinkable Whiskey,” Linnea Covington, October 28, 2021, westword.com
Rackhouse Whiskey Club/Behind the Still (podcast), “Episode 15: Molly Brown Distillery,” August 25, 2021, rackhousewhiskeyclub.com
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee