Michael Myers
Michael Myers was born on May 25, 1963. He grew up between Georgia and Tennessee, in a rural setting where whiskey wasn’t an abstraction. His family farm life included animals and open land, and he later recalled being raised around the culture of the South and the borderlands of Tennessee whiskey. He spent formative time on a family farm in Sandy Springs, north of Atlanta, and his family also raised Tennessee Walking Horses on a farm at Flat Creek, Tennessee, a tiny hamlet ironically positioned equidistant between Jack Daniel’s and George Dickel, though no hard spirit was of interest to him at the time.
On the other hand, Photography arrived early. As a teenager, Myers’ mother bought him a camera, and the habit stuck; first as a way of seeing his surroundings, later as a serious education and career. He studied photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and later, he connected the distillery’s name, “291,” to photography history and identity (Alfred Stieglitz’s famed “291” gallery) as well as to the personal symbolism he attached to it during those years. As an adult, Myers built a high-powered photography career that put him in the middle of New York’s commercial image-making world. He became a fashion and beauty photographer working at a level where major publications and marquee assignments were part of the routine.
That New York chapter is inseparable from a single morning in 2001.
On September 11, 2001, Myers was in Lower Manhattan at the intersection of Greenwich and Duane when the first plane struck the World Trade Center. He later recalled having his youngest son on his shoulders, walking him to school, when the day’s normal rhythms completely collapsed into shock, dust, and noise. A later feature also described Myers, his then-wife Erin, and their two small children witnessed the first crash from that same neighborhood corner. The immediate aftermath became a family logistics problem with existential weight. His family relocated to Colorado Springs, where his in-laws lived, first as a temporary refuge while they waited to return to their condominium near Ground Zero. They did return briefly, but the attempt didn’t hold. The family chose Colorado permanently, and Myers began commuting back to New York frequently for photo work, living, in effect, between two lives.
Even after commuting for years, the pivot that eventually became Distillery 291 did not happen in a single, clean break. That came only after the sense that his career was still creatively demanding, but no longer emotionally sustainable. By his telling, a decisive spark hit in August 2010 on a flight back to Colorado after a major shoot. Reading about marketer Steven Grasse, Myers began to imagine a different creative craft; something he could build with his hands, learn on his own terms, and anchor in Colorado rather than in airports.
He had no distilling pedigree. He had never brewed beer or distilled whiskey. But he did have the temperament of someone comfortable with technical processes and patient repetition in the form of darkroom work, culinary chemistry, the controlled unpredictability of creative production. When he started reading and watching everything he could find about distilling, he also started looking for a still. A manufacturer quote that required tens of thousands of dollars, even for a small unit, forced a choice: buy expensive equipment, or build. Myers chose to build. That decision became the most literal bridge between his former profession and his new one. Myers had copper photogravure plates from his photography work. He drew dimensions for a pot still, created a paper mock-up, and took it, along with those plates, to a welder. The result was an operating still whose copper surfaces still carry the faint outlines of the images they once helped print—the medium changed; the material stayed.
Delays dragged the build through the summer of 2011. Finally, the still was ready in early September. Myers later said that once it was close, he chose to wait and make his first run on a date that could hold the emotional weight of what had driven him west in the first place. On September 11, 2011, ten years after 9/11, he pulled his first whiskey off that homemade still, marking the founding moment that Distillery 291 would later build its public identity around.
Distillery 291’s early years were built as much on improvisation as on ambition. Myers began as a one-man operation, then added staff as demand and complexity grew. By 2015, he had brought on additional distilling help, and by 2016, the addition of a second still expanded output significantly. The operation began small, but it behaved like a serious workshop: experiment, taste, revise, repeat.
A signature production choice reinforced the “Colorado” in 291 whiskey. Myers looked for a local analogue to whiskey traditions he admired elsewhere, and one of the most distinctive elements became the use of aspen staves, a Colorado-native finishing touch inserted into barrels for a short period before bottling. Coverage compared the idea, at least conceptually, to the mellowing traditions used in Tennessee whiskey, but with a local material and a more idiosyncratic result.
Michael Myers’ arc remains as interesting as it is inspiring: a farm upbringing shaped by the culture of Southern whiskey, a serious education and career in photography, an encounter with catastrophe at street level, and then a late-career reinvention that fused artistry with engineering. Distillery 291 is then, not a detour from Michael Myers’ life’s work. It is the same impulse to make something lasting, build it with your hands, and leave your marks in the material that is translated into an entirely new craft.
Sources:
Garden & Gun, “A Whiskey Maker’s 9/11 Journey,” Tom Wilmes, September 8, 2023, gardenandgun.com
Distillery 291 official website, “Our Story”, distillery291.com
Whisky Advocate, “How A Fashion Photographer Became One of Colorado’s Most Innovative Craft Distillers,” Gabrielle Pharms, September 10, 2020, whiskyadvocate.com
Cowboys & Indians, “The Whiskey Worked,” José R. Ralat, June 3, 2018, cowboysindians.com
Bourbon & Banter, “You Need to Meet… Michael Myers at Distillery 291,” Brett Atlas, April 20, 2017, bourbonbanter.com
Whiskey Lore/Episode 12, “291 Distillery Founder Michael Myers”, Drew Hannush, July 30, 2021, whiskeylore.org
FredMinnick.com, “Five Questions With 291 Colorado Whiskey’s Michael Myers,” Fred Minnick, September 13, 2024, fredminnick.com
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee