Ryan Montgomery
Ryan Montgomery’s story is, in many ways, a modern Montana distilling story built on a rhythm as old as the soil: family land, hard seasons, and the long patience it takes to turn grain into something worth sharing. But Montgomery and his wife, Jenny, didn’t begin with a distillery, they began with a shared love of whisky. After their son Heath was born in 2009, the couple started planning in earnest to establish a traditional, small-batch distillery in Missoula. The idea wasn’t abstract. In 2010, Ryan and Jenny traveled to Scotland to learn distilling fundamentals. Ryan studied under Frank McHardy at Springbank Distillery in Campbeltown, an apprenticeship that offered a plug-and-play recipe for Montana, because it taught a philosophy of old-world methods, human attention, and a preference for doing the work with your own hands.
That traditional emphasis fit what Ryan already carried from home. Montana was not a branding choice for the Montgomerys, it was inheritance. After all, the distillery is a family business with Montana roots five generations deep. The farming side of the operation runs through Ryan’s parents, Tom and Chris Montgomery, who work the family land in Heath, Montana, raising the wheat and rye that anchor the distillery’s identity. That farm is more than a supplier. It has been in the family for nearly 90 years, sitting near the geographical center of the state on a spring creek that irrigates their fields. Together, it is part of the living system that turns Montana weather, water, and soil into spirit character.
Before Missoula became the address, there was the wandering that often precedes a return. Ryan and Jenny were living overseas when he took up homebrewing, at the same time feeling a pull to move back to Montana and build a business that could fold in his family’s agricultural background. Brewing looked like it could be that path, until a work trip to Germany brought the couple to a small distillery outside Munich. Seeing small-scale distilling up close opened another door where they realized that they could distill in the same spirit of craft as brewing, but with an entirely different kind of patience and payoff.
When the Montgomerys finally did establish themselves in downtown Missoula, the address carried its own historical weight. The distillery sits at 129 West Front Street, in a building erected in 1889 by Edward Schilling, who used it in part as a liquor warehouse and saloon space before Missoula’s downtown trade shifted into other eras. The building, and in fact, Front Street itself, belonged to the social infrastructure of the West: places where deals were cut, news traveled, and people sought warmth and company in a hard country. So inside the business, Ryan and Jenny divided responsibilities in a way that kept that in mind in a pairing of distilling and hospitality that has helped the spirits make sense to the public, one drink at a time.
For the distillery, whiskey, inevitably, became the long game. Montgomery’s Sudden Wisdom Rye is positioned as a 100% rye whiskey built around Montana and Canadian rye, milled, fermented, distilled, and bottled in Missoula. Montgomery laid down his first casks in 2015, using rye grown at the family farm near Lewistown, Montana, and the whiskey saw its first release after minimal aging in 2016. By 2019, Montgomery’s whiskey program was drawing wider attention. The distillery’s single malt earned a Gold Outstanding award at the 2019 World Whiskies Awards, and that Sudden Wisdom Rye also won a gold medal at a 2019 Sip Northwest competition.
In the end, Ryan Montgomery’s distilling life sits at the intersection of family continuity and practical craft, old-world technique and new-world improvisation, and a business whose most important product forces its owner to think in years, not weeks. The story is not one of overnight success. It is one of returning home, learning by apprenticeship, and building something that can carry the taste of a place; good processes, grain, water, and the patience to let time do its part.
Sources:
Makerviews podcast, “Montgomery Distillery…,” Scott Mathson, April 16, 2018, makerviews.com
Makerviews podcast, “Ryan Montgomery…”, Episode 02 transcript, April 15, 2018, makerviews.com
Montgomery Distillery official website, montgomerydistillery.com
The Missoula Current News, “Montgomery Distillery celebrates 7th year, wins 2019 World Whiskies Award”, November 14, 2019, missoulacurrent.com
Montana Farm Bureau Federation, “Keeping Spirits Local”, July 1, 2019, mfbf.org
Montana Press, “Montana Craft Distilleries”, April 8, 2019, montanapress.net
Distinctly Montana, “Montgomery Distillery On the Rise,” distinctlymontana.com
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee