Steve Milligan
William “Steve” Milligan’s route to becoming an awarded whiskey distiller in the Sunshine State began decades before his pirate-themed distillery appeared in Bradenton. Born in August of 1960, Milligan obtained degrees in both Chemical Engineering and International Management from the University of Alabama in 1982. Thereafter, Milligan built a successful career around chemical engineering, industrial operations and, significantly, distillation, where he spent much of the next 35 years working around the world. His career took him through residency in eight U.S. states, then five countries, and included responsibility for large-scale chemical facilities, giving him an unusually technical foundation for the small-batch distilling business he would eventually create.
His position with Dow Chemical eventually allowed Milligan to rise to vice president of operations, but his connection to beverage distilling developed during a three-year assignment in Saudi Arabia, ironically, a nation where alcohol was strictly prohibited, Milligan combined his chemical-engineering knowledge with information gathered from books, and began covertly experimenting with fermentation and distillation in his government-supplied apartment bathroom. He started with wine, converted that wine into brandy, and eventually moved into vodka and whiskey. He progressed through raw materials that included grapes and mangoes before he began working with rice, corn and molasses. Positive comments from his excited co-workers prompted further interest using the same fundamental processes that would later become his second career.
In 2017, Milligan officially left work at Dow, and settled in sunny Bradenton, Florida, but he was quick to discover that conventional retirement held little attraction for him. He had spent his entire working life making things and operating complex facilities, so distilling beverage spirits seemed that it might offer him a way to combine chemical engineering, production, and his longstanding interest in whiskey, rum and vodka. He began developing Loaded Cannon Distillery immediately. Family members involved with a distillery in Alabama provided training, resources and advice, while Steve searched Manatee County for a suitable location. He eventually selected a 5,000-square-foot unit in Bradenton’s Gatewood Corporate Center, a space with sufficient height for the equipment he intended to install. Milligan received his federal permit on October 30, 2018, and assembled a team that included partners Justin Hertz and Mark Aniello. The centerpiece of the production floor was a 500-gallon copper still, accompanied by fermenters, tanks, barrels and a large grain silo.
Loaded Cannon opened its doors in July 2019, with Milligan as chief distiller. The distillery adopted the imagery of Florida’s Gulf Coast and the Golden Age of Piracy, creating the fictitious ship “Loaded Cannon” and playfully naming his equipment for legendary pirates. Behind the theatrical presentation, however, Milligan built a serious production operation. The distillery mills its own corn, rice, rye and wheat, and its large silo was designed to hold approximately 45,000 pounds of corn. Milligan also emphasized the use of metal throughout the distillation system, avoiding plastic and utilizing only copper, stainless steel or glass in any part that comes in contact with spirit.
Despite the historical connection between piracy and rum, whiskey quickly became an important part of the broader Loaded Cannon portfolio. Its principal whiskey line took the name “Carlota’s Revenge,” derived from a Gulf Coast epic involving the legendary escaped female slave Carlota and the pirate Miguel Pascal. The Carlota’s Revenge family quickly expanded to include Straight Bourbon Whiskey and Straight Rye Whiskey. Milligan also produced a rice whiskey, made from Florida Kaminari rice, demonstrating his ability to work with grains beyond the conventional grain combinations commonly used in most American spirits.
The distillery’s grain-to-glass approach became particularly important to Milligan’s identity as a craft producer. Loaded Cannon did not simply create a brand around whiskey purchased from a distant producer via sourcing; Milligan emphasized creating the products only at the Bradenton distillery and using Florida-grown raw materials whenever possible. His scientifically-minded production philosophy has reflected his engineering background. Fermentation, distillation, and separation of the desired spirit directly during a run, copper contact, storage, and maturation have been treated as controllable production variables, rather than mere fanciful abstractions.
By the early 2020s, Loaded Cannon continued developing its whiskey inventory as the business emerged from the pandemic period. Carlota’s Revenge Straight Bourbon Whiskey provided an important measure of outside validation in 2022 when it received 91 points and a Gold Medal at the Bartender Spirits Awards. Judges called out traditional corn and rye characteristics in the whiskey, while the honor placed Milligan’s bourbon among the competition’s recipients of the panel’s highest award. The whiskey portfolio has subsequently included straight bourbon, straight rye, port-finished bourbon, light whiskey and wheat whiskey under the Carlota’s Revenge and Lost Legends names, a new line created to commemorate local first responders.
Milligan’s wife, Carmen, whom Steve had met and married in 2012, also participated in the distillery’s startup. She still works in the facility’s daily operation, though much of her job has remained behind the scenes, such as in making invert sugar used as a sweetener, and assisting in bottling and preparing ingredients used in many of Loaded Cannon’s growing portfolio of spirits. Now, the business the Milligans began after Steve’s retirement has thrived well beyond its vulnerable startup years. Loaded Cannon reached the national top ten in the USA Today 10Best Readers’ Choice competition for new craft distilleries in 2020, and it was selected among the Best of Florida distilleries in 2023, 2024, and 2025. The distillery remained operating at its Bradenton location in 2026, producing its spirits on site and maintaining a public tasting room and distillery tours. What began as the retirement project of a chemical engineer has therefore developed into an established Florida craft distillery with a whiskey program built around its own production, Florida grain and Milligan’s unusually long experience with the science of distillation.
For Steve Milligan, whiskey represents a continuation rather than a departure. The scale changed from world-class chemical facilities to a craft distillery, and the finished product changed from industrial chemicals to barrels of bourbon and rye, but the underlying disciplines of fermentation, separation, process control and careful production remained familiar territory. Carlota’s Revenge gave that technical background a distinctly Florida identity, and its 2022 Gold Medal supplied evidence that the approach could produce more than an interesting local story. More than four decades after Milligan began his professional career, the retired engineer is still working with distillation—only now the results are measured by the barrel and poured by the glass.
Sources:
Loaded Cannon Distillery official website, loadedcannondistillery.com
Bradenton Herald, “This Might Lift Your Spirits: New Distillery …Coming to Bradenton Area”, James A. Jones Jr., December 13, 2018, bradenton.com
SRQ Magazine, “It Takes A Ballsy Buccaneer”, Brittany Mattie, November 2019, srqmagazine.com
Your Observer, “Loaded Cannon Distillery…to Lakewood Ranch,” Eric Snider, June 10, 2019, yourobserver.com
Sarasota Magazine, “Lakewood Ranch Distillery Opens Its Doors”, Sarafina Murphy-Gibson, August 21, 2019, sarasotamagazine.com
Business Observer, “Area Distillery Taps into National Top 10 List”, Business Observer Staff, September 30, 2020, businessobserverfl.com
Bartender Spirits Awards, “Loaded Cannon Carlota’s Revenge Straight Bourbon Whiskey”, 2022, bartenderspiritsawards.com
Discover Bradenton, “Business Owner Spotlight: Steve Milligan, Loaded Cannon Distillery”, Beth Deyo, October 6, 2023, discoverbradenton.com
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee
