Mark Stell

“Pacific Northwest Inspired”

Bird Creek Distillery’s whiskey story begins much earlier than its founding date. It starts in a family restaurant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a boy named Mark Stell learned what it meant to work hard and care about what people were served. Born on April 4, 1967, Stell grew up watching his father run a steak-and-seafood restaurant near the harbor for four decades. He worked nearly every job in the place; washing dishes, bussing tables, cooking on the fry station, in other words, absorbing the rhythm of hospitality and the realities of small-business life long before he ever thought about barrels or barley.

As a young adult, Stell left Wisconsin for Las Vegas, where he spent several years “playing around in the casinos,” before deciding he wanted something more purposeful. He moved to Portland, Oregon, and enrolled at Portland State University to study marketing. There, he joined the international student organization AIESEC, a step that pulled his life onto a global track. In 1992, Stell traveled to the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as a student delegate. Later, back in Portland, Stell left school believing he knew where he wanted to focus his energy. He took a job with a local coffee roaster and, despite not having liked coffee much before, quickly became engrossed in the craft. Within six months he was “completely hooked.” After about nine months, he was fired when his employer discovered he was interviewing for other positions. That setback pushed him toward entrepreneurship.

With a business partner, Stell then launched a small roasting operation called Abruzzi Caffè. After a few years they sold that business and, in 1996, founded Portland Roasting Coffee, later renamed Portland Coffee Roasters. During this period, Stell met the woman who would become his wife, and together they began building a life around coffee, travel, and long-term partnerships with farming communities. From the beginning, the company focused on direct relationships with growers. His philanthropic work extended beyond coffee contracts. Stell helped found the nonprofit Portland Global Initiatives, which organized events such as “Walk for Water” to fund clean-water projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. Those experiences would eventually shape his approach to whiskey. After roughly three decades in coffee, Stell began to look seriously at spirits, particularly whiskey. 

Stell and his wife traveled the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, visited Scotland, and tasted widely, paying close attention to how age, process, and raw materials shaped flavor. His coffee background had taught him that variety, origin, and producer relationships could transform an everyday commodity into something distinctive. He wanted to apply that same thinking to American single malt. Stell began developing the concept for a whiskey brand built around specific barley varieties and direct relationships with growers. He consulted with established distillers and received a piece of advice that stuck with him: choose one thing and do it well. Stell chose American single malt whiskey, distilled from rare and heritage barleys, with the distillation itself handled by sourcing partner facilities.

In 2017, he formally founded Bird Creek Whiskey / Bird Creek Distillery in Portland. Stell continued to lead Portland Coffee Roasters while launching the whiskey brand. Bird Creek contracts with several distilleries, two smaller operations in Portland and a larger facility in Washington State, to distill single malt from barleys that Stell sources directly from farmers across the Pacific Northwest. The new-make spirit is then brought back to Portland, where it is aged, evaluated, and bottled under the Bird Creek label. Bird Creek’s identity is tied to those specific barley varieties and the farmers who grow them.

Bird Creek’s tasting room and production space sit in Portland’s Central Eastside, in the same building as Portland Coffee Roasters’ main café and roasting operation. This co-location embodies Stell’s career arc: coffee and whiskey living side by side, each informed by the same belief in traceable ingredients and long-term partnerships. By late 2022 and 2023, Bird Creek began releasing four-year-plus American single malts, including small-batch and cask-strength expressions that quickly attracted attention.

Recognition followed rapidly. In 2023, Bird Creek’s cask-strength Baronesse single malt was named “Single Malt Whiskey of the Year” by the ASCOT Awards and received a Double Platinum medal. In 2024, Bird Creek’s Small Batch American Single Malt earned Best of Category American Single Malt, Bottled & Blended, at the American Distilling Institute’s International Spirits Competition, along with Gold medals for several cask-strength releases. That same year, Bird Creek entries secured Double Gold and Gold medals at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. Industry press now frequently refers to Bird Creek as one of the most highly decorated new American single malt brands, highlighting its focus on barley types that few other producers are using.

Through all of this, the through-line of Stell’s life remains clear. From a Kenosha restaurant to a global coffee company, from Tanzanian coffee fields to a Portland whiskey house, he has built ventures around long-term relationships with farmers, careful attention to raw materials, and a strong sense of place. Bird Creek Distillery is the latest expression of that pattern, transforming carefully chosen Pacific Northwest barleys into American single malts that carry his decades of experience, from hospitality to coffee to philanthropy, into the whiskey glass.

Sources:

  1. American Mash & Grain, “Bird Creek Distillery” , Meghan Swanson, mashngrain.com

  2. Caffeinated PDX, “…An interview with Mark Stell”, June 27, 2011, caffeinatedpdx.com

  3. Portland Coffee Roasters/About Us, portlandcoffeeroasters.com

  4. The Whiskey Wash, “Bird Creek Whiskey: A Coffee Guy’s Journey…”, Nino Kilgore-Marchetti, December 12, 2022, thewhiskeywash.com

  5. PRWeb, “…Bird Creek Nets Best Of Category, Double Gold…”, May 8, 2024, prweb.com via Bird Creek Whiskey

  6. Fred Minnick, “Bird Creek Whiskey Releases New Limited Expressions”,  September 23, 2024, fredminnick.com

  7. Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, “Portland Coffee Roasters…25 years”,  teaandcoffee.net

  8. Bird Creek Whiskey/official site, birdcreekwhiskey.com

Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee