Divers Recovered 145-Year-Old Rye From a Shipwreck. Here's How It Could Change American Whiskey Forever

Chad Munger looks like your typical craft whiskey enthusiast. The native midwesterner wears a solid frame and boasts a well-manicured beard, speckled with white and gray to match his tousled hair. But he's more than just a passionate imbiber. As the founder and CEO of Mammoth Distilling, he's spent over 10 years making rye whiskey in a nondescript two-story storefront mere blocks from the western shores of Lake Michigan. For nearly half that amount of time, he’s been trawling his backyard for a historic yet forgotten grain: Rosen rye. 

The heritage cereal was born on South Manitou Island, which stands in the middle of Lake Michigan. The seed, for its part, went on to travel far and wide, primarily to Pennsylvania and Maryland, informing rye whiskey's rich and robust flavors.

“Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Rosen Rye was the most sought-after grain for East Coast bootleggers, and subsequently some of the largest whiskey makers in America, including Michter’s and Seagrams,” Munger tells Men’s Journal. “Michigan was once the largest grower and exporter of rye grain in the United States, with about three million acres under cultivation.”

Mammoth Distilling founder Chad Munger has pushed the envelope of whiskey distilling. (Photo courtesy Sandra Wong Geroux) Photo courtesy Sandra Wong Geroux

After World War II, distillers largely abandoned rye in favor of bourbon. The corn used to make the latter was a ubiquitous commodity, while American farmers used rye as a cover crop. The Rosen variety was especially problematic. Though it was particularly flavorful as a base ingredient in whiskey, it easily cross-pollinated, quickly losing its distinct character, according to Munger.

“It soon became nonviable for most farmers,” he explains. “Except on South Manitou, which is 80 miles from Wisconsin and eight miles off the shore from Michigan. So, there were no competing crops to worry about.”

Atop the island’s eight square miles of arable terrain, the Hutzler and Beck family farms planted the grain until it slowly and surely lost all economic luster.

“These farms played a pivotal role in the history of American whiskey,” says Ari Sussman, a distiller and whiskey historian. He first met Munger in 2012 when managing the Artisan Distilling Program at Michigan State University. “Their rye was so highly regarded that the legendary botanist Nikolai Vavilov traveled from Russia to East Lansing to collect a sample. It wasn’t just the quality of the grain; it was the Hutzler's and Beck's efforts to improve certified Rosen rye seed year after year that solidified their contribution to agriculture."

Nevertheless, by the 1960s, these contributions had all but vanished from the earth—save for one climate-controlled USDA seed vault in the rural hinterlands of Idaho.

Inspired by Sussman’s exuberance, Munger went knocking on its door in 2019. It turned out that the agricultural treasure, lying dormant in a box amongst endless rows of shelves, had originally been furnished by Michigan State University (MSU) decades earlier.

Through a happy coincidence, MSU exists today as fertile ground for such a project. Its College of Agriculture and Natural Resources is at the forefront of plant science and Eric Olsen—an associate professor in the field—was eager to help enact a plan for reopening this forgotten chapter in his state’s history.

Mammoth Distilling worked with Olsen over the ensuing year, acquiring 20 seeds worth of dormant Rosen rye and developing it into 2,000. Together, they grew it into a viable crop volume using various greenhouses and research plots. Though South Manitou Island is now a national park, the consortium was able to acquire special use permits to re-plant Rosen rye on the historic sites of Hutzler and Beck farms. Now, that particular harvest is about to make its way back into bottles for the first time in over half a century.

“The whiskey made with Michigan-grown Rosen rye has lived up to its historic reputation,” says Munger, who's been meticulously sampling it from the barrel as it ages. “We're thrilled to be only a year or so away from being able to reintroduce a whiskey made of grain from the actual nursery of that variety.”

Mammoth Distilling is just one of several producers re-introducing Rosen rye to shelves. Stoll and Wolfe, a craft operation outside of Philadelphia, launched its own Pennsylvania-harvested alternative back in 2022. Even the most excitable of whiskey drinkers might be content to conclude the journey there. A romanticized relic with flavor full enough to be described as the cabernet of rye has been brought back to bottle. Certainly, it was a triumph for Sussman, with his penchant for that particular sort of history.

“The story of Rosen rye is cinematic,” he says. “It spans continents. The cast includes an exiled Russian dissident, professors that needed to solve an urgent agronomic crisis, island farmers who become rye kings, and a whiskey industry that falls in with a grain in a way it hasn’t really before or since.”

But for Munger, it was just the start. He was ready to dive deeper.

“As excited about Rosen as we are, we believe there may be an even more compelling varietal out there in the world,” he says.

Two hundred feet below the surface of Lake Michigan’s eastern edge, not far from the shores of South Manitou Island, rests the ill-fated Westmoreland. On the morning of December 7, 1854, the ship foundered in a blizzard, taking the 280 casks of American whiskey in her hull down to the ocean floor.

Sunken treasure has long captured the imagination of the masses, especially when the submerged bounty in question contains perfectly preserved barrels of booze. Drink experts claim the Westmoreland's slumbering cache could be worth in the tens of millions—even if what’s eventually recovered is 170-year-old swill.

Munger is interested in a different wreck. The James R. Bentley, a 170-foot-long schooner, sank to the bottom of Lake Huron 146 years ago carrying 36,000 bushels of rye. That very grain might soon make for the most historically significant expression of the liquid ever rendered.

“It was harvested in 1878, roughly 28 years before Rosen was first propagated,” Munger says.

While there's no record of the specific variety of rye on board—or even where it was grown and harvested—Munger and Olsen devised a coordinate plan to extract the potentially viable grain from the lake floor. Their ultimate goal: to re-animate "Bentley" rye so they can grow it to scale and evaluate its character in a distillate.

They brought on board Ross Richardson, a Great Lakes diving specialist who was uniquely qualified for the task: He first discovered the Westmoreland wreckage in 2010. Not long after, he became acquainted with Munger and Sussman.

Divers search the a 170-foot-long schooner, the James R. Bentley, looking for the 36,000 bushels of rye it was carrying when it went down. Courtesy Cal Kothrade (www.calsworld.net)

“I was immediately enthralled at [Mammoth Distillery's] vision of reviving the past with modern science to create a whiskey for the future,” Richardson says of his first extended conversation with the distillers. “Mammoth’s recovery of the Bentley rye is the first step in saving and preserving our history.”

They took that step on a brisk September morning last year. Aboard two small vessels, the men ventured out from the shores of Cheboygan, five miles into the heart of Lake Huron. They were armed with speciality equipment purpose-built to retrieve 145-year-old seed from 39-degree water.

“Working in 160 feet of water requires a certain diving skillset and awareness of the environment,” Richardson says. “My role for the expedition was really that of a coordinator. I am friends with the owner of the Bentley, and I also created the grain probes, which were needed to carefully remove the rye from the hold of the wreck.”

In decidedly cinematic fashion, the resurfaced grain was urgently rushed back to shore and driven by Munger to the campus of MSU three hours away. Olsen was waiting there on standby, ready to place them on life support, which amounted to soaking them in a plant hormone he describes as “Miracle-Gro on steroids.”

“There was nothing undramatic or uninteresting that happened in the recovery process,” says Sussman. “The real moment of truth was when [Munger] drove the rye to East Lansing. We were all elated when Dr. Olson confirmed the seeds still had accessible genetic information.”

After three separate efforts, the rye seeds failed to germinate. It was soon determined that though the structure of the seeds were well-maintained in the cold water, the mitochondria within the cells, necessary for revival, had deteriorated past the point of no return.

“This was a huge human endeavor,” Olson told MSU Today in the aftermath of the experiment. “What we did was challenging and difficult, but we didn’t shy away from it. We’re the best qualified group in the entire U.S. to be trying this, because we have all the resources right at our fingertips.”

That's why Munger isn’t ready to give up on Bentley rye just yet. He’s leaning on a state-of-the-art backup plan: a modern genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR. An acronym for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” it's been used in trials for treatment of certain cancers and mental illnesses—and now for reviving rye.

“It can sequence the genome [of the recovered seed] and identify its geographical origins and varietal relatives,” Munger says. “We're working with them to do this and to compare the results to almost 300 other rye varieties MSU has gathered from seed banks around the world.”

In fact, the university is exploring beyond the earthly realm in pursuit of agricultural intel. It recently launched germinating seeds into space to better understand how future astronauts can grow healthy crops while exploring the cosmos. Undoubtedly, Munger has ideal partners in his lofty mission.

“MSU has been collecting over 250 varieties of rye from seed banks around the world,” says Sussman. “But Bentley rye gives us the opportunity to investigate rye that predates seed banks by around 50 years.”

Today, there's a relatively small supply of domestic rye—even though it's the key grain in the original style of American whiskey, commercially produced by the likes of founding father George Washington. Most American distilleries import the grain from Europe and Canada. 

 

So, even as the rye category has reignited in recent years—data from the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. shows that volumes of the style climbed by 1,275 percent between 2009 and 2019—the offerings now crowding shelves bear little resemblance to the bolder, earthier iterations that captivated generations of drinkers. The stuff that, according to Munger, made his home state the rye capital of the world.

“We're certain that Michigan is an ideal place to grow the highest quality rye,” Munger says. “It was historically true, and we now believe it’s possible to breed a grain that maximizes both agronomic performance and character at the same time.”

Meanwhile, at the Westmoreland site, divers are still petitioning the local government for access to the long-lost casks that lie below. The state restricts access to virtually all 1,500 estimated shipwrecks littering the vast, 300-mile-long floor of Lake Michigan. And that’s a good thing.

“In the early days of scuba diving in the Great Lakes, shipwrecks were stripped of their artifacts by trophy-seeking divers,” says Richardson. “Over the years, the laws and culture have shifted to protect these shipwrecks.”

Many more of them might hide forgotten hooch in their holds. Regardless of their ultimate condition, they represent an untold fortune: as the quality of submerged whiskey slowly dissipates, its romanticism only accumulates.

But to Munger—and indeed, for most whiskey aficionados of his ilk—there’s an even greater treasure already ashore. It’s bristling in the wind across the fertile fields of South Manitou Island. From this unassuming landscape came a crop that some of the most legendary producers of the 20th century deemed singularly exceptional. After a 70-year absence, it’s finally back where it belongs.