Columbia distillery unveils the American spirit

Adam Stumpf got interested in making liquor after falling in love with brewing beer. He fell in love with brewing beer because he went to school in Rolla, Mo., where he said there was little else to do besides study.

After performing well in business competitions with a plan to start a distillery, Stumpf pulled the trigger, building Stumpy’s Spirits Distillery outside Columbia on ground his family owns.

The name, by the way, comes from the family’s surname. Stumpf said he can’t recall a male relative who hasn’t been called Stumpy.

The liquor produced there — including vodkas, whiskeys and now a new bourbon — come from grains the family grows. The water is drawn from an aquifer below the farm.

The distillery’s newest product, a bourbon, was released Saturday.

Inside the distillery the floor is mostly wide open, but that’s because Stumpf is changing out his system. Blue painter’s tape marks out the footprints of the new pieces of equipment being made in Boise, Idaho.

Q. How did this all start? What got you into distillation?

A. “It was a bunch of little things that added up. It started as home-brewing in college. I went to school in Rolla, Mo. There’s literally nothing to do in Rolla other than school and beer. So we made this little brew rig. And later I worked at Anheuser-Busch for four years, so I have the beer-making process down pat. Then I bought a little still and fell in love with distillation. But the thing that really got the ball rolling was while I was going back to Washington University to get my MBA, there was an entrepreneurship class there. Pick a business idea, the class votes on it and if you get picked, you make a team and work on a business plan all semester. I pitched a craft distillery, made a business plan and entered into a couple business case competitions and ended up doing really well. It took another couple years to crunch the numbers and decide to buy a distillery. We broke ground out here in the summer of 2014.”

Q. What was the first product that came from Stumpy’s?

A. “The very first thing was the vodka, which we call Unbroken. We didn’t have a name for the vodka when we first made it and we needed to come up with one. Tim McGraw used to sing a song called ‘Unbroken.’ My wife (Laura Stumpf) and I felt broken because we were to this stage where we needed a label design, a name on it to move forward with that process. And she heard that song come on the radio and called me and said ‘What about Unbroken?’ And we typed it in the trademark search and it wasn’t taken.”

Q. Will your output increase once you install your new equipment?

A. “Quite a bit. The old system, we could run maybe 500 bottles a week if we were here every day really pushing it out. The new system, we could hit close to 1,500 bottles a week or so. It’s a big thing. And then we could always run double shifts, too, and double that. It should be delivered in the first week of August.”

Q. Most of your stored product is in smaller, 15-gallon barrels. How many bottles can you get from that?

A. “It really depends on the evaporation. Probably anywhere between 50 to 75 bottles I would say. Depending on how much we sample that day.”

Q. Water is as important to distillation as the grain you get is. Where does yours come from?

A. “We were pretty deliberate when we picked this spot. It sits on the same geology as Bourbon County, Kentucky, which claims to have the best whiskey water in the world. There are no creeks or streams here but we have all these sinkholes. So when it dumps buckets of rain, all the rainwater is going to go into the sinkholes and filter down through the dirt and the limestone. We sit on what’s called the Stemler Cave Recharge Basin, a giant underground limestone aquifer.”

Q. What about that Kentucky thing though? It doesn’t have to come from Bourbon County to be a bourbon?

A. “All you have to do to call a bourbon a bourbon is that it has to be made in America, it has to be at least 51 percent corn, they want you to distill it at under 160-proof. It has to be barreled at less than 125-proof in a new, charred American oak barrel and has to be bottled at 80-proof. You do all those things, you’re a bourbon.”

Q. How have drinkers responded to your product?

A. “Everyone that we’ve sampled to seems like they absolutely love it. I think they certainly appreciate the lengths we go to to produce a quality product.”

Q. What’s been the toughest thing about this venture?

A. “It’s difficult to make a great product. It is more difficult to sell that product. So Laura and I really collateralized our lives to start this place up. We boot-strapped the business from the ground up. We’re constantly reinvesting the money we make back into the business to make it grow. So it’s hard to spend that money on marketing and advertising when you want to build the infrastructure that’s capable of producing for the future.”

Q. What are you most proud of since getting your distillery up and running?

A. “We pride ourselves on a couple of things. Those are family and being able to pretty much single source this entire distillery from our ground out here. Family’s huge. My wife and I own the distillery but our family is amazing, they let us farm the ground across the street. A couple weeks ago we harvested all our wheat, barley and rye that we’ll be using for this upcoming year. Right across the street. Having a family that allows us to do that, that uses some of their farm to support us, that’s incredible. We’re one of the few farm distilleries in the country where we actually grow all of the grain we end up turning into booze.”

Q. It’s obvious you enjoy your work. Why?

A. “It’s completely different than getting up and going to work. It’s enjoyable. The hours are absolutely ridiculous. There are some 12-, 14-, 16-hour days wrapped up in there. It’s probably the most rewarding thing, and definitely the most stressful thing, I’ve ever done. The reward from a job you love getting up and going to is just uncomparable to anything else. It’s unbelievable. Whenever you fire up the still, it takes about an hour to heat up. But by the time that first drop starts dripping off the condenser and you get that first inception of liquid, it is amazing. Absolutely amazing.”

This story was originally published July 17, 2016 at 6:13 PM with the headline "Columbia distillery unveils the American spirit."