EAST LANSING, Mich. — What you are about to read could be the plot of a major summer blockbuster movie.
A team of specialists is assembled to hunt down sunken treasure and resurrect something that’s been extinct for over 100 years.
Add a shot of whiskey - and you have a story that’s not from Hollywood – but as Michigan Made as it gets.
“You couldn't do this with almost any other shipwreck You didn't end up in prison.”
—Ross Richardson
The educated guess is, that about 6,000 shipwrecks litter the bottom of our Great Lakes. Each one’s story can help us learn from Michigan’s past.
But what if one could help change the future?
The James R. Bentley was just another 178-foot Great Lakes schooner, swallowed up by a November storm in 1878.
Forgotten for nearly 150 years.
The crew all survived but the ship's cargo, 37 thousand bushels of rye did not, and it is now entombed on the bottom of Lake Huron. But this is not just any rye, it's a variety of the crop that does not exist anymore.
A fact that got the wheels turning for Chad Munger.
"It's a land-raised variety that would have character that we haven't seen in this country, because it's all been bred and pollinated away," said Munger. "It's historically relevant and super interesting to what we're trying to do.
What the founder, and CEO of Mammoth Distilling is trying to do is preserve and promote Michigan history while making a unique Michigan-made spirit in the process.
“For the first four or five years, we never used anything that wasn't probably in the county. At least.”
And shipwrecks -- are about as *Michigan as it gets. So the next thing for Mammoth Distilling to do was obvious...
“What we'd really like to do is go down and get some of that grain and see if we can't bring that back to life,” added Chad.
YUP - you heard that right. A wild, but not impossible plan because Mammoth Distilling had done something like it before.
“For a long time, Mammoth has been interested in rye and rye whiskey," Whiskey Maker Ari Sussman told me. "Because Michigan has been the center of rye production in the United States, there certainly was the center of rye production. 100 years ago,"
A specific favorite rye of distillers then was called Rosen rye, and it was developed at Michigan State University and grown in isolation on South Manitou Island in Lake Michigan.
"That variety rose and rye had a lot of unique characteristics, not just for the distilling industry, but it was, it was a very productive grain," said Munger. "[It had] an unusual character, grew really well in the growing zone the climate we have here in Michigan in the early 20th century."
Following the repeal of prohibition though, corn-based bourbon took over the whiskey market and the demand for Rosen rye dried up and faded away from memory.
Fast forward to this century and Sussman rediscovered this story and brought it to Chad.
"We could create superior premium rye whiskey Rosen rye was the beginning of that journey when we learned that there was actually a grain variety that was like the Cabernet of whiskey grains," Sussman said with a smile.
The duo then approached the US Department of Agriculture, who sent some seeds of Rosen rye from their seed bank and also talked MSU into helping re-propagate Rosen rye 2.0 on the original South Manitou farm that it called home 120 years ago.
“It was one of those stories we couldn't, couldn't shake,” said Munger.
So, Mammoth and MSU partnered and brought back Rosen.
"So they [Michigan State University] propagated it enough to get a full acre grown in East Lansing, at Mason, actually, and then once they'd proven it was a viable crop, again, for the first time in 100 years, we together, approached the National Park Service about planting that seed out on Manitou Island at the original farms where it was grown," said Munger.
“That was the tip of the spear that made it very clear that there was an opportunity to focus on rye in a way that other states and other regions were not,” added Sussman.
That passion for keeping Michigan history alive and relevant brought the next character into this story - historian, author, and shipwreck hunter Ross Richardson.
If you travel in such circles you know Ross, and Ross knows just about everybody.
He and Ari connected over shipwreck history a few years back, specifically using wood from one to flavor whiskey. Something that would normally be illegal because wrecks in the Great Lakes are considered property of the State.
But, in what would be a common theme for this story, Ross knew a guy...
“I said, Well, my buddy owns a shipwreck.”
That brings us back to the James R. Bently and its owner, longtime diver, and shipwreck hunter Paul Ehorn.
As the story goes, Paul had to win custody of the wreck at the bottom of Lake Huron to avoid prosecution after he brought a piece of the ship to a museum.
"We just happen to know one of, maybe a handful, maybe two, three individuals who own a shipwreck in the Great Lakes. So it's rare to have this opportunity," added Ross.
That custody that Paul won, included a haul of extinct rye.
Ross got Paul in contact with Chad and Air, and a plan was starting to grow.
"The thought of being able to get rye out of the ship and see what it see what it's like when you regrow it, and how that would perform as distillate, was super intriguing to us, and fits right into our mission here of kind of discovering and or creating the best rye we can," said Munger.
Michigan State was on board, with MSU Associate Professor Eric Olson ready to head the growth efforts.
But the team still needed a diver – Luckily Ross knew another guy, Muskegon diver Dusty Klifman.
“Ross had gave me a call, and we had worked on several other projects this year, and he asked if I wanted to be in sort of a black ops project. I said, Yes, I am in before I even knew what it was,” laughed Dusty.
A diver in the Great Lakes most of his life, Dusty was the perfect man for the job, and the team was ready.
Emails and phone calls flew back and forth.
Ross built special extraction tubes, to get samples of the rye from the dark and cold of Lake Huron.
The weather was watched like a hawk - and on an unusually calm day in September 2024, two small boats raced from shore into Northern Lake Huron. The sunny day, was a nice contrast to the tension on both ships when Dusty hit the water.
"It was a relief once I got in because there's so many people on the boat, there's so many cameras, you know, there's a little bit of waves. It's, it's nice to be in the water to just go and do what I do."
"What if the probes don't work, then I look like a jerk. I got, you know, 10 people out there, and we're all staring at each other with no grain," said Ross.
Operating in an alien world, Dusty plunged the tube into the pile of rye."
Operating in the dark and cold, Dusty felt his way around the bones of the Bentley.
“I’d never been on it, and you're, you're essentially going down blind and trying to figure out on the fly what to do, where to go and make sense of it in the dim light. I left my flashlight and everything up on the boat just to keep my hands free.”
Everyone above, watching and holding their breath.
“It was a camera that was flying all over the place and a bunch of silt," said Munger. "But you could see the tube go in and out occasionally, and you could they were talking to them. So when you really knew it was when you really knew something had happened, Ross was able to pull the three tubes up over the side of the second boat. They were clearly full. And that's when that's when it really got exciting.”
SUCCESS!
But they weren't done yet. The samples were thrown on ice and the teams raced back to shore where Chad had a van waiting for the next ‘white knuckle’ leg of the journey to Michigan State.
"It's the first time that someone's tried to resurrect a rye variety from a shipwreck, right? This, this, this is a unique and novel endeavor." - Dr. Eric Olsen
When the seeds were received by a very excited Dr. Eric Olson, associate professor in plant, soil and microbial sciences in the College of Agricultural and Natural Resources at MSU.
"The quality of the grain was there. It was just as though it was the same as in the late 1800s," said Dr. Olson.
"They were waiting for us," added Chad. "They knew that it was problematic to let it warm up or get exposed to oxygen.”
That is where the luck that was riding shotgun on this exhibition finally ran out, because the rye seeds didn’t germinate.
"It was still in good condition, but it just wasn't viable," said Dr. Olson.
But remember when I told you this could be the plot of a movie?
Here comes the plot twist, Dr. Olson had the idea to extract the DNA from the Bentley rye and combine it with what started this journey, Rosen rye. Something that has never been done before.
"Of course, it was done in Jurassic Park, but this is the first time it's been attempted in plant species." joked Dr. Olson.
"It's the first time that someone's tried to resurrect a rye variety from a shipwreck, right? This, this, this is a unique and novel endeavor."
A two to three-year process that, if successful could have benefits far beyond a nice glass of whiskey.
"So the techniques that we're using to introduce these, these old, these historical chromosome segments can be used to develop crop varieties that are resilient to heat, resistant to high-temperature stress that's coming the drought conditions like we've had this year and last year, in 2023," Said Dr. Olson. "This is happening more frequently in Michigan. So these are, these are tools that we can use to engineer crops that are, engineer the crops of the future that are that are resilient and high yielding and and, of course, nutritious. There's, there's so many opportunities in in modern agriculture, to in in plant production, to use these techniques."
And the benefits don't end there.
Chad and Ari hope that bringing back this Bentley rye will continue a story started long before the James R Bentley slipped beneath the ice waters of Lake Huron.
"We want to see the rye agricultural economy come back because we think there's a lot of potential for it, not just in terms of grain for food or whiskey, but in terms of promoting tourism and other economic activity, can have a lot of a lot of reach in this state," said Chad.
He’s talking about The Michigan Rye Trailas a way to bring tourists, farms, and distillers together here in the state.
"Agritourism is an important thing here, but it could be more important. You see what's happened in Kentucky with the Bourbon Trail. It creates something like $9 billion worth of economy there. It's huge." Chad added.
A way to bring our story – both on land and under the water alive.
"Everybody loves shipwrecks. You got the diving. Oh, you know, we call shipwrecks underwater haunted houses, because they're old and they're spooky and everything. So there's that aspect. And then you get on with the whiskey and sharing the history. Oh, my goodness," laughed Ross.
If you can't wait for three to four years to taste history, Mammoth did end up making a batch of whiskey-flavored with some of the wood from the Bentley and you can find a link to that right here.
We were lucky enough to be in the room when Ari tasted the very first bottle of it and gave us a flavor tour of what you can expect a shipwreck to taste like.
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