Minn. Ethanol Plant Taps Thirst for Vodka

Benson Mayor Paul Kittelson, left, liquor-store manager Pat McGeary, center, and City Manager Robert Wolfington are proud of their town's star export, Shakers vodka. "I've been doing this for 30 years," McGeary said, "and this is the biggest thing that's ever happened to me." (By Peter Slevin -- The Washington Post)

"The process diverges at a certain point," he said, "but fermentation's fermentation."

In Benson, Lee at first pushed the Pete's men away, but they came back.

Then they had to figure out what made vodka, well, vodka. It was not a lesson they could learn nearby.

"One of my partners and I went to Poland. We wanted to find out what vodka was really about and what the vodka culture was really like," Couteaux explained. "It opened up a whole palette of colors to us. We came back with that in mind and started futzing around."

To make sure their Chippewa Valley partners got it right, Couteaux and friends decided they needed to make another pilgrimage. Two workers took the next trip to Poland, sampling potato vodka and studying equipment from Gdansk to the country's southern reaches.

"It's all about degree of purity," said Lee, who said that making smooth vodka meant distilling the liquid repeatedly to remove unwanted flavors and chemical compounds. "You have some of that in bourbon. You don't want that in vodka." The Benson brew is distilled six times, one more than Grey Goose.

The vodka, launched in 2003, was a phenomenon in Benson, population 3,400, and quickly caught on in Minnesota. Before long, critics and commentators were remarking that Shakers was something special. Infinite Spirits, created by the Pete's veterans, began counting revenue by the million.

"It's something to be proud of, to hang your hat on. It makes it so much easier to send Christmas gifts to relatives out of state," said Dennis Rustad, a shareholder, worker and proud sipper who monitors computers at the ethanol plant. "It's a lot better than being from the place where they have the biggest ball of twine."

The town claiming that would be Darwin, Minn., farther east on U.S. 12.

Benson, marooned in a region where it has proved hard to preserve jobs and morale, appears to be a pint-size success story. The ethanol plant employs 45 full-time workers, has delivered an average 25 percent annual return to its original investors, and plans to nearly double its capacity, said Lee.

Across the road, a $140 million power plant developed by Fibrominn is rising from the flat ground. The first of its kind in the United States, the facility is expected to generate 30 jobs and 55 megawatts a year from 700,000 tons of turkey droppings and other biomass. Similar plants are planned for North Carolina and Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Producing heat from turkey litter is one thing, but it ain't vodka.

"I've been doing this for 30 years," said Pat McGeary, manager of Benson's city-owned liquor store, "and this is the biggest thing that's ever happened to me."

Shakers bottles flew off the shelf -- the top shelf, of course.

The challenge now is to keep them flying in a field so competitive that scores of vodka labels have been launched since Shakers got its start, something Couteaux said the team did not foresee. The brand's five flavors are on sale in about 18 states, mostly in the Midwest.

A new label is planned, and the team is working on its strategy. The price in Benson has dropped to $24.99 a bottle, but Willis, as a shareholder, hopes marketers will maintain a provocatively high price.

"You don't want to get it down to $11 . . . or nobody will like it," Willis said. "You get that price on the East Coast or West Coast and nobody will buy it."