Dry Fly Distillery

In the Palouse hills of eastern Washington, where wheat waves stretch to distant mountains, Don Poffenroth and Kent Fleischmann broke a seventy-four-year silence in 2007. Their Dry Fly Distillery became Washington State's first legal distillery since Prohibition's grip had strangled the last drop from regional stills in 1933.

The choice of Spokane wasn't accidental. Here, where the Spokane River cuts through basalt canyons and the Inland Empire's agricultural heart beats strongest, grain grows within a thirty-mile radius of their doors. This isn't Kentucky's corn country or Scotland's barley fields—this is wheat territory, where the Palouse's volcanic soil and continental climate create some of the world's finest soft white winter wheat.

Inside their stillhouse, copper gleams against brick walls, but the real story lives in the grain bins. While Kentucky distillers truck corn from distant farms, Dry Fly's founders made a different wager. Every kernel that feeds their mash bills grows close enough to see from their loading dock. Wheat becomes their signature, not by accident but by geography—a grain that thrives in Washington's dry summers and cold winters, lending a softer, almost creamy character to spirits born here.

The Pacific Northwest's craft brewing revolution had already shown what local ingredients could achieve, but Poffenroth and Fleischmann pushed further upstream, literally farm-to-bottle. Their wheat whiskey doesn't just use regional grain; it celebrates it, proving American whiskey needn't bow to corn's dominance or rye's spice. Here, wheat's gentle sweetness tells the Palouse's story in every sip.

The stills themselves—gleaming copper columns that catch Spokane's prairie light through tall windows—represent more than equipment. They're instruments of regional expression, transforming wheat that might otherwise become flour into something uniquely Northwestern. The distillery's expansion into bourbon and gin speaks to American craft distilling's experimental spirit, but wheat remains their north star.

From their Spokane base, Dry Fly helped spark Washington's distilling renaissance, proving that American whiskey's future wouldn't be written only in Kentucky's limestone caves or Tennessee's charcoal-mellowed warehouses. Sometimes it would emerge from wheat fields and basalt bedrock, carrying the Inland Empire's agricultural legacy forward into copper and oak, one local grain at a time.