19-07-2025
Global Missions With Monks Led Adventurer Into Wild World Of Whiskey
Phil Stegar went from adventuring in the preservation of ancient manuscripts in dangerous regions around the world to crafting innovative whiskeys in his home state of Minnesota. The Restaurant Project
Two Benedictine monks, some Indiana Jones-like adventures in dangerous regions around the world, and a visit to a Kentucky bourbon maker led a Minnesota man to become a pioneering whiskey maker.
Phil Stegar, who is the founder of Brother Justus Whiskey Company in Minneapolis, had been working for humanitarian organizations in Iraq and Lebanon when a Catholic monk and mentor from his alma mater, St. John's University in Collegeville, MN, asked him to undertake a perilous mission. This monk who worked at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, wanted help to preserve some ancient manuscripts that were in war-torn regions around the globe.
'The Benedictines have been around a long time, and they've seen wars before and what happens to' ancient books, Stegar says. 'He was working on this digitization project of ancient manuscripts, and he saw that there was this small window of time where there wasn't any major conflicts going on.'
So, Stegar traveled to places like Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine for about two weeks at a time in 2007 and 2008. In these monasteries and religious communities, which had centuries of history, he would meet with abbots and monks, teach them how to use the cameras and studio equipment he brought to them, then return to pick up a digital copy of these ancient manuscripts after they were all photographed.
'I was kind of getting to be a digital Indiana Jones,' Stegar says.'It was so important to preserve these manuscripts, which were important to people's identity and history, their religion and faith. To me, that's the marrow of life.'
'I was kind of getting to be a digital Indiana Jones,' Stegar says.'It was so important to preserve these manuscripts, which were important to people's identity and history, their religion and faith. To me, that's the marrow of life.'
Stegar knew that this work would eventually come to an end, but he didn't know what he was going to do next. 'I love art, but I'm not an artist,' he says. 'I wanted to do something physical, something with meaning.'
In the midst of his adventures, Stegar found what he was looking for on a trip he and his wife Lisa Amman took to the Abbey of Gethsemani, a monastery in Kentucky, at the end of 2007. Stegar had long admired the late Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton, who once lived there. On the way back to Louisville, they stopped at a well-known bourbon distillery.
'We took the tour, and it just hit me that all of the ingredients for whiskey - water, grain, oak and peat - were in my home state of Minnesota,' Stegar says. 'It also occurred to me that when you are sipping whiskey, it can be an activity by itself. It can accompany other activities, but it's its own activity like monks reading from manuscripts or people telling stories.'
It was an epiphany, Stegar says, that led him to fix his sights on creating a distillery that would preserve and create history in a glass.
Along the way to starting his distillery in 2013, Stegar also went to law school. 'I needed to have a way of earning a living while I was starting this distillery,' he says, adding that his specialization in trademarks, laws and regulations helped him in the spirits business.
When Stegar started his distillery, it didn't have a formal name. In the back of his mind, though, he remembered hearing stories about a monk in Minnesota who helped farmers make moonshine. In 2015, he discovered a book by Elaine Davis called Minnesota 13: Stearns County's 'Wet' Wild Prohibition Days .
The name 'Minnesota 13' refers to a hybrid corn that the University of Minnesota developed in 1893. This corn produced a sugar-rich grain with a quicker yield time, which was better for the state's shorter growing season and also made it ideal for moonshine. 'I went right out to a bookstore, and I bought the last copy,' he says.
Davis's book included one small reference to the monk that Stegar had heard rumors about during his college days. 'Brother Justus Trettel was a monk who was a blacksmith and a distiller,' Stegar says. 'He built the stills for farmers, and he taught them about the Benedictine distillation traditions.'
Brother Justus was a Minnesota-born monk at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, MN. Archives of Brother Justus Whiskey Company
Delving deeper into the history of Minnesota and Prohibition, Stegar learned that Brother Justus helped the farm families in Stearns County survive the farm depression of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. 'He insisted on teaching them the right way to distill so people wouldn't get sick from bad moonshine,' Stegar says.
As a result this 'rebel with a cause' helped these Minnesota farmers produce quality moonshine, by stripping out the methanol and cutting the heads and tails. Stegar also built them the illegal stills so they could manufacture spirits.
After learning about Brother Justus, Stegar decided to name his fledgling whiskey company in his honor. Stegar sought out Brother Justus's surviving family members, receiving their blessing to christen his distillery with his name. 'There was no legal requirement to do this, but it felt like the right thing to do,' he says.
Not only did the monk's family give their blessing, but they also fleshed out the details of Brother Justus's life. Lawrence Trettel, who was his nephew, was delighted. 'He was especially happy that the stories about Brother Justus are going to live beyond him,' he says.
Stegar formally named his distillery after this renegade monk in 2015, and he began releasing his first silver American single malt whiskey while continuing to age his other American single malts, made with all Minnesota ingredients, aged in Minnesota oak and crafted with Minnesota peat.
The Founder's Reserve is an exquisite example of Brother Justus's ground-breaking American single malt whiskey. ELIESA JOHNSON 2019
Brother Justus American Single Malt has since become known for its patent-pending Cold-Peated® American Single Malt, which uses peat in a different way from smoking. The peat is exposed to gentle heat, turning it into a granular material, and it's introduced to the whiskey just before bottling to introduce the subtle aromatics without the smoke.
'It's a special thing,' Stegar says. 'If I hadn't been this monastic manuscript preservationist, I don't know if I would have seen this the same way or taken as much care.'
Stegar plans to continue to create pioneering whiskeys while preserving culture.
'With manuscripts, provenance is important,' he adds. 'When you are responsible for a manuscript, you want it to speak for itself. I feel the same way about whiskey.'
