DETROIT, MI - This week Pete Bailey and Dave Landrum, along with distilling consultant Dave Pickerell, unpacked and assembled a 500-gallon copper still and pieced it together in a Michigan Avenue warehouse between 16th and 17th Streets in Corktown.

Within months, the 6,000 square foot space will be a fully operational craft distillery - the city's first - called Two James Spirits, and making gin, vodka and whiskey, along with a retail shop and bar serving craft cocktails.

It almost didn’t happen. The two former University of Michigan roommates were set on opening their independent distillery in either Charleston, S.C. or Asheville, N.C. Then, after briefly toying with opening it in Santa Barbara, Calif., they took a second look at what was happening in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood and decided to open up shop there.

“We just kind of realized at one point, listen, Detroit is undergoing this great renaissance and the only reason we didn’t’ look at it at the beginning, honestly, is because of the whole Kwame Kilpatrick dictatorship that was here,” Landrum said.

The former mayor, now facing federal corruption charges, was forced out of office in 2008, and as Bailey and Landrum began poking around the Corktown neighborhood further, they met the Cooley family, who owns several properties there including Slows Bar B-Q. They also met Joe Misfud, who owns multiple buildings in the area such as the one Mercury Bar is currently in, as well as the space Two James Spirits now leases at 2445 Michigan Ave.

Once they began moving forward with plans to open their business in Detroit, Landrum said they were pleasantly surprised by the city’s cooperation.

“The people on City Council were super helpful, and it was the exact opposite of what I’d heard,” he said.

He said he expects to open by June, at the latest.

Landrum started Café Felix in Ann Arbor but grew restless as he began to experiment with spirits with friends like Travis Fourmont, a bartender at Michael Symon's Roast who has gained national acclaim.

"I was using smoke machines, carving ice circles, just getting totally geeked out," Landurm said. Eventually, he wrote up a business plan for a craft distillery, and presented it to a receptive Bailey, who was working as a sustainability scientist in Chattanooga, Tenn. at the time. The name of duo's distillery is in honer of their fathers, who both passed away in recent years and coincidentally both are named James.



In the coming weeks, the two will begin distilling gin and vodka, which will be available immediately, and whiskey, which will not be available until its third year of operation because of a two-year aging process.

Two James will buy unbranded whiskey in the interim, and finish it in sherry and port barrels to give it different flavors.

“We’ll create something like that, a finished product to whet people’s whistles,” Landrum said.

But eventually, Landrum said he and Bailey want Two James to be known for its own distilled whiskey, which will come in three varieties: a rye, a bourbon and a single malt.

Pickerell, who is helping them set up their distilling process, said that they should find a receptive market for wholesale distribution beyond Detroit.

“The market for craft products is unbelievable tight now,” said Pickerell, who worked as a master distiller at Maker’s Mark for 14 years before deciding to become a consultant to independent operations like Two James. “Even in a recessionary period, the sales of craft whiskies are growing up six to 11 percent, which is unheard of.”

Locally, Pickerell admits that Detroit is not a craft spirits stalwart like Portland Ore., where he said there are 24 distilleries within a 30-minute drive of downtown, or the Hudson Valley area of New York State, where legislation is actually encouraging more people to

get into the independent distillery game,

“But everything about selling is better in your own backyard,” he said.