Drilling is already underway on Distiller's "Whiskey Bunker"

Whiskey aged at sea, in space, and now... at the center of the Earth?

When the founders of Distiller, the world's first spirits discovery app, approached Arkady Ozerov about starting a whiskey brand, he wasn't interested. Being one of Russia's 22 wealthiest oligarchs comes with its share of headaches, and constant unsolicited business proposals is one of them.

"I told them 'no' maybe forty or fifty times. At one point, one of them slept in the lobby of my office so he could see me. Finally I figured I would meet them just so they would go away," says Ozerov.

That's when Ozerov was hit by one of the most bizarre and intriguing pitches he had ever heard. Distiller wanted to produce a whiskey aged for ten years... wait for it... underground.

"Brands are aging whiskey at sea and in space. We thought, what's the next frontier? We looked into aging a whiskey on Mars, but it turns out you can't get there very easily," says Mikael Mossberg, co-founder & CEO of Distiller. "But that's when - I think it was my co-founder Brent, said - 'What about aging it underground.' I fell in love with the idea right away."

That's where things got tough for the pair of Seattle based co-founders. They had the connections within the industry, but brands weren't ready to get on board. Mossberg says they pitched at least 20 different big name liquor brands about the idea. Everyone said no.

"One brand told us that if we ever came back their master distiller would fight us," says Mossberg. "I guess they just weren't ready for the future of distilling."



As they were beginning to lose hope that their groundbreaking idea would ever be realized, they decided on one last Hail Mary, and flew to Russia to meet with billionaire soda magnate, Arkady Ozerov.

The new brand, called UnderGround Bourbon, is slated for release in 2030. Rather than sourcing their whiskey from one of the quality big name producers like MGP, they've decided to build a distillery from scratch, distill the bourbon themselves, all while simultaneously drilling ten miles into the core of the Earth to create what they're calling the world's first "whiskey bunker."

The pair acknowledge that the whole endeavor is astronomically expensive, likely to cost Ozerov anywhere between 4 to 10 billion dollars USD. Still, they believe they're on the right track.

"Anything worth doing is worth doing right, and Arkady agrees with us on that. We project that within the first year he'll have made all of his initial investment back. And he'll own almost 3% of the company, so he'll be getting a great return."

Not everyone is as confident as the Distiller founders that the idea is likely to do well.

"It's a stupid idea. I've never heard of anything as wasteful and idiotic in my entire life," said one liquor industry insider. "These guys have no business making whiskey, much less drilling that far into the earth. They've never worked in a distillery, they haven't studied the science or art of it. Frankly, it's insulting."

When you enter the Distiller offices in Seattle the first thing you see is a huge sign that reads, 'TODAY IT'S IMPOSSIBLE. TOMORROW IT'S A REALITY.'

It will be fourteen years before we'll see if they can turn their impossibility into a reality. Until then, there's plenty of whiskey out there that didn't require billions of dollars or life threatening gimmicks to gain popularity, and perhaps unsurprisingly, some of it is pretty good.