Farmers: Lend an ear (of corn) and raise a glass. Moonshine has gone upscale with a partnership between a Nebraska distillery and farmers who grow the corn. Flyover Whiskey takes corn directly from farmers and creates custom whiskey. The liquor is returned to the farmer in beautiful, stoppered square bottles with personalized labels.
Photo by Flyover Whiskey
Tom Palmer, a farmer near Fairfax, Minnesota, was stalking deer with his cousin Chris Palmer when Chris shared a kernel of information about the field-to-fluid deal. “How about if we do this?” Chris asked.
Lifelong farmer Tom was all ears.
Each farmer sent about 17 pounds of their 2022 harvest to Flyover. About 11 months later, they were sipping amber liquid that had its start in a field that had once been tilled by their grandfather. Tom ordered a double batch to share with his sons, Brian and Scott, who grow corn, soybeans, and sugar beets with him in their Palmer Company operation just outside the south-central Minnesota town. Each received four bottles, which they estimate cost about $66 a bottle.
“It was really pretty simple from my end,” Tom says. He has already placed a second order from his 2023 harvest and is reworking the Palmer Company label.
Flyover started in 2020 when Joe Knobbe returned to the family farm near West Point, Nebraska, after graduating from University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“It came about organically,” Knobbe says. “I needed something to be a little more creative with my spare time. … I got bored hauling manure every day.”
He started to research how to distill whiskey from corn through books and online information in 2016. “I didn’t go to whiskey college or anything,” Knobbe says. He “played around in the garage and basement” for about a year and a half.
Flyover started in 2020 after Knobbe tested his product on his whiskey-loving brother and brother-in-law. They were impressed and encouraged him to make more.
With help from his longtime friend Devon Birchem, who moved back to Nebraska from Portland, Oregon, where he’d worked in a brewery, they began making custom whiskey for farmers using the farmers’ corn.
“I think it just started from my idea to do it for my family out of our own grain since I wanted to be able to share something from our farm with visiting family and friends,” Knobbe says.
Since the start, he figures they’ve made about 800 batches a year. A batch yields six bottles, and there’s a six-bottle minimum for $350. After farmers place their order on Flyover’s website, they receive a postage-paid bag to fill with their corn. Then, they seal and return it.
Each batch has its own fermentation bucket, to keep the orders separate. The corn mash is strained and aged in charred white American oak, then bottled.
“It’s their corn—it’s their whiskey,” Knobbe says. The process takes about 10 months, he says, but he’d like to get it down to about six months and also wants to age the whiskey for longer periods.
Knobbe doesn’t know of any other farm-to-whiskey custom distilleries—making Flyover outstanding in the field.
