Somewhere between Dearborn, California, Boston, Ireland, Scotland, Detroit, California, North Carolina, Scotland, and Detroit again, Lance Havelka came up with a plan. It wasn’t fully formed, and it certainly wasn’t what you’d call practical, but the former photojournalist was utterly driven. OK, call it more of a mission: to craft new American spirits with distinctive flavor profiles in Detroit.
The journeys, metaphorical and literal, Havelka undertook in order to find himself blending spirits in a hollowed-out former bank building on the city’s far east side were considerable. Originally from Ann Arbor, Havelka has lived and worked on both U.S. coasts, but always felt the pull of home. A seven-month residency in hardscrabble Glasgow granted him a primer on whiskey-making methods in the United Kingdom as well as an affinity for the industrious Glaswegians. He brought back an approach to blending whiskey that is equal parts Scottish, Canadian, and American. Born from Havelka’s meticulous precision and historical inspiration from both sides of the Atlantic, Drexel Spirits launched its first products in 2021 and now consists of six distinct but interconnected spirits.
Havelka says he first started thinking deeply about spirits, and whiskey in particular, as a grad student in Boston. His neighborhood pub was populated by expats from Scotland and Ireland. These new friends were more than happy to educate him in the traditions of distilling and blending whiskey. A summer trip to the two countries in 2005 laid the foundation for his obsession with distilling.
First, though, Havelka moved to Detroit briefly before striking out for southern California as a photojournalist. Soured on the traffic, high cost of living, and recession-era job prospects, Havelka pivoted yet again and decided to regroup in North Carolina with family while he figured out where to take his career. Thinking back on his time in Scotland, he started drawing connections between Glaswegians and Detroiters.
“There was just something about Glasgow that just spoke to me. The amazing accents, the very lyrical ways of speaking,” Havelka says. “They just have a wonderful sense of humor. Anthony Bourdain once said, ‘You have to have a sense of humor to live in a place so relentlessly fucked as Detroit,’ and I think Glasgow is the same way. It takes a very particular, strange sense of humor to live in Detroit and in Glasgow.”
Havelka spent seven months in Scotland studying Scotch whiskey-making. He found unlikely inspiration in a tiny distillery in the southwest corner of Scotland. Springbank Distillery remains a lone holdout of malt-to-bottle Scotch whiskey-making, and one of only two distilleries to hold the Campbeltown classification. Scotch whiskey has five regional classifications, based on traditional methods of production and flavor profiles: Speyside, Lowland, Highland, Islay, and Campbeltown. It is typical of Havelka’s quirky character that he was drawn to the least well-known of the five classifications.
“Anthony Bourdain once said, ‘You have to have a sense of humor to live in a place so relentlessly fucked as Detroit,’ and I think Glasgow is the same way. It takes a very particular, strange sense of humor to live in Detroit and in Glasgow.”
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Another appeal of Scottish whiskey for Havelka was the attention to blending. American whiskey, including bourbon, prioritizes distilling and then aging whiskey. The master distiller at an American distillery tinkers with the ratio of grains in each barrel — in whiskey parlance, the mash bill — and then selects barrels and calculates the ideal aging conditions for each barrel. The prestige for bourbon production, then, lies in what happens before the whiskey comes out of the barrel.
For Scotch and Canadian whiskeys, another factor influences the final taste of the product. “I am fascinated by distilling,” says Havelka, “but the blending part of it is my favorite part.” Master blenders seek whiskey perfection by pulling different flavors and textures from several different barrels and blending them into one large batch, then bottling that. Blending after aging presents a unique set of challenges, says Havelka. “At times it might seem that it won’t be that difficult,” he says, “but when you break it down, you have to worry about creating a consistent flavor profile” across a large batch of bottles.
And that’s where Havelka found his niche. Returning to Detroit from Scotland, he rallied his family and friends, nailed down investors, and purchased a derelict Depression-era bank building on Charlevoix street. Inside, the clean white walls are adorned by Havelka’s photos: his nephew and mother, a friend from Germany caught in a private moment of contemplation, a city skyline. In one corner, a washing station and thermostat; in another, a dozen wooden barrels marked with hieroglyphic symbols jostle against larger steel blending barrels. Tubes, measuring tools and beakers are scattered across every surface. A simple plastic-topped table in the center of the room serves as Havelka’s “office.”
You can almost see the wheels spinning in his head when he says, “There is no best style of whiskey. It is all highly subjective. But when it comes down to it, the beauty of it is there are so many different approaches to it, so many different mash bills and ways to bring out the flavor you want.”
Of his decision to blend international techniques and flavors with Detroit ingenuity, Havelka says, “If you’re not immediately drawn to the people, the architecture and the history, you should have your head examined.”
Currently, Drexel Spirits produces four whiskeys, a barrel-aged gin, and a jalapeño-infused vodka. Sourcing bourbon from several distilleries in Kentucky, Havelka then blends and ages them into four distinct hybrid whiskeys. In his whiskeys, Havelka riffs on, rather than tries to replicate, the traditions of Scotch and bourbon distilling. Bourbank Whiskey is a straight bourbon finished in Port barrels; Irboun’s Irish and bourbon blend is aged in sherry casks. Kintra’s straight bourbon is finished in chocolate liqueur barrels. Dock & Castle, named for a three-times great-grandfather’s grocery in Dundee, Scotland, blends Scotch and bourbon whiskeys, then ages the blend in cognac barrels.
Currently, Drexel Spirits are available at a few liquor stores and bars across metro Detroit, including Jumbo’s Bar. More information is available at drexelwhiskey.com.
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