A pandemic, a riot, a family separated: Twin Cities distiller clings to hope in the havoc

Chris Montana thought the biggest hurdle he would face in 2020 was a cross-country move with his family.

His wife, Shanelle, had accepted a job in renewable energy and moved to California with their three boys, ages 2, 4 and 6. The plan was for Montana to keep his distillery, Du Nord Craft Spirits in Minneapolis, and split time between an apartment on Lake Street and their new home on the West Coast.

Five months later, Montana can add one global pandemic and one devastating warehouse fire to the list of hurdles he's had to overcome. To his résumé, he also can add Hand Sanitizer Producer and Food Bank Operator.

"There's been so much change going on, there is no normal," Montana said. "But I think it's OK for now. It always could be worse."

Du Nord, which opened in 2013, had grown to be a part of the neighborhood in south Minneapolis with a small but popular cocktail room tucked away in a largely industrial area off S. Snelling Avenue.

It had the distinction of being one of the first distilleries in the Twin Cities and the first black-owned craft distillery in the country. From its modest warehouse, it produced award-winning L'Etoile Vodka and Fitzgerald Gin and offered tours to the public. Its unfussy cocktail room was a place to sample the spirits, straight or mixed into a signature drink.

With the help of Shanelle, Montana had built the business from scratch in the neighborhood he was raised in. He knew there were easier places to open a cocktail room, neighborhoods with more foot traffic and younger residents.

The business wasn't just doing well, it was growing via a restaurant in partnership with local nonprofit Eat for Equity. From the commercial kitchen in an adjacent building, Eat for Equity planned to hire community chefs to provide food for the cocktail room. They would recruit chefs who were underrepresented in the Twin Cities dining scene. The menus would change, reflecting a diverse cast of cooking talent.

By mid-March, those plans evaporated.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a state order shut down all nonessential businesses, including Du Nord's cocktail room. The Eat for Equity restaurant was put on hold indefinitely.

Losing the cocktail room wiped out the bulk of Du Nord's revenue, but Montana was able to quickly shift the company's focus to making hand sanitizer, which was suddenly in short supply nationwide. Within weeks, the business settled into a new role as "hand sanitizer factory," and Montana prepared to rejoin his family in California.

"I thought that having switched to hand sanitizer we knew a little bit more about what we were doing and I wouldn't have to be here as much," said Chris. "But then this hit."

The sprinkler system came on in time to stop the flames from ripping through pallets full of apple liqueur and vodka. But the warehouse building was flooded. The cocktail room, with "Black Owned" signs in its windows, was untouched.

By a stroke of luck, much of the ethanol, a highly flammable alcohol used as the base of many hand sanitizers, had already been removed from the warehouse. Just weeks earlier, sensing they needed more space to mix and bottle the hand sanitizer, Montana had decided to move the entire operation to a rented space in St. Paul.

Montana pivoted once more. Several local grocery stores and essential businesses had been damaged in the riots. By Sunday, he and volunteers had converted his warehouse to a fully operational food bank.

Today, people stream in and out of the building at 32nd Street and Snelling Avenue, carrying bundles of necessities: milk, diapers, soap, water. Donors pull up and drop off carloads of bread, canned goods and feminine hygiene products.

Montana often would be at the center of it all, next to a truck loaded with donated goods, its driver's side window still smashed from the night of the attack.

"There were fires across the street from us, but I thought we'd be OK," Montana said. He spent the next four nights in a hotel in Bloomington.

Still, he understands why the riots happened, how the peaceful protests turned destructive.

"Yes, it hurts, when you come in and say, 'We've tried to do good here' and you see that someone set your stuff on fire," Montana said. "That hurts, it's going to hurt. Anyone who says it doesn't is lying.

"But the story here is the protest. The story is all the people who got together. The story is the latent anger that runs into the propellant of fatigue caused by watching this happen over and over again.

"I remember being a kid marching in a protest for Rodney King. And then here I am at another protest and the chant is exactly the same: 'No justice, no peace.' "

As for Du Nord's recovery, Montana hopes that the insurance coverage as well as the support they've received from the national distillery community will help them come back "better than ever."

"We're going to be OK. Du Nord is the first black-owned distillery in America," Montana said. "We need to keep this thing. We need to build it. And it needs to be something that sticks around that I can hand off to my kids."

For now, Du Nord will continue running its food bank and producing hand sanitizer from its St. Paul facility. As soon as possible, they want to get back into distilling, making the craft spirits that their business is built on. But it will take time.

The space they would normally use for distilling is occupied by the food bank. Their bottling machine, destroyed in the fire and flooding, is now, as Montana described it, an "expensive paperweight."

"What would make it all worth it is if this were a turning point" in race relations, Montana said. "If that's what it took so that my kids would grow up and not have to have 'the conversation' with their kids, telling them about how things would be different for them because of the color of their skin? Then it would absolutely be worth it. I'd pay that price any day. I would pay it over and over again."

"Nothing," he said. "They're too young. They don't know that the color of their skin matters yet. I'd like to keep it that way as long as I can."

Hannah Sayle • @saylehan