This Company Rescued Some Extinct Rye from a Shipwreck to Make Whiskey. What Have You Done Today.

Back in 1878, 37,000 bushels of rye sunk to the bottom of Lake Huron. That specific variety of rye doesn’t exist anymore, so a ragtag team of scientists, historians, and whiskey distillers banded together to go retrieve it.

The schooner that was lost at sea, named the James R. Bentley, ran into a storm in November 1878. Sucked down to the depths of Lake Huron, it took with it a species of rye that was later destroyed by commercial industrial farming, according to Chad Munger, the founder and CEO of Mammoth Distilling, a whiskey maker located in Michigan.

Mammoth Distilling has a history of making whiskey out of historic rye varieties, such as their Rosen rye, made out of a rye variety popular in Michigan over 100 years ago. When they heard about an extinct variety of rye that had been hanging out at the bottom of a nearby lake for a century-and-a-half – a variety they’ve nicknamed Bentley rye – they knew exactly that they needed to do.

Munger and his business partner Ari Sussman partnered up with a shipwreck hunter named Ross Richardson, and a diver named Dusty Klifman, to retrieve the rye samples from the sunken shipwreck.

After a nerve-racking dive to retrieve the samples, they were brought back to the surface and shipped off to Michigan State University to germinate the ancient seeds – a process that failed. The failure forced the scientists at MSU to get creative: they took a cue from Jurassic Park and combined the DNA of the Bentley rye with the Rosen rye to create a whole new strain.

The resulting whiskey will be ageing for anywhere from two to three years before it can be bottled and sold, so only time will tell if all of this effort was worth it. In the meantime, Mammoth used some of the wood from the Bentley shipwreck to flavor a batch of whiskey, so if you’re really into old boats and have $500 to spare, be my guest.