Located about sixty miles north of Pierre, South Dakota in Brookings, Blackfork Farms is a whiskey-making venture generations in the making.
Gordon Ommen, one of the partners of Blackfork Farms, said his family first came over from Northern Germany in 1889, settling in Southwest Minnesota and have been in the area ever since. Four generations after coming stateside, they moved across the state line to the Brookings area.
“We’re new to the area,” he adds with a laugh. Bourbon from Blackfork (image via Blackfork Farms)
The farm-to-glass distillery hasn’t always been a distillery, though – the family, Ommen says, was traditionally grain farmers and livestock producers. While this hasn’t changed – they currently farm corn, soybeans, and alfalfa – they also planted native corn species (Dakota White, Coteau Calico, and Cheyenne Red) to create food plots for pheasants, which visitors can hunt on property.