Ida Graves Distillery

03/24/2026

WE ARE HIRING SEASONAL BARTENDERS AND BARBACKS

Ida Graves Distillery is known for its high-quality spirits and dedication to creating an enjoyable atmosphere for our guests. We are currently looking for Bartenders and Barbacks to join our team. These roles are crucial in managing our bar operations and ensuring our guests receive the best possible experience.

The Roles: Bartender and Barack

The Bartenders and Barbacks will participate the daily operations of our bar, from serving drinks and playing food, to prepping cocktails and managing inventory. These roles involve a mix of hands-on work behind the bar and administrative duties, ensuring everything runs smoothly. Successful candidates will have the opportunity to showcase their mixology skills and contribute to our drink menu. You’ll not only master our current spirit repertoire but also have the creative freedom to innovate, using our spirits to craft new, unforgettable concoctions.

Please send your resume to Brock Berglund at [email protected]. Include “Seasonal Bartender” or “Seasonal Barback” in the subject line, or simply DM us.

Cheers!

02/04/2026

Is there any love sweeter than that between besties, sisters, mothers and daughters?

Join us to celebrate all of the gals in your life with our Galentine’s Day party on Valentines Day, 2/14 from 1:00-7:00. We’ll have boba tea, mocktails, cocktails and live music by .

Plus friendship bracelet making and a photo wall, too! … and just because we’re celebrating the ladies doesn’t mean that men can’t join in on the fun too 🩷

See you there!

01/05/2026

HOARFROST MORNINGS

On certain mornings in early January, the prairie wakes up transformed. Moisture from warming air meets the frozen surface and crystallizes overnight, fastening itself to everything in reach. Fence lines bloom white. Grasses dawn ornamental coats. And especially ornate are the evergreens. Ice coats the needles like breath freezing to a beard on a bitter morning—each exhalation turned solid, layering the dark with white until the tree, like the face, carries visible proof of the cold it has endured.
Hoarfrost is both spectacular and fleeting. As the sun climbs slowly and cautiously, the crystals begin to loosen, shedding themselves drop by drop until the prairie returns to its muted winter palette. But for a few hours, light behaves differently. It fractures, scatters, and glows, turning the cold itself into ornament. In the depth of winter, beauty still finds new ways to surface, not in spite of the cold, but because of it.
The Hoarfrost Morning is bright and fleeting, like frost caught just after sunrise. Aquavit’s cool herbal spine is softened by orgeat and aquafaba, while sorrel and lime bring a clean, green acidity. Pale and lifted in the glass, it tastes like winter briefly remembering how to breathe.

Hoarfrost Morning Cocktail

- 1 leaf sorrel
- 2 oz IG aquavit
- .75 oz lime juice, freshly squeezed
- .75 oz orgeat
- .5 oz aquafaba

Garnish: sorrel leaf or lemon peel.

1. Muddle sorrel leaf in cocktail shaker.

2. Add ice and other ingredients. Shake ingredients with ice until cold.

3. Serve in a chilled coupe glass and garnish will sorrel leaf.

12/15/2025

TIME OF DARKNESS (December 15 - 30)

By late December, the prairie enters its deepest hush. The sun lifts reluctantly above the horizon and seems to hover there, low and rosy, casting long shadows even at midday. Days compress into brief, dim corridors between long stretches of twilight. The darkness and cold this time of year feels almost architectural—something built and set around you, shaping how you move through the world. On the coldest nights, when the temperature plunges and the air crystallizes with each breath, the milky way emerges with a remarkable clarity. Freed from summer’s humidity and autumn’s haze, the stars burn vibrantly in the clean winter air.

And beneath this season’s heavy quiet, another truth stirs: the light is returning. The solstice marks the pivot, so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. Yet day after day, the sun lingers a little while longer. It is the first slow turning of the year. The earth tilts, the shadows shift, and somewhere deep in the soil, roots sense the faintest hint of change. In a landscape that can feel suspended between sleep and endurance, this growing light is a quiet promise—that the darkest day of the year is not the end of light, but its beginning.

SOLAR STORM COCKTAIL

Dark, bitter, and mineral, this version of the Dark and Stormy is darker and more contemplative. Bourbon brings warmth and structure, amaro adds bitterness, and ginger beer lifts the cocktail with an electric spice. It’s the light cracking through on a dark winter night.

THE RECIPE

- 1.5 oz bourbon
- .5 oz Ida Graves (amaro)
- .25 oz dark maple syrup
- 4 oz ginger beer

METHOD

1. Add ice to a tall Collins glass and add ginger beer and maple syrup. Stir slowly to incorporate maple syrup.

2. Pour bourbon and amaro over a bar spoon to float them on top of ginger beer.

3. Garnish with lime wedge.

12/08/2025

12/01/2025

First Snow (December 1 - 15)

The first snow rarely arrives with the certainty we imagine. It comes in hesitations—flurries that melt on contact, a dusting that disappears by noon, a brief curtain of white that seems to reconsider itself halfway down. Then, one day, it arrives. Bare and wind-scoured fields are swiftly swallowed up by a storm. Heavy flakes fall in thick slanting sheets, erasing the horizon and muffling the world in a matter of hours. Roads vanish, grasses bow, and the familiar landmarks of the prairie dissolve into a single pale expanse. When the storm finally relents, the land feels transformed—as though a curtain has dropped and a new season has taken the stage.

In the sudden stillness that follows, a different kind of clarity emerges. The snow, deep and unbroken, smooths the prairie into long, quiet waves. Tracks appear immediately—deer, fox, pheasant—each one an inscription of life continuing within winter’s new terms. The cold sharpens but does not bite. Instead, it holds the world in a bright, crystalline calm. There is wonder in this abruptness. This season asks you to stop, take in the silence, and accept the world remade overnight.

The Storm Front Manhattan carries the warmth you reach for after the season’s first big storm. Bourbon glows beneath dark maple, while smoked bitters drift like woodsmoke against deep snow. It’s a quiet, steadying cocktail—rich, calm, and shaped by the cold it’s meant to weather.

Ingredients:
• 2 oz bourbon
• 1 oz dry vermouth
• ¼ oz dark maple syrup
• 2 dashes smoked cherry bitters

Method:
Stir with ice, strain over a large clear cube in a whiskey glass or chilled coupe glass. Garnish with luxardo cherry.

11/28/2025

Just a reminder that our Small Business Saturday Barrel Release is happening this Saturday, November 29, from 12–6 PM at the Ida Graves Cocktail Room. 🥃✨

We’ll be releasing about 100 bottles of our newest small-batch high-rye bourbon, along with a limited selection of bourbon cocktails crafted specifically for the day. First come, first served.

If you’ve been waiting for a special holiday bottle — or simply want to support a local distillery — we’d love to see you on the prairie this weekend.

This high-rye bourbon opens with warm spice right up front — think cracked rye grain, baking spice, and a touch of black pepper. The palate follows with caramelized sugar, honeyed oak, and a subtle thread of dried orange peel. As it opens, the rye brings a lively, lifted structure, balancing the sweetness with a clean, dry finish.

You’ll find:
• Aromas: toasted oak, vanilla bean, rye spice
• Palate: caramel, peppery rye, subtle orchard fruit, burnt sugar
• Finish: long, warm, slightly dry, with lingering spice

A bourbon with backbone — bold yet refined, and unmistakably shaped by the prairie.

11/21/2025

In mid-November the wind finds its teeth. It scours across bare fields, rattling the last seed heads, and cuts unimpeded across the prairie’s frosty expanse. Puddles form glassy skins overnight, breaking easily in the morning under boot. On shaded pond edges, ice lingers in the day’s weak sunlight.

This is the time when the cold begins to speak plainly. It carries a message older than ourselves, older than the earth itself: that it is not an intruder, but the original condition of things. Without the thin blanket of atmosphere and the brief kindness of our star, the world would settle back into that cosmic baseline — a temperature so low it silences.

Standing in a November field, with the wind cutting clean through your coat and the first brittle ice forming at your feet, you sense that truth. Winter is not an interruption of life, but the universe’s default gently asserting itself. The land stiffens, the animals huddle close, and the northern hemisphere prepares for its seasonal drift toward darkness.

Cocktail: Winter Spiced Old Fashioned

The Winter Spiced Old Fashioned carries a quiet defiance against this cold. Cold at first sip, it warms from within, a small ember against November’s wind. Burnt rosemary brings the scent of warming fire, while the maple syrup sweetens for the next sip. Drinking it, you feel not just the press of winter’s approach but the small, stubborn flame of life moving against it — a gesture of warmth held up to the cold, and a quiet refusal to let the wind have the last word.

11/12/2025

We’re celebrating Small Business Saturday—November 29, 2025 with a special drop at the Ida Graves Cocktail Room.

Event Details
When: Saturday, Nov 29, 12:00–6:00 PM (CST).

Where: Ida Graves Cocktail Room.

What: Bottles of our latest barrel release + a limited selection of bourbon cocktails.

How many: Approximately 100 bottles available—while they last.

Come taste, choose your bottle, and raise a glass to small businesses and the prairie we call home.

Cheers!

11/07/2025

Grey Skies (Nov 1–15)

In November the palette dulls. Skies turn heavy and low, their weight pressing down on prairie and woods alike. The trees stand stripped, skeletal, and the prairie grasses rattle dry in the wind. Most color has drained from the land; only the stubborn gold of the last oak leaves clinging to branches, tall bluestem grasses, and the black silhouettes of crows tracing across the fields provide contrast.

The prairie hums at a lower frequency now, hushed and muted. Coyotes appear more often at field edges, trotting along confidently, no longer hidden by the dense woods. In the absence of spectacle, subtler patterns emerge: the direction of the wind, the rhythm of clouds, the sound of stalk against stalk. The redwing blackbirds gather in massive restless flocks, rising suddenly, wheeling, and settling again — a choreography of persistence. The prairie has not gone silent; it has simply lowered its voice.

Cocktail: Earl Grey Your Way

Warm gin mingles with honey, lemon, and freshly brewed Earl Grey tea — a drink to hold in both hands. The steam carries the faint aroma of bergamot and honey, an echo of brightness beneath a muted sky. Each sip is a small defiance of November’s chill: golden, fragrant, and alive with quiet warmth.

Recipe
• 1.5 oz Ida Graves Gin
• 1.5 oz raw honey (slightly thinned with warm water)
• 0.5 oz fresh lemon juice
• 3 oz hot Earl Grey tea

Stir honey and lemon into the hot tea until dissolved, then add gin. Serve in a heatproof glass or handled mug. Garnish with a thin lemon peel or a twist of dried grass — something that catches the light like a shaft of sun through cloud.

11/06/2025

We’re proud to announce that Ida Graves spirits are now available in North Dakota.

Our aquavit, gin, vodka, and amaro are officially being distributed across the state and can now be ordered by North Dakota liquor stores, bars, and restaurants.

To everyone who has asked, waited, or brought bottles home from Minnesota—thank you. We’re grateful to finally meet you on your side of the prairie.

If there’s a shop, restaurant, or cocktail bar in North Dakota where you’d like to see Ida Graves on the shelf or in the glass, simply request us—distribution is active and ready.

Here’s to new neighbors, new partnerships, and a wider prairie to pour from.

11/06/2025

We’re pleased to share that Ida Graves spirits are now available in South Dakota.

Our aquavit, gin, vodka, and amaro are officially being distributed statewide and can now be ordered by South Dakota retailers, bars, and restaurants.

For those who have traveled across the border to find our bottles—thank you. We’re grateful to now meet you closer to home.
For those discovering us for the first time—welcome. Our spirits are inspired by the prairie landscape, crafted with intention, and made in small batches at our distillery in Alexandria, Minnesota.

If you’d like to see Ida Graves carried in your favorite South Dakota shop or bar, simply ask them—we are ready to supply.

Here’s to new territory and new glasses raised.