Located in Salt Lake City, Utah, Dented Brick is an artisan distillery making spirits from grain-to-glass, producing authentic spirits and with them, adding a new chapter to the surprisingly rich story of distilling in Utah. They locally-source organic raw grains and ferment the grains with snow melt from the Wasatch mountains that flows through sand and limestone to their artesian well, shedding impurities and attracting the minerals that make the pure and rich taste of their spirits possible.

Dented Brick was founded by Marc Christensen in 2015. After an exhaustive search to find the right site for his new distillery, Marc struck gold in finding a property owned by a family of well drillers with its own artesian well on site. An artesian well differs from a regular well in that water flows under natural pressure without pumping. In this case, the well on site is drilled down 300 feet through the rock below the property. Everything with distilling starts with the water, and the water from their well is perfectly suited for just this purpose. Marc says “Our water is amazing. We like to say this years’ snow is next year’s whiskey. Our artesian well supplies us with amazing clean water full of mineral. Our water starts as snow, and after the winter, as it begins to melt, travel from the high Wasatch mountains thousands of feet down to the valley floor of the Great Salt Lake. This water disappears through the salty playa of the valley floor, penetrating the Great Basin’s porous alkali loam, and travels to replenish a deep aquifer filled with minerals from the historic Lake Bonneville. These minerals are priceless for fermentation, and form some of the unique esters and textures that are present in our spirits. Our well allows us to make spirts that are unique only to our facility.

If the well wasn’t enough, after further research they discovered their property was owned by none other than Hugh Moon, Utah’s first distiller of record who was distilling there as far back as 1857. Dented Brick is named in honor of the well driller that was responsible for the artesian well that is located at the distillery. The well driller was killed in a blazing gunfight that left impressions in the bricks of house that located on the property when they purchased it. To honor the well driller, some of those “dented bricks” were incorporated into the new distillery building and lent themselves to the name of the distillery.

The distilling at Dented Brick is currently overseen by Harley Norwood who came on board at Dented Brick after working as a distiller at High West for the last eight years. With both a Vendome copper still as a well as a 28 foot tall column still, they’re able to fit each spirit they produce to the still most suited for the process.