As Duluth's Vikre Distillery turns 10, it leads charge to shop local

DULUTH – The boreal forest-inspired gin line of Vikre Distillery is made just yards from Lake Superior, a creation of a couple who knew little about liquor production and Minnesota's archaic industry regulations when it opened the city's first micro-distillery a decade ago.

But Emily and Joel Vikre knew they wanted to live here, and make something that was both high quality and deeply local, using flora foraged from the area. Now, Vikre gin is found as far away as northern California, and a slew of other spirits round out their growing business. In 2023, the Canal Park distillery sold more than 12,000 cases of bottled spirits, including its gin, whiskey, vodka and aquavit, all done with its staff of 40. That case count is up fourfold from its first year in business, 2014.

"I think a lot of us get into it not even realizing how complicated and dominated by huge, highly monied interests, or how tiered and regulated it is," Emily Vikre said. "It was such a crash course."

Vikre closes out 10 years in business as one of Duluth's most glittering gems. But surviving as a small business here, especially one that makes artisan cocktails and liquor, has been tough, said Vikre, 41, who has a doctoral degree in food policy. The decade was punctuated by attempts to change liquor laws, the COVID-19 pandemic — wherein Vikre gave out sanitizer when it couldn't operate its cocktail room — and an employee unionization push.

Last year, in the wake of the pandemic, she and several other female entrepreneurs in Duluth penned a manifesto of sorts that shared the pressure small businesses are under to project success and vibrancy at all times, especially on social media. If they don't, they jeopardize sales and other financial opportunities, they wrote in a blog post, but margins are slim, business laws are tough to navigate and balance for women is "impossible" to attain.

"We enter business wide-eyed, caring so much about what we make and the community we make it in and for," the piece reads, but passion, exposure and ubiquity aren't profit.

"'Buy local' is not simply a nicety at this point," they wrote.

Small businesses in places the size of Duluth need to make numbers align when it comes to a limited population and spending base, Emily Vikre said in an interview earlier this month. And the company's commitment to high quality ingredients and environmentally sound production increases costs and decreases profit, she said. The company also contends with a perception that Duluth is on the periphery of Minnesota's destination cocktail makers — most on the nation's radar are in the metro area.

"You have to yell a lot harder" in a city where "fancy," thanks to a lot of blue-collar, Scandinavian roots, isn't popular, she said. (The native Duluthian isn't taking a shot; she has citizenship in Norway and the U.S.).

The Minnesota Star Tribune sat down with Emily Vikre earlier this month to discuss the distillery's decade in business. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

You helped change state liquor laws to allow sampling, cocktail rooms and the direct sale of one full-size bottle per customer per day. How did that help?

So much of this micro-distilling industry is not how it looked when we started. There were no exemptions for distilleries for the three-tier system, so we couldn't even sample to people, much less sell a cocktail or sell a single bottle. Those first couple of years we were spending a lot of time with Far North, Du Nord and Panther [distilleries] going down to the Legislature and testifying about how these are small businesses, and they're contributing to agriculture, the local economy, the creative economy. We needed to create a structure that allows them to exist. So all of those changes give the scrappiest of fighting chances [against distilleries in other states and giant distilleries].

What happened when some Vikre employees wanted to unionize in 2023?

I would have been happy to have a union. I would have been happy not to have a union. We've always tried to listen and put our employees first and do what we can as a small business. A few people organized it, including a couple of people who came in from the outside. And I, from talking with employees leading up to it, knew that a number of people had felt pressured. So I said that however it goes, everybody's voice has to be included. The only way for that to be possible is for there to be an actual vote and for people to have time to research and talk. The vote wound up going no by a huge margin.

What was behind the blog post?

People's perception of business is the big corporations. The fancy people with tons of finances. And the fact is, any small business is miles and miles closer to their employees than anybody who is high up at a corporation. Every dollar spent at a small business comes back into the community and really makes a big difference. Every time you make that decision not to, it makes a huge, huge difference. … It might be worth some inconvenience or a little bit more money, because [residents] want small businesses to continue to exist in their community.

Thoughts on a second distillery opening in Duluth? (The Duluth Whiskey Project in Lincoln Park was expected to open by the end of this year.)

I think it's great. We've been mentoring Kevin [Evans] since the start. He actually moved to town at the same time as us. I have watched him work on his ideas and work on his approach and it's very different. His types of products are very, very different. He's been trying to do this for a really long time, so it's exciting to see it concrete and come to fruition.