The Indiana Whiskey Company: the city's first documented distillery

2011 — present

The founder and the start: The distillers' negative of the entry above ends with a chemist. Charles Florance came to distilling from a Purdue degree in chemistry and physics, by way of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business (MBA 2013): the idea for a whiskey company came out of a Mendoza course in the first year of his MBA, and Notre Dame Magazine's account of the founding prints the course the idea took — entered in the business school's McCloskey business-plan competition in 2012, where it did not win; capitalized instead through the network the school gave him, some $220,000 of starting money "largely raised through the Notre Dame family"; and built physically with a local fabricator, Deluxe Sheet Metal, which helped him build a prototype still. Company profiles date the founding to 2011, the year of the idea; the documented public course begins with the 2012 competition, and both are printed. The distillery went into a former trucking terminal at 1115 West Sample Street, and sales began in 2013 — the first documented sale of whiskey distilled in South Bend, 161 years after Christopher Muessel's first brewery.

Course and scale: The house style was Indiana grain and patience, in the magazine's two accounts across the decade. The first product was the Silver Sweet Corn Whiskey, an unaged corn whiskey sold at about twenty cases a week in the first account; the company's casks yielded a two-year straight whiskey in 2015; and the later account names the flagship — Just Whiskey, a wheated bourbon, "their biggest seller," among a line the company fills out with gins and a coffee liqueur made with a local coffee house. The still is a copper pot still, in the company's own words "a beautiful 100% solid copper pot still designed to draw out flavor and character that no other still can achieve," and the mash bill its site publishes for the bourbon runs 80 percent corn, 10 percent wheat, 10 percent barley. Output, in Notre Dame Magazine's account of about 2020, ran 15,000 to 20,000 bottles a year — a craft scale four orders of magnitude below the Drewry's plant's million barrels, and the honest size of the city's first distillery: a terminal, a pot still, and twenty thousand bottles.

The sanitizer spring, and the present: The company's civic paragraph is dated March to May 2020, when the distillery turned its stills to hand sanitizer for the pandemic's first spring and then resumed spirits — a pivot the university's account records and the Crime section's pandemic chapters frame. It stands operating in November 2026, its own site live, selling tours and tastings at the Sample Street distillery. One limit is printed with the entry: the company's awards and competition record are its own publications' claims, and this section prints its founding, course and scale from the university's reporting and the company's site, and lets the medals stand in the company's own telling rather than this history's.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Magazine — "A Distillery in the Family" (the founding account: the Mendoza course, the 2012 McCloskey competition entry, the $220,000 raised largely through the Notre Dame network, the Deluxe Sheet Metal prototype still, the former trucking terminal at 1115 West Sample Street, sales beginning 2013, the Silver Sweet Corn Whiskey at twenty cases a week) and the magazine's later alumni account (the two-year straight whiskey of 2015, Just Whiskey as the biggest seller, output of 15,000–20,000 bottles a year, the March–May 2020 hand-sanitizer production).
2. The Indiana Whiskey Company, the company's own publications (theindianawhiskey.com, read November 2026) — the copper pot still, the 80/10/10 mash bill, the product line, and the distillery operating with tours in November 2026; Tracxn company profile — the 2011 founding date, printed as the profiles give it against the 2012–13 documented course above.