Every Day Adds Up

Du Nord Craft Spirits, the first Black-owned distillery in the country, was nearly lost when the Third Precinct burned in May. What went down that night–and how did owner Chris Montana end up unknowingly saving the day?

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[I]

On the day after the Third Precinct burned, Chris Montana waited till curfew broke at 6 am and then drove the few blocks from his Lake Street apartment to his distillery, Du Nord Craft Spirits—on the same block as the smoking precinct. 

“I was notified by building management that the sprinkler system had been on since 2 am,” he says. But going right away at 2 am wasn’t an option. There was a curfew, and Montana is a Black man. “And I’m not aiming to catch a bullet from MPD. I could see the flames still burning when I got there. Smoke everywhere. Smoke, with the flames behind it. It wasn’t the smartest thing in the world for me to go in there.” 

But he went in. Into the flames and the flood.

“I opened the door and a foot of water came out,” he says. “Big pallets of hand sanitizer were just burning in the water.” Overhead, water was still pouring down from industrial sprinklers (30,000 gallons in total, when tallied at the end, says Montana). Wading through the gushing sprinklers and flooded floor, he kicked over a flaming jug of hand sanitizer. The accelerant, suddenly freed from its bottleneck, flared into a fireball. “Just a fast fireball, though,” he says. “Once it hits that lake, it gets diluted and goes away.” 

Montana figures he kicked over 20, maybe 30 jugs, making 20 or 30 fireballs. “You look around, you could see they found our totes,” he says of the giant 1,000-liter plastic containers that hold alcohol, like Du Nord’s local-grain distilled vodka. “They put rags on them, set the rags on fire. They were trying to get the totes to catch fire, except they set the packaging on fire first and the sprinkler system kicked on.” 

After Montana kicked over the last flaming jug, the smoke thinned. He stood in the early light that began to fill his flooded distillery, beneath the water streaming with such force it ground away a third of the ceiling, and he wept. 

Montana’s is the first Black-owned craft distillery in the United States. He built it a few blocks from the high school where he’d once been a homeless teen. He built it with his wife, Shanelle, and $60,000, turning it into the pride of south Minneapolis. “None of it had been easy,” he says. “We were going to make it because we worked harder. Everything that had burned, it was all work. To see it set on fire—it was tough.” 

Once the fires were out, once the sprinklers were off, once the people in the building that he shares with an Ethiopian bakery began to talk, only then did Montana realize he might have, through an abundance of business prudence and caution, accidentally saved God only knows how many lives. 

[II]

On the day he opened Du Nord Craft Spirits in 2013, Chris Montana’s story could have been called the feel-good business story of the decade. There he was, having a ribbon cutting scant blocks from South High School, where he’d once been a homeless, couch-surfing 13-year-old, on his own due to his biological mom’s difficulties. (She volunteered with AIM patrol in the ’90s, south Minneapolis being one of the national epicenters of urban Native American life and South High School being less than a mile from Little Earth, the largest Native urban housing center in the country. Montana and his mother are not currently in touch.) There he was, in a place where he’d been a homeless kid navigating high school until a Jewish classmate’s family invited him to stay in their Prospect Park home and eventually adopted him. Montana went on to college and then worked with Wellstone Action (now called Re:power). What could be more south Minneapolis than Du Nord, where the Native, Black, Jewish, lefty, and Wellstone-loving threads came together under one roof? And that roof just happens to be the first cocktail room in Minneapolis since Prohibition. 

Not that Montana saw his life as only a feel-good story. His teenagehood, even in the part of town with mansions, was still subject to the same racism everyone else suffered. He recalls a particularly cruel game of cat-and-mouse with the MPD. “If you know anything about Prospect Park, you know there aren’t that many people who look like me up there,” he says. “Well, at the time, there was a curfew—if you were under 16 and you were out after 11, you were violating curfew. I’m heading home at night, MPD picks me up, puts me in a car. You match a description of a burglar, they say. I had no tools on me or anything. They held me. And held me. And held me. They let me out two minutes before curfew—not time enough to get home. I ran right to my buddy’s house: Let me in. The police set me up.” 

Or another night when his friend Stacey was dropping him off at his home. “A cop car pulls up; they take me over to their car. They’re asking her: Are you OK? What’s going on? They’re asking me: What brings you to the neighborhood? I said: I live here. That’s my house. I have a key to that house. They said: I don’t believe you. I’ve lived a couple different places; as far as police departments go, there’s nothing worse than MPD. They don’t care at all. You’re Black, then you’re a problem they have to manage.” 

It doesn’t stop simply because you become a success. “You live here, you run a business here, you pay the police salary, and you pay the settlements,” he says. “It’s not a ‘bad apple’ problem. It’s the culture. Now that I’m a business owner, I’ve had an officer say: All this booze, hope the Indians don’t come and drink it all. Now, this is the same guy who’s going to be responding to calls in Little Earth. You wonder if the police are ever going to ask themselves, Is it just that this whole community has it wrong, or are we doing something wrong?”

Montana told the police not to go into his business in case of fire. He told them it was too dangerous. He wanted to keep the police safe.  

[III] 

On the day of the first protest against the murder of George Floyd, Montana marched. Protesters headed to the Third Precinct, so he left early and called over to Hook and Ladder to ask the people running the arts space in the old firehouse if Du Nord could set up a tent and give out water and hand sanitizer in Hook and Ladder’s alley. “If things get out of hand,” the Hook and Ladder crew said, “let us give you the alley door code.”

Montana gave out water and walked through the crowd. “That first night, it wasn’t Black people, it wasn’t white people, it was everybody,” he says. “But some of the younger folks, they were fed up and started breaking windows. I remember this group of Native guys defending this window at the precinct, telling the protesters who wanted to break it: You’re not going to be here for the aftermath, we are. That’s one story that never got out, how for the longest time the Third Precinct was surrounded but generally protected by protesters. I ended up protecting a window with a couple people. We were telling these late-teens, early-20s kids: If you do this, that’s what Fox News is going to report: destruction. They were like: We don’t want to hear that. Get out of the way, or you’re going to get hurt too.” 

Montana didn’t like how the crowd was changing as he began to see “license plates from everywhere, from the South—lots of right-wing types. We saw two neo-Nazis. They had the tattoos, and they weren’t yelling or screaming, just quietly going around poking and prodding.” 

Back at his tent, he watched the police begin a pincer movement to clear the area. Then came tear gas and flash grenades. “That was a first for me, getting tear-gassed,” says Montana. “It just fries your lungs. Punching in that Hook and Ladder door code while your eyes don’t work—that was weird.” Emerging on the streets after they were cleared, Montana had one thought: “Things are getting out of hand. I have to move the ethanol.” 

[IV]

On those first late-winter days when Americans first began to grapple with the reality of COVID, we didn’t have enough hand sanitizer. To help, Du Nord partnered with two other distillers, Tattersall and Brother Justus, to manufacture the high-proof, highly volatile base alcohol you need to kill viruses. To date, the group has donated more than $500,000 worth of hand sanitizer to various organizations, such as homeless shelters. That’s why, only a few months later, in the days before the Third Precinct burned, Du Nord was full up with highly flammable industrial ethanol. Sensing that things were spiraling out of control in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Montana had his staff use a 26-foot Budget rental truck to move 26,000 liters of 190-proof ethanol to a distribution warehouse in St. Paul. 

Montana knew that the ethanol wasn’t just a fire hazard. It was created in giant metal tanks, and if those tanks ignited and exploded, it would mean tank shrapnel tearing into any human flesh and setting fire to all the punctured plastic or glass containers of alcohol in the vicinity. 

What Montana didn’t know was that the Ethiopian bakery that shares Du Nord’s building was operating the night the Third Precinct fell, the night Du Nord was set on fire. The bakers heard arsonists break into Du Nord. If anything bad happened, they planned to hide in the room-sized metal box that commercial bakers use to proof bread. If the ethanol had remained in place, they’d likely have been roasted alive. 

[V]

On the night after he kicked over the flaming jugs and came to marvel at the miracle of his decision to use the Budget truck to relocate the ethanol, Montana went home to his apartment on Lake and Chicago, exhausted. He paused to consider the looters coming and going from the Foot Locker across the street, but neighbors agreed the rioters wouldn’t burn apartments. He went up, changed, took a Benadryl, and resolved to sleep. 

The smoke alarms went off at two o’clock in the morning. His apartment building was on fire. He called his wife, Shanelle, who was in California with their three kids. After devoting years to Chris’s dream, Shanelle, whose passion is clean energy, had taken a job in Orange County. The family relocated in January, and Chris came and went to the distillery. He said to Shanelle: I need a clear path out of the city, one that isn’t on fire or blocked by the National Guard. One where I won’t be shot as a Black man breaking curfew. What can you see on your phone? Then, in his T-shirt and gym shorts and KEENs, he listened and drove as Shanelle guided him safely out of the city, and he stayed at a hotel near the Mall of America. Then she booked a plane ticket and flew to Minneapolis. 

[VI]

In the days after the Third Precinct burned, Montana discovered that his buttoned-up businessman instincts—to always have a good sprinkler system, to always maintain plenty of insurance, to always follow your instincts when you feel like things are getting hinky and you should use your offsite storage—had left him in pretty good shape. Comparatively. 

So Chris and Shanelle called their friends from Wellstone Action and got a volunteer corps onsite. By the Monday after the Thursday-night fire, they turned their distillery into a food bank, giving out Cheerios and diapers to neighbors who’d had all their grocery and drug stores torched. Friends had started funding campaigns in their name, but Chris turned the donated money into a grant-making organization, the Du Nord Foundation. (He wishes now he had called it the Uprising Fund, but it was a hectic week.) As of this writing, the Du Nord Foundation has donated almost three quarters of a million dollars to impacted Minnesota businesses. Al Franken donated $50,000, and Sarah Silverman auctioned off an online Happy Hour. “Al’s funny, Sarah’s funny. We went on for a couple hours,” he recalls, “though I’m afraid I harshed the mellow—I was so touched by everyone’s generosity.” 

[VII]

On a day sometime in the future, Chris Montana can see in his mind’s eye something good coming from the George Floyd uprising. As of this writing, Montana has put in a bid on a big building not too far from his main one, with the idea of starting a Black- and brown- and women-inclusive small business incubator. Since he started Du Nord, his distillery has maintained an employee profile that’s 87 percent women and 50 percent people of color. Montana enjoys this workplace and also finds it provides a competitive edge in the community. “We get to hire the best of the best now, because Du Nord is a welcoming place and people really want to be here.” A Black-owned brewery has also committed to his vision of a big building with anchor tenants and incubator-baby businesses, big names in town like Mortenson Construction Company are interested in helping, and he’s had conversations with the Pohlad Family Foundation, as well. 

“How do we rebuild?” asks Montana. “For me, that came the easiest. We need to rebuild. But it’s not enough to save the diversity that was here. If that was enough, the business community wouldn’t have borne the brunt. The question is: How can we build generational wealth for communities of color? How can we use the goodwill that’s out there now to create an engine of growth for our future? Du Nord is in an odd position. Yes, we were damaged, but we are stronger than when we went in, both for COVID and the uprising. You don’t find a lot of that. 

“Am I overly positive?” he thinks out loud. “Well, I get to do that because I’m not looking at the smoking ruin of my dreams. I still have half my distillery. I moved back into my apartment. There are people who don’t have that. There are a lot of people who have to think: How am I going to feed myself tonight? Maybe I have business survivor’s guilt. But I think in this moment, if you’re not going to take a really big bite out of the problem, why waste your breath?” 

So Chris Montana is going in. 

This article originally appeared in the November 2020 issue.

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