Coming Soon: Stilheart Distillery & Cocktail Lounge

The North Loop's first (woman-owned) distillery opens in time for the holidays!

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Big news in the North Loop, cocktail lovers, so put down your glass and lean in. 

Now, you’re familiar with Lawless Distilling of course, the out-of-the-way Seward distillery that’s also a constant fun and hip party-garage, right? (Lawless lovers, please note they’ve now flipped to their fall concept of Haunted Art Gallery, so get your pre-Halloween costume on and head over.) If you know Lawless, you’re likely familiar with the fact that the cocktail program is run by super-bar-stars Bittercube, and maybe you’re even familiar with the ownership, including husband and wife Kirsten and Nate Karnitz. Well, here's some big news:

Kirsten Karnitz has sold her ownership stake in Lawless and is opening her own thing in the North Loop: Stilheart Distillery & Cocktail Lounge. Next door to Fairgrounds Coffee, it will share distilling staff with Lawless, though it will focus entirely on distilling for the cocktail program on site, with little or no plans for the distilled products to find wider distribution. And, all the cocktails will be kegged, featuring Bittercube “elixirs,” that is, their non-alcoholic cocktail mixes.

“We’re thinking about the distillery concept differently,” Kirsten told me. “Stillheart is really about focusing on the cocktail in a consistent format.”

I pressed Kirsten: This is actually a total flip from what we’ve known in Minnesota distilleries before, isn’t it? Cocktail rooms at places like Tattersall or Du Nord are more like showrooms for the distilled product, but this is different—more like a neighborhood brewery taproom than what we’ve known as distilleries before. “Correct,” said Kirsten. “I just think it takes out a lot of the complications in running a distillery. Instead of focusing on spirits distribution we can focus on the cocktails.” 

To that end Stilheart worked with Little Box, the architects and designers behind beautiful St. Genevieve and the slick northeast Glam Doll, to create a sort of artsy 1970’s/1960’s gallery space.

I called up Nick Kosevich from Bittercube to ask about these elixirs. “The past couple of years we’ve been working on our non-alcoholic side of the business, these elixirs are sort of like acidified syrups. When you do kegged cocktails with fresh citrus you get oxidation and breakdown of the citrus really fast. So what we’ve done is essentially reverse-engineer citrus using 100% natural ingredients, nothing artificial at all, so we get something that walks and talks like lemon or lime juice, but isn’t.”

Kosevich told me that a few of the elixirs you can expect to taste at Stllheart include a lime-mint mojito, and a grapefruit-lime elixir for Palomas. “It turns a six-step or five-step drink into pour + garnish + serve,” he told me, which he expects will cut down on wait times and prices too. The Stilheart cocktail line will be both nitrogen- and carbon-dioxide-carbonated. “Sangria is so pretty when it’s on nitrogen,” Kosevich told me. “It churns around like a Guinness, it’s beautiful.”

Expected open? Early December. Does this mean kegged eggnog? Drop by and find out!

124 N 3rd Ave., North Loop; coming December 2019.