Sweet Sippin’

Written by: Brady Drake
Arthur Weidner, Founder

North Dakota Sweet Crude A Must-Try ND Drink

It’s no secret that North Dakotans are proud of our state. As we should be. Our state is home to some of the best people in the country, one of the highest GDPs per capita in the country and beautiful landscapes. Is there a better way to celebrate all we have than with a liqueur bearing the state’s name? North Dakota Sweet Crude co-founder Arthur Weidner certainly doesn’t think so.

Arthur Weidner, Founder

And why would he? Arthur, alongside his brother Christian, is currently carrying on a family legacy that goes back over 100 years to his great-grandfather Martin Weidner, a man who secretly made whiskey in his smokehouse during the state’s prohibition period in the early 1900s.

According to the crudespirits.com website, “Old man Weidner passed his recipe on to his children, who shared it with theirs. Generations of Weidners have added their polish, but left the liquor unrefined (as a good hooch should be).”

“My brother and I like to do a fair amount of hunting,” Arthur said. “On several of our hunting excursions in the western part of North Dakota, where my father grew up on the farm, we wanted to give the farmers that let us hunt on their land something a little bit more than just a $20 bill or something. A lot of times, we would trade work for hunting rights on certain guys’ land. We used to call ourselves the pheasant builders. But it’s not possible to spend a week doing projects for everybody. So, sometimes we would hand out our family venison sausage. I had been introduced to our family hooch since I was eight years old and Chris and I decided to make a batch one time and we ended up with a couple of extra bottles. We ended up giving one to a farmer as a thank you and didn’t think much of it. But when we called the next year wanting to hunt on the land again, the farmer told us he could use about 12 of those bottles. That’s when we thought, ‘we might have something here.'”

From there, Arthur began playing with the idea of starting a business and trying to figure out what it would take to get the business up and running.

“I knew I didn’t want to jump into it completely right away and become a full-on distiller myself because that takes a lot of investment,” Arthur said. “However, I knew, obviously, we’d need to scale up from doing it just on the stovetop. I came across a couple of small distilleries and found one that said they’d be interested in making our liqueur on a contract basis. We gave him our recipe and had him sign a nondisclosure agreement and I began looking at how to become a distributor.” The next hiccup for Arthur and his brother to overcome was figuring out how to scale the recipe, which included two ingredients that were originally of concern to him: herbal tea and caramelized sugar. While he was able to source the herbal tea blend from producers, the caramelized sugar proved to be a more difficult problem to overcome.

“Caramelized sugar isn’t available out on the general market,” Arthur said. “What is sold on the market is generally used as a colorant, not a flavor profile. It tastes really bad. So, I contacted the NDSU mechanical engineering department and talked with somebody there who had an idea for a machine, but didn’t have a place to test it out or the time to do all of the drafting and everything that would need to be done to make it. However, he thought that his students might be interested. It took about two years to perfect the machine and the modifications to it. But when it was up and running and we got the data back from the taste testing, it was the most beautiful data that I’d ever seen as a scientist in the engineering field.”

Q&A

How close is the taste to what you guys made at home?

Oh, we improved on it. I would have to say it’s definitely different than Grandpa Martin’s. He wasn’t using lemongrass. There’s definitely some stuff that we’ve added to it. There’s black tea, green tea, even a little bit of mint. I actually sourced them from my uncle in Washington state. It’s definitely a step up from what was being passed around at the celebrations in North Dakota.

How long was it before you started to feel like you were really gaining some traction with the business?

I started by corporating myself in 2015. We produced our first batch three years later in 2018. I sold my first bottle in July 2018. I was still working full-time as an engineer for John Deere. Then, in March of 2019, I quit my engineering job and went out on the road full-time doing sales across North Dakota. In July of 2019, my sales really started to do something. Then, I also started getting into Minnesota. I’ve now got about a dozen distributors across North Dakota, Minnesota and South Dakota carrying my product.

What do you think helped you get to that point?

I think sampling and tasting the product really helped. They’re just half ounce samples, probably less than a half ounce because I don’t fill the cup all the way up. Under Minnesota state law, that’s all I’m allowed to give out as a sampler. North Dakota doesn’t have that law and it’s a much different business environment in general. In North Dakota, the person that controls the liquor is the tax commissioner. The people that control liquor distribution in Minnesota are the Office of Public Safety. So, you could see how there’s probably a different bend on how things are handled. There’s also a lot easier access to decision makers in North Dakota.

How much were you working in those early days?

Pretty much every evening after work.

Sweet Crude Spirits sells both a cinnamon & spice flavor as well as a citrus & spice flavor.

Tell us about when you knew you had to quit your day job.

I just had too much [going on]. I wasn’t able to get out and do the sampling and the sales calls that I needed to. I was getting to the major markets, I was getting around here in Fargo and Bismarck and a little bit in Jamestown, but I wasn’t able to get through the rest of the state. I wasn’t able to really blanket the state. And so my wife and I, we just said, “Well, you know, you’re gonna have to jump in or, or pull back, you know, one or the other.”

Is this a passion project for you?

I do enjoy it. It’s nice to see people enjoy the product. It’s also great to carry on the legacy for Grandpa Martin, who was making this stuff 100 years ago. I like getting out and meeting people. Early on, in 2018, I kind of made a commitment to myself saying that I was going to get to every town in North Dakota that had a liquor license and try and introduce the town to North Dakota Sweet Crude. It took me about a year and a half but I finally made it to every town that had a liquor license. So, I’ve driven almost every mile of paved road in North Dakota and I’ve seen a lot of country I’ve never seen before. It makes me appreciate it more now.

Do you have any recommendations for places in the state that people should go to that they might not have thought about?

The areas around Lake Metigoshe State Park are beautiful. I just like the wide-open spaces in North Dakota as it is. Obviously, the National Park area that we have is gorgeous, but there are also little picturesque river valleys that flow into the Missouri River that are pretty nice to see too. There is a lot of North Dakota that you can’t see driving down Highway 94.

Can you tell me about your relationship with the drink over your lifetime?

When I was eight years old, I went back to Beulah for my grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary. As an eight-year-old, I’m just sitting there on the sideline watching people dance and talk and everything and listen. And all of a sudden, a little old guy comes around with a bottle and a couple of glasses and he gave me just a tiny, tiny bit. That was the first time I ever tasted it. And then a couple of years later, my dad made a batch on the stovetop and I thought that was kind of cool. It wasn’t until I was in high school before we really made batches with my dad again.

What has it been like working with the distiller?

We’ve had a fantastic time with them. The product is a little unique in that we’re using an herbal tea blend and we’re running it through the tower a second time so we get the big punch of the cinnamon and orange, depending on which variety we’re making. And we had to figure it out together. We had to go down and look at the equipment and figure out how we were going to do this.

To learn more, visit crudespirits.com
Facebook: /CrudeSpirits
Instagram: @crudespirits
Twitter: @CrudeSpiritsND

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Brady is the Editorial Director at Spotlight Media in Fargo, ND.