If you’ve ever been to a brewery, cidery, or distillery, you probably appreciate a craft beverage, but maybe you’ve never truly understood why until now, upon hearing Justin Meccia’s take on spirits and the community surrounding them.
Justin is the owner, alongside his wife Zena, of Whitefish Crafted Spirits, even though their tasting room resides off Highway 2 in east Kalispell. (We’ll get to that later). His newest spirit is the Huckleberry Reserve, a huckleberry rum made from wild Montana huckleberries. It doesn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary but Justin pulls back the curtain on how much thought went into offering this one-of-a-kind spirit and why it’s so special.
Let’s take vodka, for example, as a comparison. Vodka is always mixed. And whiskey is similar. The whiskey drinker knows what they’re getting into, so to speak. It’s less approachable, it stings or burns. It has a robust nature when it hits the tongue.
“However, rum tends to be more palatable because it’s so sweet…When you take huckleberry, which is kind of tart, and you allow it to collide with the sugars and the rum, you actually get a pretty well balanced rum,” says Justin. “By itself, or poured over ice, it’s actually quite enjoyable.”
He goes on to offer a distilling process perspective. Overall? Rum really isn’t that difficult to make or distill, but it is difficult to control. As a dad to five, Justin compares his spirits to his easiest subjects.
“Once you start to make rum, once you get into the direction of making a rum that’s flavored or unique, controlling it so that it stays that way is a little difficult. Think about spirits like they are children. Rum is kind of like your wild child. It can go 100 different directions. If you don’t control it, that’s what you have: a wild child spirit.”
The longer, more delicate process of controlling the exact rum Justin wants to put out into the world is one that speaks for itself, without a counterpart, like a mixer. His tagline for the business is “rugged but never rough,” and now we’re starting to see why. Justin isn’t aiming to make a spirit, just to end up disguising the taste with the goal of making it palatable. “We aim for all of our spirits—all of our products—to be drinkable or palatable by itself.”
Vodka, he says, is pretty straight forward—arguably the easier spirit to make, which is why you see a rather saturated huckleberry vodka market. It has a fast turnaround, it’s fairly easy to control, and it’s overall pretty straightforward. The huckleberry is really more for marketing, not to enhance the actual quality of the vodka, he shares. “The result is still a spirit that’s really difficult to appreciate by itself, which is why huckleberry vodka is always mixed.”
A light bulb moment, indeed. What if our spirits were enjoyable without a companion? Justin pursues a high quality, palatable spirit that truly highlights one of Montana’s most loved flavors—the huckleberry—by including it in the process, not by muddling it for an add-in.
“We’re giving people the opportunity to enjoy a hard beverage without it having to kick them in the teeth in order to do so…the secret to that actually is not so much in what we cut our spirits with, it’s actually what we filter or choose to not filter out,” says Justin. “Distillation is not just what you put in but what you keep in that will result in the final product. So our move to do huckleberry rum was two-fold; one, to do something that nobody else does and also because we’re staying true to form. We want a product that, should you be interested, you can drink it by itself. It doesn’t have to be mixed.”
Justin talks about a crowd favorite: the mojito. Bartenders have a love-hate relationship with the drink—it’s slow to produce but it’s usually costly, so any bar is happy to put them out. And the customer is always satisfied. After all, it’s a timeless, refreshing beverage.
“If you want to make your mojito even better,” says Justin, “Make it with one of our rums. Now you’re either adding a citrus element [Whitefish Rum with Spices—infused with orange and clove] to the mint or you’re adding a huckleberry element to the mint…Everybody’s going to go crazy over it.” And Justin hits the mark with palatability. When making the drink, “You know what you don’t have to do? Anything else.” No muddling, no mixing.
Justin has plans for signature cocktails that are so good, they’ll keep you coming back. But he’s not in a hurry to slap anything on the tasting menu. He and Zena became the owners just one year ago in a serendipitous way. Whitefish Crafted Spirits originated in its namesake town of Whitefish in 2015. In 2016, Justin was a guest bartender for the owners because they were doing a tasting event in Kalispell, Justin’s home turf after he moved from Wilmington, North Carolina in 2008. If you’re going to serve it, you ought to taste it, right? The orange and clove infused rum blew him away.
“I wasn’t exactly a rum drinker except for when I tasted this I said, ‘Oh my goodness, call me a pirate, let’s go back to rum because this is amazing!’” When the establishment moved to Kalispell, it became a routine date night location for Justin and Zena, until 2024 when the owners approached Justin—also a real estate agent—about wanting to sell. A quick look under the hood revealed that there really wasn’t much to sell, so Justin wracked his brain for a month about how to help his friends. Luckily, a new idea took hold with just enough experience to give it momentum. Justin and Zena were home flippers. They flipped one home per year for the first four years of their marriage. This business needed flipping.
“At its core, a home flipper really is a problem solver…This is just like flipping a home, except for you’ve got different things to consider. While we’re not remodeling a kitchen, we are remodeling a brand. We’re ambitious enough, we feel like we’re smart enough, let’s take this on,” says Justin. And it makes sense—Justin and Zena are longtime craft beverage lovers—breweries, cideries, and distilleries—and when they travel, they always seek out the nearest one. “What we love about them is the hyper local aspect that they provide,” says Justin. “We love tasting the local community.” The Flathead community is a culture that believes in hospitality, according to Justin. “So much that you’re welcome to bring your families in the cideries and distilleries and the breweries. It’s not like I’m advocating that alcohol needs to be part of your diet—what I’m advocating is that you should be after things that are very good.”
And that sentiment ties directly into his family. His 5-year-old knows the distillery as “the business.” It makes “juice” and that juice is for adults. “At a young age,” says Justin, “he’s being introduced to this idea that there are things out there, and that there are better things out there, and I like that. We can all go to McDonalds and sit down, and it’s going to be the same no matter where you go…there’s nothing special about the community, other than the fact that it employs a few people. What we enjoy is local, unique, and unlike anything else. That’s art in the community.”
With the future ripe before them, Justin and Zena are ambitious about what’s to come, and they’re willing to take the long (expensive) way home. “We do have a future name in mind…we’ll be rebranding in the future,” says Justin. “Like what very much pulled us into this in the first place was the aspect of it being a staple of the community, we are aimed at making this very community-centric. In fact, we are aimed at making it very Montana-centric. My goal is to be the distillery that honors Montana most, and with the new name and the new efforts, that’ll really resonate.”
“We’re giving people the opportunity to enjoy a hard beverage without it having to kick them in the teeth in order to do so."
“I wasn’t exactly a rum drinker except for when I tasted this I said, ‘Oh my goodness, call me a pirate, let’s go back to rum because this is amazing!'"
"My goal is to be the distillery that honors Montana most, and with the new name and the new efforts, that’ll really resonate.”