Brian & Renee Bemis

“Driftless in Baraboo”

Brian Bemis’s career path began far from a rickhouse, but instead it started by alternating between the bright, clean showrooms and the greasy service bays of car dealerships in northern Illinois. For nearly four decades, he built a reputation as a successful automotive retailer, eventually founding and growing the Brian Bemis Automotive Group in Sycamore and DeKalb, Illinois, a network that came to include multiple new-car franchises across several brands. Those years in the automotive world honed the skills that would later prove crucial in whiskey: attention to detail, long-term planning, and a deep sense of how to treat the clients and personnel upon which the business depends.

By the mid-1980s, the automotive group was firmly established, and over the years, Bemis’s company became a family-anchored, locally known operation that prided itself on customer service, philanthropic support, and community involvement. Entrepreneurship was only half of the couple’s story. While Brian built his automotive enterprises, his wife, Renée Bemis, was making her own name as a professional sculptor. She grew up in Palm Beach, Florida, earned a college golf scholarship, and went on to a national-level golf career before turning full-time to sculpture in the late 1980s. Her bronzes of animals and people have been placed in public spaces and private collections around the United States, and she has served for many years as president of the Society of Animal Artists. So, In 2016, the Sycamore Park District was elated to announce that the new community dog park would be named the Brian Bemis Family Dog Park, recognizing a $100,000 contribution from the Bemis family and noting that Brian and Renée would donate a bronze German Shepherd statue, sculpted by Renee, for the entrance.

By the late 2000s and early 2010s, both Brian and Renée were, then, accomplished in their separate careers: he as a lifelong entrepreneur/car dealer of nearly forty years, she as a scratch golfer and world-class sculptor recognized in national exhibitions. What they wanted next was something they could build together, a shared endeavor that blended his business experience with her creativity. That search led them toward American whiskey.

In 2012, the couple turned their attention to Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, a distinctive landscape left untouched by the last glaciers, marked by rugged hills, sandy soils, limestone, peat and bogs. They were drawn to the hamlet of Baraboo, on the Baraboo River, for its natural beauty, tourism potential, and access to high-quality grain and water. Brian and Renée noted in particular the aquifer, sandy soils and agricultural conditions well suited to grain. 

That same year, they broke ground on what would become Driftless Glen Distillery.  From the start, the project was ambitious: the facility was designed to be an experience as much as a production site, with a Vendome 550-gallon copper pot still, a 42-foot column still, and an additional pot still for clear spirits, all set beside a full restaurant, bar, and gift shop overlooking the river. Their early barrels went down in 2014, and Driftless Glen began releasing its own bourbon and rye just a few cask-aged years later.