MINOT—Rebekah Sue, aka Beka, Bolton was raised in Minot, graduating from Our Redeemers High School in 2006. Her mom, Margie, owns Margie’s Art Glass studio in downtown Minot, and her dad, Ted, is a marketing representative with the Farm & Ranch Guide, and more recently purchased the Northern Sentry and Velva Area Voice newspapers. Nothing in Beka’s early life had any connection to bourbon, and her geographical location in Minot, North Dakota, was not exactly in the heart of the bourbon distilling regions of the U.S. So, how does a girl from the magic city of Minot become an expert and eventually a key part of a family distillery in Kentucky? “Well, we need to go way back,” said Beka during a recent interview, and so we did.
Beka worked at various jobs in the Minot area, on Minot Air Force Base as a mechanic, and then as a supervisor in the oil fields for about 10 years, before she finally settled on her current vocation, well sort of. “I’ve been a big whiskey person for a while, when I first started out, and the first thing I got into was Scotch. I was able to drink some really good and some very old scotches, and I love scotch,” according to Beka, “but Steve Akley from the ABV Network saw a funny post I made on social media and asked if I could be on one of their podcasts.”
“I said, ‘Sure, I don’t know anything about bourbon, but I like to drink whiskeys,’ so why not go on this bourbon podcast?”
Beka said she thought she had done a terrible job and figured her podcast stardom was over. “But he (the producer of the podcast) called me up a week later and asked me if I would like to be on the podcast again? People thought I was funny and easy to talk to.” That was four years ago, and Beka is still the co-host to this day.
The show is called the Bourbon Daily. “When I started out I had maybe 3 bottles of bourbon, and before I moved to Kentucky (more on this later), I had about 100 bottles of bourbon in my collection,” Beka continues. In March of 2020 Beka’s oilfield career would end. Her boyfriend, now husband, Royce Neeley was a regular guest on Beka’s show, “but he was in Kentucky, and I was from North Dakota,” and a long-distance relationship just didn’t seem to be in the cards. But that isn’t the end of the story, Beka continues. “We met up at a distillers' vacation in Key West in January of 2020, and we hit it off. By March of 2020 we were engaged. I had no intentions of living here (Kentucky) yet.”
The opinion of the Neeley family, and Beka, was that the distillery was going to be shut down. “But then the came the pandemic, and we started to make hand sanitizer,” Beka said. “It was absolutely insane. We were getting 400 phone calls a day. We stopped making bourbon to make hand sanitizer.” As it turns out, Neeley Family Distillery sent a pallet of their hand sanitizer to Trinity Health in Minot.
It became obvious to Beka that her future would be in Kentucky, and not in a North Dakota oil field. “So, May 1st (of 2020) was my last day working in the oil fields.” Beka and Royce got married on June 10, 2020, in Las Vegas which was, according Beka, “the best decision ever.” Soon the Neeley distillery was open, and events like tours of the distillery and management of the gift shop became part of Beka’s regular job.
“I became manager of the single barrel (unique recipe, limited to one barrel or 250 bottles of bourbon) program, and so I get to pick out all of the single barrels that we do. I get to pick out all of the single barrels, one of which won a gold at the San Francisco Spirit Competition, which is one of the biggest competitions in the world, and it was only a 21-month-old bourbon.” Beka smiles and says, “It was kind of cool that I picked it out, and it won a gold.”
For a North Dakota girl to be deep into bourbon in the state of Kentucky is certainly unique. “Yeah, I kind of forget about that sometimes. The bourbon industry is a really great industry to be in,” says Beka. “It’s a very close-knit industry. It’s always weird to me when people know who I am, and people will come into the gift shop and when I tell people my name or talk about what I have done they say, so you’re Miss Beka Sue. I just forget, we get 30,000 and up to 60,000 downloads (of our podcast) per month.”
A little bit about Neeley Family Distillery. “We put out 4 barrels per day, which is a bit different than (another distiller) that puts out 1,200 barrels a day. We’re a craft distillery, and they are a large distillery,” according to Beka. And the Neeley Family Distillery is on the grow. “We’re discussing dropping in another 8 fermenters (they have 8 now), so we can expand a little bit more. We are opening a second location in Daniel Boone National Park. Hopefully the beginning of summer 2022.”
According to Beka they don’t want to be a larger distiller like a Jim Beam. “We want to be smaller so that our quality will stay top notch,” says Beka. “Once you get too big then your quality just kind of goes down the drain.”
Can we get your (Neeley Family Distillers) bourbon in North Dakota? “We will be able to ship to North Dakota once we get our ND license because of a change to direct to the consumer laws,” she answers.
Great news for the future, but what about today?
Well good news, people can just go about 45 minutes south of Cincinnati to Sparta, Kentucky, location of Neeley Family Distillery, and ask for Beka. And if you tell her you are from North Dakota, and Minot, North Dakota, in particular, you’ll receive an award-winning smile and a warm handshake from Miss Beka Sue.
Or for more information, see neeleyfamilydistillery.com.
