Christi Lower knows she isn’t the traditional face of bourbon taste making.
She’s not a fifth-generation distiller in the Kentucky trails, where 95 percent of the world’s bourbon is produced.
Instead, Christi is a metro Detroit mother of four who ended a medical career to join the booming landscape of handcrafted American whiskey.
She’s embarking on a journey to make “curious spirits for curious spirits.” Christi and her husband Jeffrey Lower are the tag team behind Highline Spirits Craft Cocktail & Tasting Room, a flight tasting lounge they plan to open mid-fall at 330 S Main St. in downtown Plymouth.
“We are now full steam ahead and ready to go for Plymouth,” Christi told What Now Detroit during a recent interview.
Plymouth city council members recommended approval for the downtown establishment’s liquor license June 12. State regulators from the Michigan Liquor Control Commission began inspections to finalize the permitting last week.
The Wayne County tasting room is one of two Highline Spirits destinations the couple is poised to open later this year. They plan to unveil their first tasting room at 3126 Broad St. in Dexter by Labor Day.
The Lowers are also working with local stores and restaurants to roll out their first slate of blends July 17. Among their products is a blend of aged bourbons mixed from three different distilleries, a Triple Rye whiskey, an American whiskey and a Straight Kentucky bourbon. All four will be sold on Highline’s website when the product skew launches in mid-July.
“I’m really excited to be able to enjoy what I’ve been doing with other people,” Christi said. “I’m really excited to be able to bring the spirits to market and to the tasting room. To be able to sit down with people I can enjoy and talk about it with them.”
Christi is Highline Spirits’ driving force. She quit her job as a physician assistant and has been working day and night to get the business up and running.
Her love of craft spirits was birthed from a Kentucky wedding she attended about 10 years ago. A bourbon steward ushered guests through a tasting tour of several whiskeys and bourbons and it piqued Christi’s interests. She began learning about the woods and ingredients that go into making different spirits and became a bourbon lover.
“I got into it because it’s really, really cool,” she said.
The passion persisted through the years and grew stronger during the pandemic. Christi spent much of her downtime reading textbooks about bourbon. Jeff suggested she start a business and the inspiration came during a family hike through Glacier National Park in Montana in 2020.
Christi was stressing the reward of taking chances in life and completing difficult tasks to her children when her oldest daughter encouraged her to take the leap of faith.
“Learn new things. You can do this,” she told her mom during the 15-mile trek.
With that, Christi set out to bring her dream into fruition. She took classes and got her distilled masters management certificate last year. She did the legwork to build Highline Spirits from the ground up, leading renovation efforts at two tasting rooms and working to perfect the blends. There have been stressful days and sleepless nights along the way. But Christi said her kids have been around to bear witness to her “small moments of joy” through the process.
“You can start again. You can follow a passion,” she said. “It is exhausting and totally hard. But they watched me go back to school and now they’re watching me build this business. So that’s honestly where the inspiration and the balls really came from.”
Bourbon, a classic, barrel-aged American whiskey, is on the comeback trail. According to a report from the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, American whiskey was the second fastest-growing spirit behind Tequila last year, seeing a 10.5 percent increase that drove sales up $483 million to $5.1 billion.
Highline Spirits will capitalize on that resurgence in popularity, offering premium cocktails and blends of bourbon, whiskey and other craft spirits produced by award-wining distilleries from around the country that partner with the Plymouth and Dexter tasting rooms. Customers will be able to indulge in private barrel picks, workshops will teach curious newcomers how to make good cocktails, and bourbon enthusiasts can participate in master spirit classes.
“We’re hopefully creating something that I think is greater than the sum of its parts,” Christi said. “We’re kind of pulling the veil back on a very secretive, closed industry and teaching them that it is accessible for everyone.”
The Plymouth location will exist in a two-story 2,600 square-foot kitchen-less building that for years was the Wiltse’s Community Pharmacy. Christi said she’s working with small businesses and minority-owned catering services in South Michigan to curate a diverse lineup of food concessionaires that can operate as standalone vendors in the tasting rooms on a rotating basis.
“I am a minority; it’s not typical for a woman to own a distillery,” she said. “I faced difficulties getting my business off the ground. And now that I have a platform, I think that it’s really important for us to be able to share the platform with others and highlight their businesses.”
