GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — It was a perfect fall day as two scuba divers descended on the James R. Bentley shipwreck in Lake Huron with the goal of finding sunken treasure.

It wasn’t jewels or gold they were after, but rather the shipment of rye that had been on the ship when it sank in November 1878. Their goal was to recover the rye and bring it to a scientist at Michigan State University so the historical grain could be brought back to life.

“It seems like a story all of its own, doesn’t it?” said Chad Munger, the founder and CEO of Mammoth Distilling and Consolidated Rye and Whiskey. “But it’s really part of a much longer arc of a story.”

A DECADES-OLD AD FOR WHISKEY AND AN EXTINCT CROP

That story starts about three years ago inside the Michigan State University library. Whiskey maker Ari Sussman with Mammoth Distilling, a small craft distillery based in the Traverse City area with a location along Grand Rapids’ Wealthy Street, was searching through old advertisements when he came across an ad for whiskey.

It included a photo of the bottle’s label, which had an interesting detail, Munger explained.

“That label said, ‘This whiskey was made with pure Rosen rye, grown on South Manitou Island in Michigan,'” he said. “Which is really, really unusual. If you pick up a bottle of whiskey today, no one will tell you what the variety of grain that was used to make that whiskey is, ever. And if even if they did that, they wouldn’t tell you the specific farm that it was grown on.”

After doing some digging, the team found the whiskey had a connection to a long history of rye in Michigan. According to MSU, Joseph Rosen sent some rye seeds from Russia to a plant breeder at MSU in 1909.

The seeds were first planted in 1912 on South Manitou Island — located in Lake Michigan, just 15 miles away from Mammoth Distilling —  to prevent cross-pollination. Soon, Michigan had become the largest rye-producing state in the country, growing millions of bushels of rye before Prohibition, Munger said.

During the Prohibition, it became the preferred grain for East Coast bootleggers, and it was still used by some big whiskey makers post-Prohibition.

But Michigan farmers stopped growing rye around 1970 as it stopped being profitable.

So when Sussman found the advertisement for a whiskey made out of Rosen rye decades later, no one was growing it anymore. This piqued the interest of the Mammoth Distilling team, as it “fit into this model of, let’s use local, interesting, historically relevant grains and fruits in things we make,” Munger explained.

He and his team tracked some existing Rosen rye down through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which keeps a seed bank in Idaho. The USDA sent the team about 18 grams of the grain, which they took to MSU to see if it could be turned into a viable commercial crop to make whiskey.

The MSU team, including Associate Professor Eric Olson, Ph.D., a wheat breeder and geneticist, was able to take the handful of seeds and turn it into around 200,000 seeds. That was enough to go to the field.

From there, Mammoth Distilling and MSU approached the National Park Service about restarting two farms on South Manitou Island. They found out that not only did the National Park Service know about the Rosen rye story, it had kept the farms intact, maintaining the buildings and mowing the fields, though not planting crop, Munger said. It agreed to let them restart the two farms, bringing Rosen rye back to the South Manitou Island.

TWO SHIPWRECKS AND A SCENE FROM ‘JAWS’

All this led the Mammoth Distilling and MSU team to meet Ross Richardson, a shipwreck diver and expert who lives in the Traverse City area.

“He said, ‘Well, there’s a lot of interesting things on the bottom of the lake, too, that are related to Michigan history and agriculture. You might be surprised,'” Munger recalled.

Richardson told them about the Westmoreland shipwreck, which he discovered in 2013 in Platte Bay, south of South Manitou Island.

According to the National Park Service, the Westmoreland sank on Dec. 7, 1854, bound for Mackinac Island from Milwaukee. The captain ordered those on board to get on three small boats. One capsized and and another overturned, losing two people. A total of 17 people died, with 15 going down with the ship. Another 17 survived.

The Mammoth Distilling team had been unknowingly passing over the wreck every time they went to the Rosen rye farm, Munger said.

The ship is filled with sunken treasure: gold, uniforms and bottles of whiskey. Munger and Richardson are partnering to talk to the state about recovering some of the contents for a research program, including some wood that Munger hopes to reclaim in order to make wood staves to age whiskey. They’re working through the process to get a permit to make that recovery.

As they worked on that project, Richardson mentioned another shipwreck, the wreck of the James R. Bentley schooner.

The Bentley set sail from Chicago in November 1878, bound for Buffalo, according to MSU. It faced tough conditions during the voyage, ultimately striking a shoal and sinking in Lake Huron near Rogers City. The crew members were all saved, but its contents were not.

“‘Oh, by the way, it was filled, when it sank, it was filled with raw rye grain,'” Munger recalled the Richardson saying. “To us, that’s even, that’s — wow. That’s even more interesting than barrels of whiskey at the bottom of Lake Michigan. That’s exactly what we’re looking for, are really interesting examples of rye grain that might make great whiskey that have interesting historical value, particularly to Michigan.”

The rye is different than anyone in modern day has seen, a predecessor to current rye, including Rosen rye, he explained.

So on Sept. 17 of this year, Munger joined a group of scuba divers, including and set out to the shipwreck with the goal of recovering the rye shipment.

It was a tight fit aboard the two boats with the divers and others, Munger said, likening it to a scene out of “Jaws.” One-hundred-foot freighters passed by the dive site all day as the divers worked on the recovery mission.

The divers brought tools they made in their garage to bring the rye to the surface.

“They were taking down a couple of tools that they had made in their garage. Nobody’s ever really tried to extract grain from a wreck before, so there isn’t a tool that you can pull from the hardware store that that’s meant for this,” Munger explained. “So they engineered something on their own out of PVC pipe and some plungers.”

They crossed their fingers that the tools would work and made the 160 foot descent to the wreck.

It was about a four-hour process, with Munger and the others still above water able to watch the divers’ progress through cameras. Finally, the divers returned. The tubes they had made to store the rye worked.

There was a lot of excitement on board as they saw the grain, Munger said, but they still weren’t sure if it would be viable for germination.

“Of course, nobody on those boats is (MSU assistant professor) Eric (Olson),” he said. “We all saw a lot of seed and it had quite a funky smell. I can tell you the smell of 160-year-old wet grain is fairly unpleasant. But you know you’ve done something right when you get the canisters full of that.”

FIVE SCIENTISTS AND MICHAEL CRICHTON NOVEL

The team put the grain on ice to try to keep it cold and stable, handing it off to Olson around 5 p.m. that day.

“I think the real exciting part of the day was actually when we got to hand those containers off to Eric in East Lansing and see what his reaction was going to be,” Munger said.

“I was thrilled,” Olson said. “It was like somebody opening a time capsule and there’s this history right there in front of us. It was remarkable the quality of the grain still. The seeds were still intact.”

There was some variation among the rye, but about 50% to 75% of it still had starch. The outer surface had sheltered the seeds, many of which were still bright in color and vibrant.

“That fueled my optimism that we would be able to get some grains out of there,” Olson said.

A team of five scientists worked on preparing the grain and getting it into germination boxes, working until about 11:30 p.m.

They tried multiple methods to try to get the seeds that had been sitting at the bottom of Lake Huron for 145 years to germinate. Some, they put in a chemical meant to jump-start the germination process. Others were dried out first.

They were unsuccessful.

“We tried to take that same trajectory (as Rosen rye), to take that seed and follow that same blueprint,” Olson said. “We were not met with 100% success in germinating those seeds. It wasn’t not for trying. We spent weeks … making different attempts on it.”

But it wasn’t a total loss — while they couldn’t get the seeds to germinate, they were able to extract DNA from the grains.

“That’s what we were able to recover,” Olson said. “That’s one of the treasures that we were able to recover from the shipwreck, is the genome of this rye variety.”

By isolating the DNA, the MSU team will be able to get most of its genome sequence out of the rye and introduce those segments into another rye, likely the Rosen rye. Olson expects that through genome engineering, they’ll be able to create a rye that’s up to 50% similar to the Bentley rye.

“We’ll be able to recover them. This is very much what they did in ‘Jurassic Park,’ the Michael Crichton novel. It was science fiction back then. It is science reality now. So that’s what’s really cool, is that the actual science in those 25 years since ‘Jurassic Park’ came out, the science has actually caught up to that,” he said. “The genome of this historical rye variety will live on with a modern rye background.”

Looking back on the day the shipwreck divers recovered the rye, Olson said it was a “once in a lifetime event.”

“It was a very movie-like environment, close to a real action movie as I’ll ever get, I suspect, in my life,” Munger said. “That was a big day for me, at least. I don’t expect that I’ll get to do that again, unfortunately.”

NEW WHISKEYS AND A NEW BEGINNING FOR RYE

It will be awhile before those in West Michigan can try the whiskey that will come from the team’s efforts. Whiskey created from the Rosen rye is expected to be available in 2026. Whiskey aged in the wood recovered from the Bentley shipwreck will be available in April 2025, while whiskey made from the Bentley grain is expected to be available in 2029 at the earliest.

But what started as a search for interesting, historical rye to see what those grains mean for the flavor of whiskey has grown into a bigger story.

“While making shipwreck whiskey would certainly be extraordinary, the real treat is being part of preserving our Great Lakes history,” scuba diver Dusty Klifman of Blueyes Below, who recovered the rye, said in a message to News 8. 

“This idea is really a very, very big one,” Munger said. “It looks like it’s an attempt to make whiskey out of rye from a shipwreck. But that’s really just one little piece of this story.”

Munger and Olson both hope that their work will help jump-start a new rye market in Michigan.

“This is a really interesting piece of a narrative arc here that we’re interested in, and that’s recovering Michigan grain and spirits history, and making the best whiskey and growing the best grains that we can,” Munger said. “And reintroducing rye as a crop that’s viable in this state instead of just a cover crop, but one that people grow intentionally as a commodity, and try to help farmers have another crop to put in the rotation to help make their farms more sustainable.”

Rye is a productive crop, Olson explained, and it’s resilient. It can handle droughts, heat stress and cold temperatures.

“There is a reason that this rye traveled the globe,” he said. “It started in the Fertile Crescent area (of the Middle East) in human history, but then it migrated beyond. … It made its way all the way into the Nordic countries. Vikings were growing rye. And so it’s traveled the world, it has a lot of broad adaptation, and it’s the hardiness of rye that has allowed it to thrive.”

Present-day, there’s a lack of investment on improving rye, Olson said. Using modern technology, the goal is to develop rye into a more productive crop while keeping its character and quality intact. The biggest goal is to extend its use as a human food crop, Olson said.

“I think rye is poised to take center stage here … in the coming decades,” he said.