Bendistillery, INC.

Bendistillery is the Bend, Oregon craft spirits operation that holds an essentially unmatched distinction in modern American craft distilling: founded in 1996, it's the oldest craft microdistillery west of the Mississippi River and one of the very few American craft distilleries that predates the modern craft-spirits movement by over a decade. The operation, which markets its products under the Crater Lake Spirits brand name (referencing the Crater Lake National Park that sits in the southern Cascade Mountains of Oregon, a few hours south of Bend), was founded by Jim Bendis on a 30-acre juniper-tree farm in the high-desert country east of Bend — a deliberate choice tying the brand to the broader Eastern Oregon high-desert agricultural and outdoor-recreation identity.

The 1996 founding date is editorially significant. American craft distilling as a meaningful commercial movement essentially didn't exist before the early 2000s — the post-Prohibition spirits industry had consolidated to a handful of major producers and craft-scale distilling was effectively a regulatory and economic non-starter through most of the 20th century. Bendistillery's founding in 1996 predates Tuthilltown (NY, 2003), Stranahan's (CO, 2004), Westward/House Spirits (OR, 2004), and essentially every other modern American craft whiskey operation. The brand effectively established the regulatory and operational template that the broader 2000s-2010s craft distilling movement would follow.

The product range is anchored by the Crater Lake brand spirits. Crater Lake Estate Vodka (the flagship — distilled from corn-and-water-only, the brand's most-distributed product), Crater Lake Sweet Ginger Vodka, Crater Lake Hazelnut Espresso Vodka, Crater Lake Pepper Vodka, the Crater Lake Estate Gin (built around the on-site juniper berry harvest from the original 30-acre juniper farm, a literally farm-sourced botanical input that's unique in American craft gin production), Crater Lake Whiskey programs including Oregon Single Malt and Crater Lake Rye, and a substantial range of seasonal and limited bottlings.

The Bend visitor experience runs through both the original distillery production facility outside town and a downtown Bend tasting room on the main commercial corridor. The Bend location puts the brand at the center of one of Oregon's most-trafficked year-round outdoor-recreation tourism destinations — skiing at Mount Bachelor in winter, mountain biking and Deschutes River recreation in summer, and the broader Bend craft-beer-and-brewery scene (Bend is widely cited as having the highest per-capita craft brewery concentration of any American city). For visitors building a Central Oregon outdoor-recreation trip, Bendistillery / Crater Lake Spirits is the essential craft-spirits anchor of the region.