Meet the Man Building the Next Era of American Single Malt Whiskey
Like many people, Stranahan’s American Single Malt Whiskey's Head Blender Justin Aden had a life-changing epiphany in Paris. For a couple of years during his childhood his family lived in France. After watching the adults come alive when they enjoyed good food and drinks, he knew he knew he wanted to make whiskey.
“I could feel the energy and the enthusiasm,” he says. “I saw at a young age that this lights up a room.”
But he didn’t grow up in a famous whiskey family whose name has been on bottles for decades. However, his time in Europe really left an impression on him even after his family moved back to the United States . “My dream as a kid was always to make whiskey for a living,” he remembers.
Courtesy Stranahan's American Single Malt Whiskey
Not that long ago that fantasy would have been hard to make a reality, since there were just a handful of distilleries left in America and most were staffed by members of just a few families. But fortunately during the last 25 years that all changed with the explosive growth of craft distilling and the launch of the whiskey boom.
Aden is the perfect example of the new career path that is now possible for people looking to enter the industry. He enrolled at Michigan State University, studying microbiology and molecular genetics, and was accepted into MSU’s Artisan Distilling Program—one of the few university‑run distillation training programs in the country and graduated in 2009.
At the time, there were very few places to learn how to distill alcohol. MSU became an unlikely epicenter of this movement and at 22 he got hired to work at the program. “I found myself at ground zero of the explosion of the American craft distilling boom,” he says. “I was immediately the guy operating that distillery,” he says. His work at MSU led him to jobs prototyping recipes for new brands as well as helping them to build their distilleries.
He also learned about the unglamorous reality of the job. “It’s a dirty job,” he says. “You’re dragging hoses. You’re cleaning tanks. You’re getting steam burns.”
Courtesy Stranahan's American Single Malt Whiskey
But he also learned the deeper discipline of the work. While some of contemporaries chased headlines, jumping from one distillery to another before their first barrels of whiskey ever matured. He wanted the opposite. “You have to park yourself at a distillery for long enough to see the barrels that you lay down turn four, turn eight and really learn how my warehouses work.”
So he spent nine years at Valentine Distilling in Detroit, building a whiskey program from scratch, scaling production, and learning the rhythms of a warehouse season by season. “It was incredibly rewarding,” he says. “We got to make a bourbon and a rye from scratch and build a whiskey that I was proud of.”
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Mentors shaped him as much as the work. From Dr. Chris Berglund at MSU, he learned “the line right up to the point where I think science becomes art.” From Dr. Pearse Lyons, who founded beverage giant Alltech, he learned humility and joy. “You make whiskey, you make joy for people. Don’t forget that.” And from Bushmills’ Master Blender Alex Thomas, he absorbed a sense of stewardship—“your job is just to look after those barrels for a moment in time.”
Since being appointed Stranahan’s first Head Blender the fall of 2023, Aden carries that philosophy forward. He gets to work with the Denver-based distillery's incredibly deep stock of 100 percent malted barley whiskey, which certainly befits the American single malt category leader.
“We have a pretty deep inventory,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun for me to dig through there and come up with new things every year.”