BEHIND THE GLASS
THE ART OF DRINKING WELL
What We’re Pouring — and Why
History. Provenance. Place.
Every drink carries more than its ingredients. The best bring with them a history, a place, and a way of making: grain raised and distilled close to home; beer brewed with regional character; wine shaped by soil, climate, and patient stewardship; and old forms kept alive by the people who continue to make and share them.
The Story Mansion menu was assembled in that spirit. It joins classic cocktails to Montana spirits, beer, and nonalcoholic offerings, with two American wines chosen for their fidelity to place. Two drinks also honor Montana men whose lives embody distinct aspects of the state’s character. What follows is a brief account of what we will be pouring—and why.
Cocktails
Montana Grain. Classic Form.
The Garding
The Old Fashioned comes close to the original meaning of “cocktail.” An American newspaper defined the word in 1806 as spirits, sugar, water, and bitters; the drink now bearing the name preserves that spare architecture. By the late nineteenth century, ordering a whiskey cocktail “old-fashioned” distinguished the established form from the proliferating novelties of the bar.
Arcata’s version honors Ed Garding, a Havre native and former Montana State Bobcat football player who rose through community banking to lead First Interstate BancSystem and later served as acting dean of the College of Business at MSU Billings. Built on Dry Hills bourbon, The Garding is composed, substantial, and unmistakably Montanan.
Cocktail ReceptionBlack Manhattan
The Manhattan is among the great whiskey cocktails of the nineteenth century: rye or bourbon, sweet vermouth, and bitters. In 2005 at San Francisco’s Bourbon & Branch, bartender Todd Smith substituted Averna for the vermouth and sharpened the drink with orange bitters. That small revision produced the Black Manhattan, a modern classic with the bones of the original and the darker, herbal character of amaro.
For this glass, however, Manhattan has a second geography. Dry Hills traces its family roots to 1905, when Jacob Droge homesteaded in the countryside near Manhattan, Montana, on the ground that gave the distillery its name. More than a century later, Jeff and Erica Droge, together with the wider family, founded Dry Hills to carry their own potatoes and grains from field to bottle. With the family’s Montana Straight Rye at its center, our Black Manhattan honors both a modern cocktail and a five-generation Montana enterprise.
Cocktail ReceptionThe Johnny G
Quinine, derived from cinchona bark, had long been used against malaria when British drinkers in India began pairing quinine tonic with gin; a printed reference to the combination appears in 1868. What began in medicinal bitterness became one of the bar’s most durable exercises in simplicity.
Here Dry Hills Montana Abbey Gin—made from potato spirit and redistilled through fourteen botanicals—meets tonic and lime. The drink honors John Grauman, born in Miles City and rooted in Billings since his teenage years. His life there—as a husband and father, wildcatter, hunter, handyman extraordinaire, and teller of remarkably tall tales, some of which may even have been true—marks him as a quintessential Montana original. Crisp, bracing, and not entirely tame, The Johnny G suits its namesake.
Cocktail ReceptionHuckleberry Fizz
The fizz belongs to the first great age of American mixed drinks. Jerry Thomas’s 1876 Bar-Tender’s Guide records whiskey, brandy, and gin versions built from spirit, lemon, sugar, and seltzer. The principle is simple and enduring: a sour lengthened with bubbles becomes lighter, brighter, and more sociable.
Our variation begins with Hollowtop Huckleberry Vodka, made by Dry Hills from Montana potatoes, mountain water, and natural huckleberry flavor. Lemon, cane sugar, and soda place that distinctly regional note inside a nineteenth-century form.
Cocktail ReceptionBeer
Brewed in Billings. Made for Montana.
Lite Lager
Lager takes its name from the German lagern—to store—a reference to the cool maturation that gives the beer its clean, settled character. Brought to American prominence by German-speaking brewers in the nineteenth century, pale lager eventually became the country’s everyday beer. More recently, independent brewers have returned to the form with renewed attention to grain, hops, and patience.
By All Means treats lightness as an exercise in precision, not an absence of flavor. Its Artisan Lite Lager remains crisp and refreshing while carrying notes of fruit, herbs, flowers, fresh bread, clover honey, prairie sweetgrass, and restrained noble spice.
Cocktail Reception41 Peaks
India pale ale grew from the strong, well-hopped pale beers shipped from Britain to India in the early nineteenth century. The style found a second life in the American craft movement, where domestic hop varieties made it more aromatic, expressive, and emphatically regional.
Named for Montana’s loftiest country in the nearby Beartooth Mountains, 41 Peaks carries that American inheritance into the Rockies. Cascade, Amarillo, and El Dorado hops produce an aromatic, well-balanced IPA with a smooth finish and considerably more drinkability than its elevation might suggest.
Cocktail ReceptionWine
American Vineyards. Distinctive Places.
Spottswoode Sauvignon Blanc
Sauvignon Blanc is an old French variety prized for its natural acidity and aromatic clarity. In California it can range from simple refreshment to a serious, cellar-worthy wine. Spottswoode has pursued the latter course since 1984, drawing fruit from its St. Helena estate and other family-owned vineyards in Napa and Sonoma, then fermenting it in a considered mixture of stainless steel, French oak, amphora, ceramic, and concrete.
The Novak family acquired Spottswoode in 1972 and began farming the estate organically in 1985, earning organic certification in 1992—well before such practices became common in Napa Valley. The wine belongs on the Arcata table because it joins beauty and seriousness to family continuity, hospitality, and responsible stewardship of the land.
Cocktail ReceptionThe Eyrie Vineyards Pinot Noir Estate
Pinot Noir is among the wine world’s most site-sensitive grapes. In 1965, David Lett arrived in Oregon with 3,000 cuttings and the conviction that the Willamette Valley could become its American home. He planted the valley’s first Pinot Noir vines and, with his wife Diana, named their vineyard for the red-tailed hawks nesting above it. A 1975 Eyrie Pinot later competed successfully with renowned Burgundies in Paris and Beaune, helping establish Oregon on the world’s wine map.
The Estate bottling brings together Pinot Noir from Eyrie’s five certified-organic vineyards in the Dundee Hills. The vines are farmed without irrigation under regenerative, no-till practices; the fruit is harvested by hand, fermented with native yeast, and raised primarily in neutral oak. It is a wine shaped less by adornment than by soil, season, and patient attention.
Cocktail ReceptionWithout Spirits
Montana Fruit. Old-Fashioned Form.
Huckleberry Spritz
The spritz developed from the habit of lengthening wine with water in nineteenth-century northern Italy. With the arrival of carbonated water, the form became lighter and more animated; the later addition of bitter aperitifs gave the modern spritz its familiar tension among sweetness, acidity, bitterness, and bubbles.
This spirit-free variation places Shivelight’s Huckleberry Shrub at the center. Pressed raw huckleberries, raw Montana honey, apple-cider vinegar, and aquifer water supply fruit, floral character, and tartness; lemon and soda lift the mixture into a bright expression of the Mountain West.
Cocktail ReceptionBitterroot Apple & Ginger Highball
The highball emerged in the late nineteenth century as one of the bar’s most economical ideas: a concentrated base lengthened with a carbonated mixer and served tall over ice. Its apparent simplicity leaves little room for disguise; proportion, temperature, and the quality of the ingredients do nearly all the work.
Here Shivelight’s Bitterroot Apple & Cinnamon Shrub supplies orchard fruit, honeyed acidity, and restrained autumn spice, while its Ginger Honey Shrub contributes warmth and length. Lemon and soda bring the drink into balance. It is a highball in structure and a Montana orchard in character—considered from the beginning as a complete drink, not an alcoholic drink with something removed.
Cocktail Reception“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
