In 1909 a parcel containing 2,000 bluish-green kernels of improved rye seed stock arrived at Michigan Agricultural College’s Experiment Station. The researcher in charge, Dr Frank Spragg, had requested it from a student who had graduated the previous year, Joseph Rosen. Rosen had come to the United States from Russia after being imprisoned there for being a student protestor. At the urging of Dr Spragg he had asked his father to send a sample of rye grains that grew well back home, which they both believed would do well in Michigan’s climate. Rosen had already moved on to a graduate program elsewhere when the seeds arrived, but Spragg decided to name the unknown varietal Rosen rye after the student who made it possible. Spragg painstakingly cultivated the new rye varietal and right away he knew it was something special. Rosen rye would rise to prominence in the American whiskey industry before dying out for decades. Now, there are organized efforts to bring it back.
“By the powers vested in me by Nicholas II, Czar of all the Russias, I hereby sentence you, Joseph Rosen, to five years’ imprisonment in Siberia.” This is the opening line of a radio play that aired on Cincinnati’s WLW in November of 1940, dramatizing the harrowing story of a student sent to the gulag but who escaped to the United States.
“Joseph Rosen was exiled by the Czar,” recalls Mammoth Distilling whiskey maker Ari Sussman. “He was an agronomy student
