Sonder

There’s a particular kind of guest who makes you forget you’re supposed to be running a podcast interview and not just having a conversation. Nick Maas is one of those guests.

Nick runs Dancing Goat Distillery out in Cambridge, Wisconsin, and he just launched Stillman’s Sonder, a pair of 10-year whiskeys built as a tribute to his grandfather and father. But before we ever got to barrels or blends, we spent a solid stretch of this conversation talking about a word. Not a whiskey word. A word from a book of invented vocabulary called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

What sonder actually means

The word is sonder, coined by writer John Koenig for a feeling most of us have had without ever having language for it: the sudden, disorienting realization that every person around you is living a life just as complicated and vivid as your own. You’re the main character of your story. Everyone else is too, in theirs.

Nick traced the word back to a night in November 2012, outside his dorm in Iowa City after losing a close friend, watching strangers walk by completely unaware of what he was carrying. That’s sonder. Not loneliness exactly, but the strange vertigo of realizing your grief, your joy, your whole interior world, is invisible to almost everyone you’ll ever pass on a sidewalk. And then the immense realization that you aren’t completely unique. Every person passing by in that crisp environment has the same immensity.

It’s a heavy way to start a conversation about a whiskey brand. It’s also, by the end of the episode, obviously the only way this particular brand could have started.

From feeling to philosophy

Nick applied this concept to running a craft distillery. As he put it, small producers don’t actually compete with each other, not really. If Dancing Goat took every ounce of business from another Wisconsin distillery, they’d still be a rounding error next to the majors. The real fight is for maybe one percent of what the big national brands sell. Everyone smaller than that is, in a sense, in the same snow globe together.

He pushed the idea further, into territory most whiskey conversations don’t touch. Sonder, he argued, is close to a secular version of grace: the decision to extend someone the benefit of the doubt because you’ve accepted that their inner life is as real and complicated as yours, even when you disagree with them. It’s a big claim to hang on a bourbon label. Nick hangs it there anyway, and somehow it holds.

Building a whiskey around a feeling

Stillman’s Sonder didn’t start with a marketing brief. It started with inventory: thousands of barrels of MGP-sourced whiskey, some aged in unusual Andean oak casks that a family friend had sourced through a Mexican rum subsidiary years earlier, when American white oak was in short supply.

Those Andean oak barrels, made from a different species entirely (Quercus humboldtii, not the Quercus alba used in standard bourbon barrels) produce a whiskey that’s fruitier, thinner-bodied, and honestly doesn’t taste much like bourbon at all on its own. Nick described being able to pour it blind for most drinkers and have them guess almost anything besides “bourbon.”

So the team ran hundreds of finishing tests, essentially treating the aged whiskey the way a chef treats raw ingredients rather than a finished dish. Double-oaking two-thirds of the blend in new American oak added the body and caramelized sweetness the Andean casks couldn’t provide on their own, while keeping the fruit-forward character underneath.

The American Single Malt took a longer road: three separate rounds of blending and re-barreling across virgin oak, ex-bourbon barrels, Wisconsin brandy casks, Cognac, and Calvados, aimed at giving a young, grassy base spirit the maturity and complexity you’d expect from something twice its age. Nick’s own description of the goal stuck with me: they didn’t want to make a whiskey to please American single malt drinkers.

A label with a whole city hidden in it

The packaging has its own story. Nick and his team built the label art around Frank Lloyd Wright’s writing on Usonian architecture, the idea that thoughtful design should be accessible to ordinary people, not gatekept behind expense. The illustration traces an actual journey: starting at Madison’s Monona Terrace and the state capitol, moving through solar panels slowly replacing Wisconsin cornfields, and arriving at what Nick calls Whiskey City, the fictionalized version of Dancing Goat’s own facility in Cambridge.

Tucked into that artwork is a quiet tribute to Dan Bully, a member of the Dancing Goat team who died and deserved comemoration. Nick talked about him with the kind of unguarded warmth that doesn’t usually make it into a whiskey label story, and it was clear how much that inclusion mattered to him personally.

Where this leaves things

Stillman’s Sonder is now finding its way onto shelves in Wisconsin, California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and DC, with Georgia coming soon, and it’s available online through Seelbach’s and SharedPour for anyone outside those footprints. At roughly seventy dollars a bottle, it’s positioned to compete directly with the base-level scotches and heritage bourbons that dominate that price tier, but the story behind it is doing a lot more work than most labels bother to attempt.

I don’t know that I’ve had a conversation on this show that moved this fluidly between literary theory and continuous still mechanics. That’s sort of the point. Nick studied English and history in college and it shows in how he talks about whiskey: like someone who refuses to separate the craft from the meaning behind it.

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