Anne Marie White, the last Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, is opening a new distillery in her hometown in Michigan.
White and Scott Anderson, another longtime hand on the old DOE weapons complex, will soon open “The Honorable Distillery” in a renovated movie theater in downtown Marquette, Mich., according to a press kit on the business posted online.
“While it’s late in coming, we are pushing to open in late June but with supply chain issues, it could slip,” White said in a Wednesday email. “You would not believe how hard it was to find bottles!”
White and Anderson are partners in Buffalo Dragon Investments LLC that purchased the one-time Nordic Theater building to house the distillery. Anderson is a Jacobs executive currently with URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) in Tennessee, and formerly president of the CH2M-led cleanup contractor at West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state, according to his LinkedIn profile.
White served as assistant energy secretary for environmental management for 14 months during the administration of President Donald Trump before resigning in June 2019, apparently after her boss, then energy undersecretary Paul Dabbar, another political appointee, decided to make a change.
Later that same year, White and Anderson purchased the 11,000-square foot theater building, which was most recently used as a book store before closing around 2017. White grew up in Marquette, a city about 21,000 along Lake Superior, where her father once played for the semi-professional Marquette Iron Rangers hockey team, according to the distillery website.
The business said its goal is “uplifting the soul through honorably crafted distilled spirits” such as vodka, gin, bourbon and rye whiskey.
The drinks will rely upon locally-grown grains. “It will be all Michigan at start up and we hope to get even more local in year 2 and have it all be from the Upper Peninsula,” White said. “ In fact we are currently working with a local farmer to grow a very specific varietal for us.”
