The final stop in our contract distiller series takes us to a place you probably wouldn't expect: Princeton, Minnesota, home to one of the largest spirits production facilities in the United States. Phillips Distilling Company and its production arm, United States Distilled Products Co. (USDP), have been a quiet powerhouse in the American spirits industry since 1912. Their connection to the bourbon world runs through Cooper's Mark, a small-batch bourbon bottled at the Princeton facility whose actual distillery source remains one of the more persistent mysteries in NDP whiskey.
Phillips Distilling Company was founded in 1912 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, as Ed Phillips & Sons. The company originally sold candy, newspapers, and tobacco, which is pretty much the most 1912 thing I’ve ever heard. Eventually they pivoted to spirits, relocated to Minnesota, and over the next century built one of the largest privately held spirits companies in the country.
Today, Phillips is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, with its massive production facility in Princeton, Minnesota, operating under the name United States Distilled Products Co. (USDP). The Princeton facility spans roughly 800,000 square feet, runs seven production lines across three daily shifts, 24 hours a day, and ships nearly 8 million cases annually. They employ over 200 Minnesotans. The company is still family-owned, now in its fourth generation. Former U.S. Congressman Dean Phillips served as the company’s president and CEO from 2000 to 2012, which gives you a sense of the family’s profile.
Phillips’ portfolio is enormous and diverse: UV Vodka (one of the best-selling flavored vodka lines in the country), Prairie Organic Spirits (named Best Vodka in America by Newsweek in 2026), Kamora Coffee Liqueur, Revel Stoke Whisky, Trader Vic’s Rum, Leroux Liqueurs, and roughly 840 different SKUs across 400 formulas. They also offer contract bottling and private-label production services. If you live in Minnesota, there’s a very good chance you’ve had a Phillips product without knowing it.
Here’s where Phillips enters the bourbon conversation. Cooper’s Mark Small Batch Bourbon is a whiskey brand that traces back to the USDP / Phillips operation in Princeton. The label says “Produced & Bottled by Cooper’s Mark Whiskey Co., Princeton, MN,” which, as the bourbon community figured out fairly quickly, is the Phillips Distilling / USDP facility.
Cooper’s Mark is bottled at 91 proof and marketed as a handcrafted small-batch bourbon. The actual source distillery for the bourbon liquid, meaning where the spirit was distilled before it arrived in Princeton for bottling, remains undisclosed. Our research classifies this connection as RUMORED. We know the bourbon is bottled by USDP in Princeton. We don’t know who made it. This is a common pattern with large bottling operations: they handle the final production steps, but the distillate itself could come from any number of distilleries in Kentucky, Indiana, or Tennessee.
Phillips also produces Douglas & Todd Bourbon, which is described as “handcrafted at Minnesota’s oldest family-owned distillery” and aged a minimum of four years in new charred oak. This suggests Phillips may actually be distilling some bourbon at the Princeton facility, though the details of their distillation capabilities versus their bottling-only operations aren’t clearly delineated in public materials.
USDP is, at its core, a blending, bottling, and distribution powerhouse. The Princeton facility doesn’t just bottle spirits. It formulates, blends, and packages an enormous range of products across every spirits category. They have an injection blowing facility that manufactures plastic bottles on-site. They handle compliance, labeling, inventory management, and shipping logistics. If a brand needs to go from concept to shelf in any U.S. state, USDP can make it happen.
In the bourbon world, this means a brand like Cooper’s Mark can exist without owning a distillery, without managing barrel aging, and without handling any of the physical production. USDP sources the distillate (from an undisclosed distillery), blends it to spec at the Princeton facility, bottles it, labels it, and ships it to distributors. The brand exists as a marketing entity built on top of USDP’s infrastructure.
This is not unique to Phillips/USDP. As I covered in the Levecke post, large-scale bottling companies play an enormous role in bringing spirits to market. What makes the Phillips story interesting is the scale and the Minnesota connection. Most bourbon consumers don’t associate Minnesota with whiskey. But USDP is one of the largest spirits production facilities in the country, and bourbon flows through it alongside vodka, rum, tequila, and everything else.
I want to be transparent about the limits of what I know here. Cooper’s Mark bourbon is bottled in Princeton, Minnesota by a company whose core business is large-scale contract production. The actual distillery that produced the bourbon is not disclosed. It could be MGP in Indiana. It could be a Kentucky distillery like Barton 1792 or Green River. It could be a Tennessee distillery. Without a DSP number on the label or a statement from the brand, we’re left with informed speculation.
This is exactly the kind of opacity that makes sourcing research both frustrating and necessary. A bourbon consumer sees Cooper’s Mark on the shelf, reads “small batch,” notes the 91 proof and the attractive price point, and makes a buying decision based on incomplete information. The NDP model isn’t inherently dishonest, but when the source distillery isn’t disclosed, the consumer has no way to evaluate what they’re actually getting beyond what’s in the glass. And while tasting it yourself is always the best test, having context about where it came from and how it was made can meaningfully inform that experience.
That’s the whole point of this series. Every bottle has a source. Sometimes that source is proudly displayed (“Distilled at Bardstown Bourbon Company“). Sometimes it’s buried in fine print. And sometimes it’s not disclosed at all. The best thing you can do as a bourbon consumer is pay attention, ask questions, and use tools like the OAKR spirits database to see past the marketing and into the data.
Cooper’s Mark Small Batch Bourbon is the primary bourbon expression available from the Phillips/USDP family. Douglas & Todd Classic Bourbon is another Phillips-produced bourbon, aged a minimum of four years, and positioned as a step up in their portfolio. Phillips also produces Revel Stoke Whisky (a flavored Canadian whisky line) and a range of other spirits that fall outside the bourbon category.
This is the last post in the contract distiller series, and I chose Phillips/USDP to close it out for a reason. If you’ve been reading from the beginning, you’ve traveled from MGP’s massive Lawrenceburg, Indiana facility (which sources half the NDP bourbon in America) through Bardstown Bourbon Company (built for contract distilling from day one), past corporate giants like Beam Suntory and Diageo, through craft operations like Cedar Ridge, Neeley Family, and MB Roland, and now you’re ending in Princeton, Minnesota, at one of the largest spirits production facilities in the country.
The spectrum is the point. Bourbon comes from everywhere. It’s distilled at heritage facilities, corporate megaplants, family farms, and converted NASCAR parking lots. It’s bottled in Kentucky, California, and Minnesota. It’s blended by master tasters, rock musicians, and retired MLB closers. The only thing that connects all of these stories is the liquid in the glass and the question every consumer should be asking: where did this come from, and does it taste good?
That’s what OAKR was built to help you answer. Not with marketing copy, not with brand stories, but with data. Flavor scores. Mashbill details. Community reviews. Distillery sources. The stuff that actually matters when you’re standing in front of a wall of bottles trying to decide which one to take home.
Thanks for sticking with me through this whole series. I’ll see you on the other side, where we start connecting all of these contract distiller posts to the individual NDP brands that source from them. That’s when things get really fun.
Bourbon enthusiast, spirits industry analyst, and the voice behind OAKR's distillery guides, brand reviews, and bourbon education content. Visiting distilleries, dissecting mashbills, and translating the craft into data since 2024.
From MGP to Princeton, MN, this series covered 15 contract distillers. OAKR connects the dots between distilleries, brands, and your glass.
