Dented Brick Distillery is a food and drink brand founded in South Salt Lake, Utah, in 2016.
Dented Brick Distillery says its artesian well was found by a water witcher. By the company's account, the witcher's son, a well driller, was killed in a gunfight on the property, and the shootout left bullet dents in the bricks of his home. Some of those bricks went into the distillery on Washington Street in South Salt Lake and gave it its name.
Marc Christensen was running a barricade company when he decided to start something new. He grew up in Idaho wine country and looked at wine first. The margins were tough, so he turned to distilling. "It was a really bad idea," he joked to CompanyWeek. An SBA loan paid for the building, and the distillery opened in spring 2016 with Antelope Island Rum.
The company says the land once belonged to Hugh Moon, a pioneer distiller who bought it in 1856 with his whiskey money. Dented Brick now sells about 18,000 cases a year and calls itself Utah's top-selling local vodka and gin brand. Christensen still runs it, and in 2026 the company began offering ownership units to accredited investors.
Ten years after opening, the water still comes from the well the witcher found.
Dented Brick's first planned release was a vodka infused with ephedra, a shrub early Utah settlers brewed as tea, until the FDA asked for a clinical trial the company could not afford.
