‘Making whiskey, not war’
The story of Horse Soldier Bourbon starts at 9/11. Just days after the attack, Mark Nutsch and a team of special forces were deployed to Afghanistan to combat the Taliban in the area, and they were to do so on horseback. Before them, the last U.S. Army unit to receive horseback training was the 28th Cavalry in 1943. Their story has been told in a variety of books, documentaries and movies, including “12 Strong,” starring Chris Hemsworth. Now, however, Nutsch is “making whiskey, not war,” as he said, with his company Horse Soldier Bourbon.
So, earlier this month Nutsch and some of the Horse Soldier Bourbon team came to Custer during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally to introduce the company and the bourbon to the area at a special tasting event at Mount Rushmore Brewing Company.
“This is an incredible honor,” said Mount Rushmore Brewing Company owner Janet Boyer, as she introduced Nutsch to the event crowd.
Nutsch offered tasting of three of the products, and explained some of the background of how each bourbon is made.
To a riveted audience, Nutsch also told of his time in Afghanistan, and how he and his team came to be known as the horse soldiers.
“My team was notified Sept. 14 that we would be the first 12-man team to deploy out of our unit into Afghanistan. We did not know that we would uniquely end up riding horseback,” he said.
Although, he a ranch background and did rodeo for two years in college, no other members of the team he was commander of had real experience on horseback. Still, they ended up riding on horseback for days through the mountains of Afghanistan.
They worked with a CIA team a group of 300 militia fighters on horseback, which they grew into a team of over 3,000 horsemen in just 10 days.
“It was like you stepped back through a time portal a couple hundred years,” he said of watching the cavalry in action. He said their effort was to unite different rivaling ethnic factions in the area against the Taliban.
Eventually, they even liberated the Taliban-controlled city of Mazar-i Sharif, which he said “became the catalyst that caused other local groups to take up arms against the Taliban.”
After a succesful career in the military Nutsch left active duty service in 2005, and with some of those team members, they started their first business venture in St. Petersburg, Fla.—the Urban Stillhouse, a fine dining restaurant and bar.
Horse Soldier products are now available at Mount Rushmore Brewing and sold at Lynn’s Dakotamart. It’s available in 32 states now, and this was their first trip to the Black Hills.
Nutsch also offered an invitation to the distillery the company is building in Sommerset, Ky., which is slated to open Independence Day of 2026.