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KENTUCKY
Copper & Kings BRANDY
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(Pictured) Copper & Kings’ Joe Heron
BY STEVE COOMES | PHOTOS BY ANDY HYSLOP Opening a brandy distillery in Louisville is … … a brilliant business maneuver or a brazen dismissal of the firmly entrenched Bourbon industry? About 30 seconds’ conversation with Joe Heron clarifies that it’s not the latter. He and wife Lesley Heron didn’t launch Copper & Kings to stick a thumb in the eye of Bourbon makers. Rather, their sophisticated, alembic pot-still distillery was constructed in Butchertown precisely because of the city’s proximity to Bourbon making and its support system. “People have always asked, ‘Why Louisville?’ The logic in brandy making is you go west, where the fruit is,” says cofounder Joe Heron. The greatest supply of high-quality grapes, apples, pears and plums do grow in California, but America’s best distilling experts are here, Heron adds. “The smart thing is you come to Louisville … where you build a distillery with the guidance of world-class distilling engineers in Kentucky. And Vendome, who made our stills, is a few blocks away.” Firming his case for Louisville, Heron lays on the numbers: More than 66 percent of America’s most populated cities are easily reached in less than two days by truck from Louisville, and 75 percent of the brandy consumed in the U.S. is tippled east of the Mississippi River.
Nearly a decade ago, when working on previous beverages with Louisville-based consultant Flavorman, the Herons fell for Louisville’s parks and restaurant and music scenes. Leaving Minneapolis to make Louisville their permanent residence was an easy choice, but the decision to create Copper & Kings here was all business. “Vanity projects fail, and this is not a vanity project for us,” Heron says. “If you get into a business without having everything worked out from production to supply chain, you tend to leak money.” Which the Herons’ previous two businesses didn’t do. They created Nutrisoda in 2003 and sold it to PepsiAmericas in 2006. Following that hit, the couple created Crispin American Craft
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Cider, a high-end bottled hard cider, in 2008. They sold that company to MillerCoors in 2012. Longtime brandy fans, the two asked the following questions to gauge whether they should become distillers: • How well served with brandy is this particular market? • How crowded is it? • What’s brandy’s regional presence? • What’s the quality perception or image of similar and competitive products in that segment? “When you look at Bourbon, you see that all of those questions are easy to answer,” Heron begins. “The market is well served, it’s crowded, it has a strong regional presence here and product perception is very good.