TRENGTH S in NUMBERS The case for adding SKUs to your distillery WRITTEN BY KRIS BOHM
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tep foot into most craft distilleries, and you will find that they have thriving tasting rooms and cocktail lounges. While there may be one type of spirit your distillery focuses on, it is logical to cater to the diverse taste of the people who visit your distillery. For example, what if a spirits enthusiast has brought someone along with them to your tasting room who is not so enthusiastic about distilled spirits and may be tough to win over? The type of consumer who may not care for the taste of distilled spirits can still be catered to with the right type of product. You would be remiss not to capitalize on the opportunity to sell several types of products for visitors to enjoy in cocktails and bottles to-go. Let's talk about some of the diverse spirits that can be produced to meet the broad tastes of an audience in your tasting room. As a young distiller, I very much had the purist mindset. Plying my craft to make world-class whiskey, rum, and vodka, I viewed adding flavoring or sugar to spirits as cheap shortcuts. The owner of the distillery I worked for had a different view on flavored spirits. They insisted we develop a prickly pear-flavored vodka to add to our spirits portfolio. If you have ever tasted a prickly pear, you would know the cactus fruit really does not have much flavor. After many trials using fresh prickly pear to develop a unique spirit, I concluded that I could not get the bold flavors we wanted
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from the fresh fruit. The next stop in our product development was to turn to natural flavors. We sourced several different natural flavors that were TTB approved and tested adding those flavors to our regular vodka. These natural flavors really hit the mark to produce a spirit with the bright taste we wanted, but the spirit was still lacking something special to make it taste just right. Our next step in the development was to add sugar to the product. The addition of sugar and flavor to the vodka was just the right combination to produce a spirit that was delicious and bright. Now, I was not proud of this product. The addition of flavors and sugars to a spirit did not sit well with me and my pursuit of purity in distilling. Although I did not like the idea in principle, we taste-tested the flavored product with a slew of people and received many compliments. Because of the nearly unanimous love of our new prickly The pear vodka by all who tasted the concept, we moved type of forward
consumer who may not care for the taste of distilled spirits can still be catered to with the right type of product. 59