SO YOU WANT TO BUILD A DISTILLERY? WRITTEN BY SHANNON O’NEAL
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ho knows exactly where the idea came from? Maybe it was a vacation pitstop at a craft brewery or an overheard tale from a friend who knew a guy who quit his day job to follow his calling. Or maybe you’ve already turned your passion into a successful upstart, but you want to grow your dreams with new products and higher production volume. However you arrived at the idea of launching or expanding your distillery business, the fire has been lit, the wind is at your back, and you’re ready to set sail on this new adventure. Problems? You’ll just figure them out along the way. Anthony White, division leader for beer, wine and spirits at Haskell, wants to remind you of one thing: Christopher Columbus had the same philosophy when he set his course for India and wound up somewhere in the Caribbean Islands. Sure, he has his own holiday now, but would you really deem his journey a success? “All it takes is a little miscalculation—10 degrees, maybe 20 degrees—and suddenly you’re off course,” says White. “Add in winds, currents, and sea monsters that you didn’t account for and suddenly you’re looking a lot less like Christopher Columbus and a lot more like Gilligan and the crew of the SS Minnow.” Sailing metaphors aside, the point is there are a lot of moving parts that have to come together in unison to create a successful distillery. If you enter into the business without a solid plan that accounts for the massive scope of such a project, your chances of failure are astronomically higher. At their recent presentation in Nashville, Tennessee for the American Craft Spirits Association conference, White and his colleagues from Haskell detailed their Project Delivery Model, which is a simple framework which new and growing distillers can use to plot a successful future.
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STEP ONE:
DEFINE THE OPPORTUNITY
(CREATE THE PLAN & CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT) “You gotta know what you want to make,” says Rob Masters, a long time distiller and distillery consultant for The Epic Distilling Company. “And then you have to identify how much of it you want to make.” New craft distilleries pop up in new locations every day with different specialties and different ingredients that are used to create a wide variety of spirits. How will your product set itself apart from the competition? Will you make specialty barrelaged whiskey or flavor-enriched vodka? Botanical-infused gin or smooth spiced rum? Each spirit requires a completely different production process, which means different equipment, different energy needs, and different facility requirements. In the early planning stages, a block diagram can help you visualize each step in the process and subsequently make important choices about what raw materials you will need, what types of yeast and fermentation equipment you will utilize, whether your spirit will be batched or continuous distillation, and how you will eventually mature your product, proof it, and prep it for bottling. Once your block diagram is completed, that technical document will become the foundation for all other plans to come. It will also help you start to devise a feasible production schedule. For clear spirits, process times are shorter and the product can be bottled within days of distilling. But for darker spirits that require a longer aging process, you have to know how much you
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