Artisan Spirit: Fall 2020

Page 108

ONE YEAR LATER:

NAVIGATING HELL, FINDING HOPE

REVISITING TATTERSALL DISTILLING AND THE TWIN CITIES AMID 2020’S QUAGMIRE WRITTEN BY RICH MANNING /// PHOTOS PROVIDED BY TATTERSALL DISTILLING

The previous Tattersall article was written in the summer of 2019. One year later paints a vastly different picture. We caught up with Jon Kriedler at Tattersall to see how they’ve been impacted by 2020’s pandemic.

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here’s no celebrations at Tattersall Distilling in 2020. No horseshoe-shaped bar to sit at and raise a glass, no crowd of happy people engaged in conversation, no indie rockers jamming away on an outdoor stage. There are thunderclouds, but they rolled in around March and dropped this vicious, unrelenting bastard known as coronavirus on everyone. The joy and excitement felt in the summer of 2019 is gone, replaced by a grim reality that’s forced paradigm shifts in every business strategy

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imaginable. “It’s been a rough go,” Jon Kriedler, Tattersall’s founder and chief officer stated. “We shut down the bar in March, and it won’t be open for a long time, probably not until next spring at the earliest. We’ve had to lay off staff and cut back to the bare bone. Our retail channels are holding up, but they only account for so much of our revenue. We’re still figuring out what to do as this situation evolves.” This is a familiar story for those tracking

the distilling industry’s pandemic-induced struggles. What often goes unmentioned — or at the very least, underreported — is how the depth of derailment can go well beyond the shuttering of a distillery’s bar or tasting room. During our interview, Kreidler reveals that Tattersall achieved their goal of landing New York and California distribution and were about to roll out in both places, along with a few new mid-Atlantic states, in March. In fact, they were about to have their entire catalogue of spirit available in WWW.ART ISANSPI RI TMAG.CO M


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