Craft Distillers Cope With Capacity Issues
August 26, 2013It’s a good time to be a craft distiller these days, as many are operating at peak capacity and selling out their stock. But that success has raised the issue of how to boost capacity to meet with surging demand.
“The only thing holding us back right now is that we’re volume-constrained,” says Andrew Webber, co-founder of Corsair Distillery in Nashville, Tennessee. “We could sell three to five times what we make now—about 15,000 cases of whiskey altogether this year—if we had more capacity.”
Many distillers echo that complaint. Paul Hletko, owner and distiller at FEW Spirits in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, is a 43-year-old former attorney who started FEW only two years ago. He’s making an unaged white whiskey ($45) and a rye made with wine yeasts ($70). He’ll release 1,500 cases of the rye this year, but is frustrated by perennial back-orders. “We can’t keep up with demand,” Hletko says. “In fact, we can fill only about 10% of our orders. We doubled our capacity three times in 2012, and we’re doubling it again this year.”
Some craft whiskey makers have been so short of capacity that they’re outsourcing liquid from older merchant distillers such as Lawrenceburg Distillers Indiana (LDI), the former Seagram facility where Bulleit and Templeton both source their ryes. High West Distillery and Saloon, based in Park City, Utah, and founded in 2007, makes no secret of the fact it sources its biggest seller, a six-year-old 95% rye called Double Rye! ($32) and other products from LDI. Sales and marketing manager Mat Garretson says High West will have aged stocks of its own brown spirits ready to release in about two years. He adds that High West will have a new distillery next year and expects to be making more of its own products very soon.
Meanwhile, High West is experimenting with innovative blends like its Campfire ($60 a 750-ml.), a combination of Scotch, Bourbon and rye. There’s also a Western Oat Silver Whiskey ($32) made with oats. “Our goal is to push beyond the old boundaries in whiskey and play around with blends,” Garretson remarks. “Many other craft distillers have been sourcing outside for brown goods. Some are truthful about it, others try to obfuscate the origins of their whiskey.”
For some distillers, outsourcing is a matter of cost. In Sheridan, Oregon, Ransom Spirits buys unaged white whiskey from Kentucky and then redistills and blends it with its own barley mashes. Its Whippersnapper, aged in a blend of new and used oak barrels and then finished in used Pinot Noir and Chardonnay barrels from the adjacent Ransom Wine Co., retails for $30 and goes to 20 states.
“Sourcing some raw whiskey in Kentucky allows us to be price-competitive with products from the big distilleries,” says Tad Seestedt, 48, Ransom’s owner and founder. But Ransom’s next creation won’t come cheap: the company will soon release an Irish knock-off called The Emerald, retailing at around $90 and made from a mashbill recipe that includes oats taken from a 19th century distilling history book. “It will give people a taste of what Irish whiskey was like in the 1800s,” Seestedt says.
Subscribe to Shanken News Daily’s Email Newsletter, delivered to your inbox each morning.Tagged : craft spirits
