For all the challenges that nanodistillery operators face, it’s important to remember that there are certain benefits. With smaller volumes, local focus, and often a tasting room at the core of the business model, these distillers typically have the freedom to try things that bigger players never could.
While R&D should matter to any successful producer, the reality is that larger distilleries with wider distribution don’t have the same flexibility to experiment. Smaller distilleries can be nimble, and their customers tend to be more open to trying an unusual one-off.
[PAYWALL]
“It’s human nature, everybody wants something unique,” says Jim Harris, cofounder of Bozeman Spirits in Bozeman, Montana. That’s especially true “when there’s maybe not a lot of it—they feel like they can go get something not everyone can get their hands on.”
When buying from the largest distilleries, customers tend to look for reliable staples. With nanodistilleries, however, they’re often interested in discovering unusual, exciting things. The trick, Harris says, is to produce both those perennial staples and those intriguing, limited-quantity offerings. Bigger producers can’t do as much of the latter.
For example: Bozeman just produced a small-batch whiskey. “It was eight years old, just one barrel, and we didn’t have anything else like it,” Harris says. “It’s super-unique; we’re not ever going to have that product again. The big guys, they can do single barrels, but they usually have hundreds of them. … As we grow and are around long enough, we have random single barrels from over the years, and it’s cool to open them up, taste them [and to] put it in another barrel and get double- and triple-barrel series.”
Leveraging your small operation’s potential for experimentation—without leaning so far into it that you lose steady demand for flagships—is a vital balance to strike.
Pivoting for Inspiration
Different distilleries experiment at different points in the process, and the results take their products—and their businesses—to different places.
It can happen at the very beginning—when testing how a new ingredient interacts with alcohol, for example—or it can happen nearer to the end, with barrel-aging. It can lead to new core or seasonal products, or special releases that remain one-offs. The formula depends on a distillery’s size, category focus, audience, tasting-room dynamic, and the distillers’ own interests.
In Brooklyn, New York, the lineup at Standard Wormwood includes a rye, a gin, two agave spirits (tequila-style and mezcal-style), an amaro, two aperitivos, and dry and bittersweet vermouths.
They produce 2,000 to 3,000 gallons annually. Cofounder Sasha Selimotic says the focus is largely on their own cocktail bar. Having their own bar as a priority supplies endless inspiration—a new cocktail might demand new ingredients—as well as the ability to keep batches small enough to try things out. While they produce the rye in 300-gallon batches, with limited distribution in mind, they can also experiment with 30- to 50-gallon batches.
With those trials, they’re often trying to replicate something used in particular cocktails while also taking it in a uniquely Standard Wormwood direction.
“Campari for a negroni, for example,” Selimotic says. “We make an aperitivo, and it functions similarly, with a different profile at the same time. … We’re working on a chartreuse replacement for our bar, which would have wider distribution potential as well. And our bittersweet vermouth—that’s a very different style than what’s on the market, and that works for us.”
The idea is to hook people with familiarity but keep them coming back for distinct nuances. That’s all based on careful iterations and R&D, Selimotic says.
“You have to have a mind for exploration and can’t assume you know everything,” he says. “Be open to things you don’t know—that’s how you uncover new practices, new processes, different outcomes you weren’t even thinking about.”
The Standard Wormwood team has a library of 500 to 1,000 different macerations they reference. “If you macerate this at this time for this proof with this many grams, what is that like?” Selimotic says. “What application would that have in what spirit or what cocktail? For each, there are five or six variables—multiply that times 1,000. It’s very methodical.”
Courtesy New Deal Distillery, Portland, Oregon
“Like a Kitchen”
Another small distillery with a wide range and bar focus is New Deal in Portland, Oregon. Besides staples such as straight rye whiskey and dry gin, New Deal’s lineup includes nocino liqueur, pear brandy, ginger liqueur, pepper vodka, bitter chocolate vodka, spiced rum, cascara liqueur, bierschnapps, and more.
While owner and head distiller Tom Burkleaux jokes that this kind of variety is “a terrible business model,” it’s something that works for a distillery with a tasting room. New Deal is in a good location for foot traffic while offering sample-friendly options such as flights and mini cocktails for curious customers who know where to turn for new flavors.
At New Deal, experimentation happens in a few different channels. “Botanicals and liqueurs, we’re running experiments all the time,” Burkleaux says. “We can use the same base, and it doesn’t require our core production facility. We’re really creative in that area and always trying to see how different flavors work. It’s a constant background thing.”
Going through New Deal’s 200-liter stills, experiments such as gin or aquavit happen “a couple times a quarter,” Burkleaux says. “That’s where being small starts to get expensive—you don’t want to end up having too many experiments that don’t work if you’re making 400 liters at a time. You have to get creative in structuring these experiments.”
On the whiskey side, Burkleaux says he’s always tinkering with his main production, whether it’s changing up a distillation, a mash bill, or trying out nontraditional barrels.
“Once you produce the alcohol, you can experiment, like throwing it in pinot barrels,” he says. “Even if it doesn’t sell, you can continue to experiment. Craft distilleries are like a kitchen: You can make a soup and then a stock with everything left over.”
At Bozeman, Harris says the barrels are where most of their experimentation occurs. Vodka is a core to the distillery’s lineup, with products that include a signature huckleberry vodka, lemon vodka, and gin. Whiskeys, agave spirits, and rums offer more flexibility at the aging stage—especially now that the distillery is in its 11th year, Harris says.
While they do play with their whiskey mash bills, it takes a couple of years to really track those trials. On the other hand, constantly testing the results of different barrel types yields faster conclusions.
“Since we’re so small, we’re watching [single] barrels at a time,” Harris says. “Someone like Sazerac that’s huge, they’ve got hundreds of thousands of barrels. … They’re usually just monitoring time … dealing with mass quantities, shooting for just one flavor profile.”
Managing Creativity with Balance and Consistency
Being able to run a small batch based on a new idea and get direct feedback in the tasting room can be intoxicating for a creative distiller with a lot of ideas. However, Selimotic, Harris, and Burkleaux all stress the need to balance trials with core products.
“Amaro’s great, but it doesn’t pay the bills,” Burkleaux says. “People don’t buy a bottle every week—it might last them six months.”
New Deal made its early money on vodka before evolving into other flagships plus their more limited offerings, he says. Leaning into variety can reach a wider audience with more diverse tastes and interests—but that also dilutes your marketing efforts, so you need a couple of cores that act as consistent anchors.
“If you can find viable plateaus, you have a little more room to play,” he says.
To experiment more frugally, look for opportunities to run multiple experiments off of one base—botanical spirits and liqueurs work well for that—and take advantage of any ingredient opportunities that come your way.
New Deal’s Distiller’s Workshop Bierschnapps grew directly out of nearby breweries offering them leftover beer. Standard Wormwood, meanwhile, has a small farm upstate where the team can grow their own ingredients, such as black walnuts and wormwood. No matter how interesting the opportunity, however, no experiment should crash the production schedule for your core products—this is why botanical infusions and barrel-aging can be smart places to tinker.
Consistency is another balancing act. There are certain spirits, such as vodka, that consumers will always expect to be the same, Selimotic says. That makes a cemented process essential. For more botanical spirits, however—especially those known for reflecting their regions—there’s more of an expectation that flavors may change year to year. To account for that, so that variations are never too stark, Selimotic says it’s important to control every other element of the process you can.
“If the juniper harvest is not the same as last year, you can still control things like how much of it you use, and your ABV,” he says. “Just keep adjusting until you [are] close to the same finish [as the last batch].”
Take Note!
To an extent, the open-mindedness that guides consumers to try new things at smaller distilleries comes with an understanding that craft spirits can evolve, to a degree—and they may even prefer it that way, Harris says.
“There are always subtle differences—that makes craft, craft,” he says. “People follow that, they like that, they understand that.”
However you experiment, Burkleaux says, there is one critical tactic to temper innovation with consistency: Write. Every. Single. Thing. Down.
“You can learn to be consistent, but you’d better take really good notes,” he says. “You can go back three years and try something that was so good then, but the recipe isn’t enough. You need to know exactly what you did.”
