Craft distillers in today’s market are facing uncertainty, but the way through it may involve leaning into what makes them distinctive: Stay small, be nimble, and work creatively within your means. While nanodistilleries come with their own challenges, they’re also well poised to keep costs manageable and focus on nurturing customer relationships in their communities.
As distillers consider routes that diverge from the once-popular pursuit of boundless growth, it’s worth considering the most pressing obstacles and how to navigate them. Being small can be its own kind of obstacle. How do you build a brand and make the spirits you want to make if you also happen to be very limited in space?
For distilleries whose business models and desired locations have left them with small footprints—those such as Ballmer Peak in Lakewood, Colorado; Copper Cat in Woodinville, Washington; Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, New York; and Nightside in Edgewood, Washington—the limited space doesn’t need to limit what they want to make.
Instead, these distilleries have assembled toolboxes of partnerships, moving parts, and MacGyver-ed setups to embrace the benefits of being compact, including lower overhead, greater flexibility, and room for creativity in smaller batches.
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Building Unique, Quality Brands in Tight Spaces
Longtime bartender Alex Clark cofounded Widow Jane Distillery in Brooklyn before striking out with his wife, Amy Grindeland, to launch Fort Hamilton in 2016. They were among the first to set up shop in Industry City, a complex now home to other distilleries and breweries as well as restaurants, stores, studios, and more. While it would require careful planning, they knew that New York was where they wanted to be.
“In a city like this, the rents never seem to go down,” Clark says. “You can go across the river and get $11 a square foot in New Jersey, but that doesn’t help me because [I’m] a New York state whiskey producer with a New York state farm distilling license.”
Clark and Grindeland decided to partner with upstate distilleries to produce their whiskey recipes—first at Black Dirt in Warwick, New York, now at Taconic in Stanfordville—as well as bulk neutral spirit for them to produce gin and vodka in their 1,000-square-foot (93-square-meter) Brooklyn space. For Clark and Grindeland, that specific combination of what they produce upstate versus on-site has proven to be the most effective way to maintain control over ingredients and how they redistill, blend, and age, depending on the spirit—such as their rye whiskey finished in mead or Armagnac casks—all in the city where they want to be.
At Ballmer Peak in Colorado, cofounder Austin Adamson says their 600-square-foot (56-square-meter) production space has pushed him and partner Eric Strom to think outside the box with their lineup.
“One of the biggest limitations of our size is we don’t have room to age whiskey for two years and have a steady stream of it,” Adamson says. “That’s where space is kind of dictating how much product we can put out. For the younger spirits, it’s forced us to be a little more creative, since we don’t have a barrel program. What can we do post-distillation to either emulate barrel-aging or to modify it to work better in our tasting-room cocktails?”
He adds that they’ve used oak chips and spirals for rum and looked at how they can use their column still for more than just one product—for example, by running vodka through it, then (after cleaning) their gin, then their spiced rum.
Photo courtesy of Nightside Distillery, Edgewood, Washington
Ingredient Decisions and Methods
One of the first constraints that distillers feel from limited space is in their choice of base ingredients. There may not be much space to store and mill grains, and that can influence thinking about fermentables.
Fort Hamilton solves that problem by partnering with Taconic to source whiskey; Clark says the most crucial element of that solution was finding a like-minded producer. At Ballmer Peak, meanwhile, Adamson says they use molasses for many of their spirits.
“It creates some really delicious spirits, but it’s also an easy fermentable to work with,” he says. “It comes in a state that takes minimal processing once we get it. We don’t have a forklift. … We get our molasses delivered in 55-gallon drums we tip onto their sides using a drum cradle. Then we use a spigot and fill five-gallon buckets and dump that into boiling water to bring it up to temperature and to the starting gravity we’re after.”
When Ballmer Peak does use grain for its spirits—such as its light whiskey—they get it pre-milled. That costs an extra 35 cents per pound, but Adamson says it’s worth that to avoid worrying about milling equipment. They also partner with another local distillery when they need to mill any grains.
“It’s a cost to have grain milled, but it’s better than having silos,” says Jess Lebow, co-owner of Copper Cat in Washington. “Milling is messy, and there’s a huge increase in insurance pricing because of the explosion risk.”
Lebow and wife and co-owner Bing Wu source their fermentables locally, whether it’s grains such as rye, barley, and triticale, or the Washington grapes they use for gin, vodka, and brandy. “Woodinville is the center of wine country in Washington State,” Lebow says. “So, at the beginning of the pandemic, we had a bunch of neighbors with wine they couldn’t get bottled.” While Lebow and Wu are happy with the flavors they get from those grapes, the wine connection resonates with their local audience.
Also in Washington, south of Seattle, Nightside uses neutral cane sugar and apple juice as bases for spirits such as gin, vodka, and aquavit.
“There’s no hot side needed,” says founder Tom Greene. “We can invert the sugars in our kettle, add juice, and ferment in 250-gallon batches … in totes.” He also gets pre-milled grains for Nightside’s whiskeys, teaming up with local breweries to produce the wort but bringing it on site to ferment.
“It’s a good trade-off,” Greene says. “We can rent their setup and labor for a pretty minimal cost, and that cost helps them, especially, because their hot side is usually sitting idle.”
Modular and Mobile
Equipment decisions are a game of Tetris shaped by what you want to make and how you want to make it within your space. No two small-footprint distilleries will look exactly the same.
Ballmer Peak does have a mash vessel, and that led to choosing other equipment based on 150-gallon (568-liter) batch sizes. Copper Cat uses a cookpot with a 1,000-gallon (3,785-liter) stripping still. Because of their fermentables and brewery partnerships, both Fort Hamilton and Nightside can skip the hot-side setup.
Copper Cat can fit a batch in two 750-gallon (2,840-liter) fermentors, while Ballmer Peak has three 150-gallon (568-liter), jacketed stainless fermentors for their grain-based products. For their molasses-based spirits, they have four 1,000-liter (264-gallon), caged polyethylene totes for fermenting. Nightside also ferments in 250-gallon (945-liter) and 300-gallon (1,135-liter) totes. They can double-stack them, Greene says, adding that their small forklift is “employee of the year, every year.”
Fort Hamilton’s lack of vertical space prompted Clark to choose a pot still, where he macerates and redistills their seven-times-distilled New York corn spirit three more times with fruit and other botanicals to create gin. Ballmer Peak has a 50-liter (13-gallon) bain-marie pot still and 52-gallon (197-liter) column still. Copper Cat, besides their wash still, has a 100-gallon (379-liter) still.
For everything from collection vessels to pumps, distillers who are squeezed on space need to stay mobile. Ballmer Peak’s 55-gallon (208-liter) drums move on dollies when they’re running the stills; the dollies pull double duty for finishing and storage barrels, too. Pumps are on the move, as they are at Copper Cat and at Nightside. “All items less than 100 gallons (379 liters) are on wheels,” Greene says. They use a wheeled rack for modular storage and a pallet jack to shift fermentation totes around.
Packaging systems must be flexible, too. At Copper Cat, Lebow and Wu have a gravity-fed, stainless-steel bottling trough about four feet wide, also on wheels. “We have a manual lift so I can lift the barrels and stack them and grab a single stainless-steel barrel and tilt it, connect it to the hose, and allow the spirit to flow into the trough. Everything is single barrels, so we’re only working with up to 250 bottles at a time.”
Nightside has a single-bottle vacuum filter they started out with and still use for small batches, plus a four-bottle, vacuum-style filler; both have in-line filtering. After pumping through a nonreactive water filter housing to remove particulate, Ballmer Peak pumps the spirit into a bottling reservoir with a two-spout gravity filter. Adamson says they have a bottling table with pump, filter, bottle filler, 12-spout bottle rinser, and drip-drying rack.
All Systems Go: Heating and Cooling
You can make all the right equipment decisions, but to make it all work you either need the right heating and cooling systems, or you need to learn to work with the ones your building’s got.
It’s common for average-sized distilleries to run on steam boilers, but those take up a lot of room and present fresh risks in tight spaces. They have to be a fit for your unique space. Lebow says they didn’t design Copper Cat’s distillery; they bought if from a previous distiller. It came with a separate walled-off room for their boiler. At Nightside, Greene says they’ve upgraded to a 250-gallon 946-liter), double-wall boiler. It’s not direct-element, has its own steam jacket, and Greene uses it with an eight-inch modular column with valves he can adjust for whiskey or neutral spirit.
For Clark and Grindeland in Brooklyn, steam boilers were off the table—not enough space, not to mention the pushback that can come with using one in a shared, rented space, as well as from the local fire department. Their jacketed still runs on electricity, and they use thermal retention by running their distillations back-to-back. Ballmer Peak operates on electricity, too, but Adamson says even that has challenges.
“We have single-phase power, which means it’s a little less efficient in terms of a lot of machinery,” he says. “We were limited to how much the transformer attached to our standalone building could handle. Because of that, we limited ourselves to only running four or five of our electric heating elements at once.” The column still can use two heating elements, the pot still four, the mash tun two, so there’s a lot of plugging and unplugging going on depending on what’s in use.
Cooling can also be a challenge at Ballmer Peak. When working with consultants for their build-out, Adamson says they set out to recirculate and reuse the same condensing water as often as possible to minimize water usage. They ended up with a water reservoir in a tote, plumbed to both stills for cooling, with hot water getting pumped to a heat exchanger.
“It’s just an air heat exchanger dependent on the air temperature of the room for how efficient it is at cooling,” he says. In cooler seasons, they have garage doors they can open to keep the temperature lower, but in summer they have to run their still a bit slower.
Photo courtesy of Copper Cat Distillery, Woodinville, Washington
Taking Advantage
Post-production is often when the need for space—namely, barrel storage—is most keenly felt. For aged spirits, simply finding a place for barrels demands more creativity.
At Ballmer Peak, this is where drum dollies again come in handy. Copper Cat’s Lebow says they also keep their barrels on wheels. Stacking is key, too, if you’ve got vertical space—Lebow stores barrels three rows high. When Nightside was using 15-gallon (57-liter) barrels, Greene says he double-stacked them; now that they’ve moved up to 30-gallon (114-liter) barrels, he says palletized storage with four barrels to a pallet is a better fit.
Depending on your space, a tasting room may or may not eat into your production capacity. Copper Cat has designated a 15-by-20-foot (5-meter by 6-meter) space for their tasting room. Fort Hamilton has 750 square feet (70 square meters) for its bar, and the landlord lets them overflow into unused space across the hallway for more seating.
Photo courtesy of Fort Hamilton Distillery, Brooklyn, New York
That overflow seating is a lesson in never being afraid to ask for things, such as extra space or guidance—you never know when something might be available, and every bit helps. For example, Adamson says, it’s smart to consult with your local fire department before you build, so you avoid any future headaches when everything is still changeable.
For all the extra steps that might be needed to make the spirits you want to make in limited space, staying small can have major advantages—and they’re especially important to consider in today’s industry climate.
“I’ve seen some distilleries grow too fast, and then the market’s had this downturn,” Greene says. “The fact that we’re still chugging along—our January is the best we’ve had in 10 years; our bills have been affordable; and we have almost zero overheard in terms of debt. I’m happy we’ve remained small.”
Small batches offer flexibility as well as opportunities for experimentation and creativity.
“If you’re super-big, you have one, maybe two mash bills,” Lebow says. “It’s very difficult to stop and make a different product other than what you do with barrel-finishing. … I can choose every single time what I’m making. It’s very valuable—I can get feedback from customers and make adjustments very quickly.”
Those customer relationships go a long way in the success of these small distilleries, which can remain hands-on with production while directly engaging with guests. At Nightside, Greene says that they do more in sales when he’s present in the tasting room, just because “people feel that connection.”
At Copper Cat, Lebow underscores that advantage. “We’re touching every bottle—Bing hand-labels every single one,” she says. “People get to meet us and talk about why every single one is different. Someone bigger can’t possibly talk to every customer.”
