Developing a Taste for Specialty Distilleries

Austin says there are many inefficiencies of labor because of the size of craft distilleries. “A distillery 100 times the size of us may have only 20 percent to 30 percent more staff.” Big distilleries are also in a stronger negotiating position with distributors because they operate on a bigger scale, she says.

Disposing of waste is a huge operational and safety issue and an expensive one for smaller operations, comments Erenzo.

“Almost no distiller that gets into the business thinks about waste, but it’s one of our biggest and most expensive problems,” he says.

Meanwhile, getting rid of thousands of gallons of spent mash requires trucking it somewhere because it cannot be spread on the ground or dumped into the municipal waste system. An expected revision of a Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA, proposal that spent grain intended for animal feed must first be inspected and then packaged will be welcomed by the industry, he says. For large distilleries with huge quantities of spent grain, selling it is another form of revenue; for craft distillers disposing of it is only an expense.

There are advantages to operating a small distillery that offset the disadvantages, one of the best being that these operations can be “very agile,” according to Campbell. “If I want to change something or tweak something, it’s very easy, whereas in a large distillery we wouldn’t be able to do that. We get to question what we do and try out new things.”

“Our advantage is that we can be more nimble,” Mooney says. “We can create products and test them out here, and there are no layers of bureaucracy to go through. We look for all the ways that being small is an advantage and that allow us to make things with greater care.”

References

1. Distilled Spirits Council 2014 Industry Review. New York City. Feb. 3, 2015. Accessed Sept. 3, 2015.