There are indeed a lot of variables at play and the spirit landscape has changed post-covid.
Our tasting room opened in August of 2019 and we sold a little over 1000 bottles in those first 4 months.
2020 was starting out on track then covid shut everything down, but we ended up with around 2500 bottles sold for the year.
2021 overcorrected because of everybody finally getting out and we doubled to a little less than 5000 bottles for the year.
2022 seemed to correct backwards to where 2021 probably should have been for us with around 2600 bottles sold again.
2023 we are at around 3000 bottles sold thus far.
The above is just bottle sales in our tasting room, we also pivoted into canned RTD cocktails in 2022 but I didn't count those in the numbers because I don't have the Distro vs Tasting Room numbers on hand.
Post-Covid we have seen less people coming in but they are spending more on average. We don't currently operate a cocktail bar, though we are going to open one hopefully in 2024, and Tennessee doesn't allow DTC, but we use an out of state third party for shipping. Our tasting room currently keeps the lights on but not much else, everything else is driven through distribution and quite a bit of private label/contract distilling.
It's pretty much been said elsewhere, unless you are in a really high traffic area the tasting room can maybe keep the lights on but the main focus should always be distribution and growing your footprint while not over-extending. It's not a fun situation to run out of a popular bourbon when it takes literal years to gain back the inventory.