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Glenlyon

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Everything posted by Glenlyon

  1. Just got off he phone with a nearby distillery, who's owner informed me they were suffering from a lot of creditor problems and were being forced to close. It got me to wondering how the distillery business is doing over all. After five years of solid growth for us, this year has been very slow - no doubt, thanks to tough economic times. The owner attributed the business failure to not being able to project the brand effectively - which, speaks to the need for distillery owners to really understand how much it costs to get the message out to the customer. As I've often said, its easy to sell your product to a liquor store of restaurant - it very difficult to get customers to come in to buy your product. In the beginning we felt handicapped because our zoning would not allow us to serve food or cocktails. Bottle sales only. In retrospect, this has turned out to be a competitive advantage in some cases. But, now with increased local competition, we are feeling the squeeze and are actively looking for new ways to get our products and messages out. Now is the time to be innovative. It will be interesting to see how the industry does in the next few years. How are you doing?
  2. You'll need at least 18Kw and maybe even more - but, worth it as electricity is a good way to go. Steam is great, but not always feasible.
  3. OK. So selling to liquor stores is a complex, yet exceeding boring business. Because, retail is very staid. Also, the liquor stores you are likely to approach are already awash with product - so what are you going to sell them, vodka? Whiskey? Gin? What haven't they seen? Yawn. The key to success, is understanding that your business model is different than the liquor store model. They have loads of product, so they only need to sell a selection of what they have to make a profit. You, on the other hand have to sell all of your product to make a profit. So - rather than trying to get into a lot of stores, focus on a few key stores that believe in you and who are willing to work to train their staff about your products. Sales staff who like your product will sell a lot of it. Sales staff that don't know about the product won't sell any. Selling to retailers is pretty easy, set up an appointment, pop by with some tasters, expect to sell one or two sku(s) and see what happens - however, if the product doesn't sell to the end users, you won't get reorders and without re orders, you have no business. Therefore, the responsibility to make your product successful is on you to figure out how to drive customers to those retailers once you get your products on the shelf because the retailers won't do it. Expect to spend at least a year and probably more to develop meaningful, stable demand for your products. Effective sales and marketing are time consuming and expensive. There is no way around it.
  4. Just remember, he says after 16 hours of working straight since o'dark o'clock this morning, running a distillery is a shit ton of work and right now, there are not so many customers and making a profit is not easy - the start up costs are very high and the monthly overhead, even for our small distillery can easily exceed $20 = 30k per month.
  5. Proceed as usual. Likely there will be no issues.
  6. I don't generally ferment in plastic totes because I find they can be prone to a lot of bacterial problems. We don't use plastic containers of any kind - but we do have plastic winemaking spoons for some basic stirring. Thank goodness I don't have to worry about inspectors having an opinion, but I still wouldn't use anything other than stainless or glass for high proof alcohol.
  7. Assuming that your jacketed tank would likely have an agitator - all you would need to do is add your hot water, then your molasses or sugar and using the agitator mix it all up. Then use the cooling feature to bring it down to the desired fermentation temp. Easy. Worth buying the tank for. I dislike fermenting in totes as they are hard to keep bacteria out of.
  8. Well, its pretty dull in real life. First you make your base alcohol, then steep your botanicals and then pot still the results. And, while you are waiting on the still, you are probably cleaning the distillery.
  9. It's interesting that you are already engaged in buying your stills while still trying to work out projections. But, that will simplify your projections because now you know how much you can produce. There is no point in creating projections that exceed your production capacity. It is unlikely that your tasting room (unless you have very high traffic) will generate a huge volume of sales, but it will cost you between 10 and 20k$ just to keep it open and operating. If you are making sales and moving weight, expect your overhead to rise dramatically. Stilling is easy. But, running a distillery requires more than a still and some will. You also need marketing, advertising, sales, logistics, supplier management, product development, audience development, etc, etc, etc, etc... All of which, cost endless dollars. Hitting the streets and selling to restaurants, bars and retailers is great in theory, but shifting alcohol requires a tremendous amount of physical energy and it is very difficult to manage accounts, get new ones and keep the distillery producing good quality product all at the same time. It's takes at least three people to effectively run a small distillery - or so we've found out. In our case there is just the two of us, but we do bring in weekend help when required. And my last two cents - one business plan isn't enough. You need a plan to get up and running, you need a plan for when you are actually up and running and you need a financial plan that will withstand all sorts of indignities. 4 years in, we are considered to be a successful distillery, but our bank accounts are low, the work is relentless, finding good, reliable labour is a bitch. Also don't make the fatal mistake of writing your business plan for money people (bankers/partners). It will be useless to you and it won't generate the cash you are hoping for. Rather, write your plans for YOU - what is YOUR plan? What are you going to ACTUALLY do when you show up Monday morning to open. If you can't answer that question, not matter how much you made your projections look good you'll never get past the banker.
  10. There is probably some truth to this. Way back before prohibition there were loads of 'craft' distillers in both the US ands Canada. Known by the big 8 in Canada as the 'nuisance distillers', they convinced the government to pass all kinds of laws to restrict or eliminate the small distillers and basically, succeeded. While I doubt today there is an organized plan, it is becoming much more difficult for even larger mid-list distilleries to operate. Even us, small as we are - are now forced to spend upwards of $40k to buy bottles at a time - rather than the few pallets we used to get. And with the cost of money and inflation these days, I don't see many new start-ups (a few but few) - and the guys I compete against are not really thriving. You absolutely need a very significant competitive advantage if you are going to make money in this game going forward.
  11. That's a great question. After sending out an experimental salesperson, she could hit 4 - 6 places a day. But, I also suspect she spent a percentage of time - not being in a rush, let's just say. She closed sales but she failed to generate consistency of relationships that would lead to re-orders and a comfortable experience. So, over time we let most of those contacts slip away. Instead, focusing on fewer stores - but, each of those stores have established a local audience for our stuff and the salespeople know and even drink our stuff. Also, most stores will only focus on one or two of your beverages - even though you may have a lot more to offer. A note here - over that last few years we've done quite a bit of advertising and marketing. This year, we've done only about a third as much - it's starting to reflect n our sales - so, marketing and advertising is key and you have to be relentless about it. Even if the costs and time expenses are making you grouchy and you wonder if you are actually getting results. You probably are.
  12. That's an excellent description of the "off" smell. I suspect it's the glue they use. Terrible in a confined bottle storage area.
  13. We use their Jersey bottles. Ever since they moved production to India the quality has noticeably dropped. The batch I'm working my way through now has inconsistent neck openings. Some corks fit fine the majority are very loose. There are often chips on the lips and shoulders and the boxes are either over glued or under glued and have an off smell. Expensive as ever though.
  14. It's done. There is nothing wrong. There is something wrong if it takes days and days to ferment. But when you're dry you're dry. That's it. The whole point of this system is efficiency and turnover.
  15. I'm about to open, so I don't have much time. We started small and it took us a year to figure things out. Enzymes are like magic, you have to know what you are doing to make them work. With a 100L still your yields will be very small and will not cover a basic overhead much less much less the overhead you'll be facing should you become successful. This month I've spent 30K in overhead. I have to sell hundreds of bottles every week to stay open. The math tells the truth. You need to do at least 3000L of mash a week to even get to the players table.
  16. No amount of ingenuity will allow you to remove wheat grains from your mash. Once they are in part of the mash, you simply won't be able to remove them. Cost effectively, anyway. Grinding flour fine is great - however, you probably won't realize much improvement in yield for the extra work. High temp conversion leads to complex sugars which you don't want in distilling.
  17. You mash sounds very organized, as they should be when you are starting out and I suspect you'll need to do a bunch of them to dial in something that you can rely on. I would say this has some potential. However, it's going to be a lot of work. Grinding grain sucks up time - you'll likely need to double or triple grind it to get it fine enough to use. You mash will be thick and un filterable, which means, getting rid of it at the end of the process is going to be an ongoing headache. Not to mention the cleaning of hot sticky grain is not fun. The aforementioned grain particles will cause an insulating factor which will cause the fermentation temp to rise above 40*, so you'll need cooling and in the end you won't have much finished product to sell - so you'll need to be doing a lot of mashes. So, you'll get good at them fast. I know that because that's pretty much what we went through. My final tip is ph can get you into trouble with such small mashes and yeast will create their own conditions. Don't adjust for ph when you are starting - let nature take its course. If you mash is too acidic off the top, the yeast will never thrive. And, you are still missing a key ingredient element - which, I'll let you figure out.
  18. There is a saying in the business: "Nobody can tell you how to start a distillery, you just have to do it." However, these days there are loads of books and courses you can take. I took a few and largely learned what I didn't want to do. Running a distillery of any size is a shitload of mundane work. Filling tanks, shifting grain, etc. Very little of it is particularly romantic. Basically, it's really easy to learn: spend a million dollars to build your distillery and then show up every morning at 4 AM and work 'tll 9PM for seven days a week and plan to do that until you get a team of reliable staff, you sell or you die.
  19. Selling alcohol is a world awash in every kind of booze is an art unto itself. You never know. Just this last week we attended a distillers festival and we were up against 29 other distilleries, several with excellent reputations with newly minted awards and buzz. Yet, we were the top selling distillery by a comfortable margin.
  20. Finding good sales outlets is a competitive business indeed. We've largely given up on bars and restaurants as we can't compete with the big brands, their rock bottom wholesale prices and the payola they use to keep their spirits in the 'well', as it were. We've also found bars and restaurants simply don't move enough craft product overall, and our idea of volume and theirs are two different realities. We currently have one restaurant that is doing reasonably well for us - but, that's only six bottles a week. Hardly worth getting out of bed for. So, we focus on being as creative as possible. We work harder at private retail stores because they order a couple thousand dollars of product at a time every few weeks, so it's worth the effort. But, we've found we only make the sales because we are actually visit the stores - which, translates into relationship selling. You have to have great relationships with store managers who believe in your product and will actually lift a finger to sell it. 'Cuz if they ain't selling it, they ain't reordering! To build these relationships, we've had to get rid of reps (the stores hate them) and show up ourselves. But, that creates a problem for us because we have a lot to do and running around to stores is not high on the priority list. We are a very small operation but we are really good at selling a lot of product and we've created growing popular demand which is also critical in getting retail store interested in and actually moving your products.
  21. Most of our retailers charge way more than we do and don't seem to care. We used to try and convince them to lower the price until one day a retailer said to us "Why lower it if it's selling?" People want to spend money it seems.
  22. We have been waiting for over ten months for our last order. To even get on the list to buy, we had to order 12 pallets! we got word in September that they were on their way and now weeks later the supplier is unsure where they are. Humph.
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