Glenlyon

That is indeed a butt ugly still! I would suspect it was designed the factory owner's dog.

We generally see a lot of activity in this area in January. Locally, there is a thing called 'Dry January' that always gets a lot of press. Luckily for us distillers there will always be a market for alcohol! And although I tend to cater to an older crowd, I'm seeing no shortage of younger people developing an interest in spirits and cocktails. They love the craft aspect and my sales are as healthy as ever, so I'm not overly concerned - but it is prudent to know your audience and what they want. To that end, some local distilleries around here have done very well with non alcohol gin substitutes. Not my thing, but they are richer for it.

The FDA has said that once the alcohol has been distilled from grain, it is then considered gluten free. As we do have a wheat/barley based vodka, this question comes up frequently. We try to be patient because we value our customers but sometimes I wonder if people understand food at all.

I would imagine the location of the kitchen is probably more important to your operation plan than to inspectors. I have a friend who has a very nice bistro, but - the kitchen is on the ground floor and the dining area is upstairs - and so they (and staff) have to either walk up and down stairs or, use the dumbwaiter. Either way is a frustrating bottleneck - as they have learned. 

We hand wash and then sanitize with a sanitizing machine. We use small sturdy glasses because of breakage - and even they will break on a semi regular basis. We have about 200 in rotation.

It was much the same experience when we signed on to DistillX5. After a couple of very frustrating months we threw in the towel. The software is probably just fine, but it is extremely difficult to maintain accuracy, especially if more than one person is interacting with it. But what really bugs me is the subscription model. I'm sorry but the math of alcohol doesn't change. Why do we have to keep paying for the same thing over and over? All you are really paying for is database management - that you have to manage yourself anyway! Diabolically clever. At this point I'm back to my excel spreadsheets. Perhaps not the best solution but a hell of a lot cheaper when you consider how much alcohol you'll have to sell to meet the monthly subscription fees.  

I feel your pain and our bottle supplier only says it's going to get worse before getting better.

Bruinwood Estate Distillery.

bruinwood.com

@bruinwooddistillery

We switched to DistillX5 about 5 months ago. It's excellent software but we have not been able to make it work for us and we are currently abandoning the system. It's very expensive and probably best suited for bigger distilleries with limited skus. One of their sales lines is (roughly): "X5 takes the anxiety out of distillery management." We found it did the opposite.  

Distillery burns to the ground...

https://www.cheknews.ca/they-are-absolutely-devastated-new-distillery-in-sooke-burns-down-after-early-morning-reports-of-explosions-fire-784160/

We have a geothermal cooling system that we have just doubled in size. It runs all the time on a continual loop and the hot condenser water is piped through radiant floor piping embedded in the tasting room floor. The system is passive and costs us practically nothing to operate and it's really efficient, cooling all of our stills and fermenters and best of all - its completely silent. It was also very cost effective to install - comparatively speaking and our customers love the concept from an environmental perspective.

Yes, I'm a BC craft distiller.

The advice you are looking for can be found on https://homedistiller.org/forum/

Also, don't use the entire citrus - rather, just use the zest. We've found using the whole fruit does tend to create more of a problem. 

Don't waste your time. Go directly to Universal Packaging and let them do the heavy lifting.

Golden is a great mountain town and this would be a great opportunity to really go after the tourism market. My sister lives there and has been catering to that market for years with her lodge. I would definitely give this a run if I didn't already have my own place.

Thanks for clarifying. I keep forgetting our business environment is so much different.

Don't forget when selling to liquor stores and restaurants, you generate less revenue per case because you'll be selling at wholesale prices. So you'll need to sell that much more to make it pay, therefore - you'll have to make more booze and then spend more money marketing to make sure to sell all that extra booze. 

The key to  a successful tasting room is making it female friendly! You want it cozy with lots of natural light and humour. 

I'm exceedingly fortunate that I operate in craft alcohol heaven. I sell primarily direct through our tasting room, public market appearances followed by online and then private liquor stores and finally bars and restaurants. I would say we sell 20% of our product through the liquor stores and the bars/restaurants. The rest is done mostly face to face (until covid). We only need to pay federal excise on our bottles other than that, whatever we charge comes back to us - and we can charge whatever we want. So I have very affordable vodka and obnoxiously expensive specialty drinks. (GST & PST are charged at the sale and don't impact on our profit.) On average we will close 90% of our customers who spend an average of $95 per visit. On a sunny summer afternoon, we'll easily blow through 200 bottles - and we are a tiny operation, far from the madding crowd.  

You are not selling into Tito's market, so don't worry about them. If you are going for the craft concept then you want to focus on direct to the consumer - either through the tasting room or online. Having liquor stores is great for the ego and to get some local presence. But, they are loads of work to service and provide the lowest returns. Add a distributor and after that it's all about volume 'cuz the margins are very slim by then. In the craft environment, vodka is a reliable, profitable seller as is gin and a lot of other very interesting products - which, is what brings the customers to the door. Whiskey for the small distiller is dessert.

35 minutes ago, davdear said:

"Don't worry about making anything but whiskey/bourbon that's the only thing that sells."

Not very good advice.

It depends. No business plan can accurately predict how many sales you will have. That ultimately, will be up to your abilities to actually sell in the heat of battle. Your business plan though can more importantly tell you what your limitations are going to be. Building size, tasting room occupancy allowances - your combination of mash tun, fermenters, still and most importantly, labour force - will dictate your maximum output, less inefficiencies. Once you know what your overall capacity is then you'll have a rough idea of your potential revenues. From there you can create a budget that will pretty accurately reflect how much cash you'll have to work with, and how much you can afford to spend to get customers and hopefully, what profit you can expect. Realize though, like all plans it won't survive contact with the enemy, but it's totally worth going through the exercise and having one in place.

It's been an adventure! That's for sure. It took us eighteen months to go through the re-zoning and licensing. Then we built the building and eventually opened. I remember our first six months. We opened in June with three 120 L fermentation tanks and a 140 L still from Affordable Distillery. We were completely un-prepared for what happened next - which, was the interior of our province went up in flames. That forced all of the tourism normally bound for the forests and lakes to come to our secluded seaside village. We were swamped! We only had vodka and we could barely pull off a mash - our alcohol take was pathetic and every bacterial problem dogged us worse than covid. But as luck would have it, people liked our vodka, we added some gin and then hung on through the winter. The next spring, all those people who had discovered our part of the world came back and they took word of our great experience back to Vancouver. Then, one day we decided to attend a Vancouver based distillery tasting fest and we won the audience choice for one of our cream liqueurs. That was a very surreal experience. When the event opened we were up against 39 other distilleries, most with excellent reputations. The first ten minutes we could hardly get somebody to try our stuff including a new vanilla cream liqueur I had made. But once they started to taste it, word quickly got out about our great creamy beverage and for the next three hours we couldn't pour fast enough - all of our product sold out of the on site store in minutes. Ever since then, our vanilla cream liqueur been our best selling beverage. The next season opened with us way behind and we struggled all summer just to keep up. Our tasting room was packed right through December. In January we were, trying to recover when we started to hear about the covid virus. What a stroke of luck! We quickly started making hand sanitizer (possibly the first in Canada) and we had it on the market in early February - so when the March shutdown happened - we were the only game in town. Happiness is a distillery owner in the middle of a social catastrophe! Then, as soon as the market became saturated with all the other distiller's sanitizer in April, we promptly switched back to beverage alcohol and scooped up all of the vacant spots in the licensed retail market that other distillers lost. I'm telling ya, this next year is going to be a fucking corker!! Best of all, we now charge a premium for our products and our margins are astronomical - our accountant squirms with joy whenever she's talking about them - so, we love the distillery business!!