Once my wife and I decided a distillery was the way to go, then all we needed was to blaze a path to success. Everyone wants to make their own whiskey (oh, so sexy!), but a decent whiskey takes time to age. So what were we going to do in the mean time? We didn’t have the resources to put whiskey away and wait until it was ready. In a flash of brilliance, we decided that we would make Vodka and then Gin and best of all neither required aging. We were so impressed with ourselves. It wasn’t until a month or so later that we realized we had just reinvented the wheel. It would seem that for quite a few micro-distilleries, the standard business path is to start with vodka then make gin, all the while putting whiskey into barrels. This says something about doing your research. Of course, being ignorant of such things can work in your favor. If we knew “everyone” took this path, would we have balked in our resolve to open a distillery? This makes me think of one of my favorite questions for business or advertising students, “How do you enter and succeed in a market that has already been flooded with your type of product?” But that thought is for another post.
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