One of my great professional joys is meeting new distillers. Bright-eyed and bushy tailed, they’ve got pluck aplenty and grand notions about how their products are going to make the world a better place. And while that sentence might read as mocking, I can assure you it isn’t. I’m rooting for these distillers. Hell, I’m rooting for anyone who brings something new and wonderful to my cup with a healthy dash of positivity — something the world needs now more than ever. If there is an unspoken undercurrent to meeting these fine epicurious entrepreneurs, it’s that I often find that many don’t understand the art and science of product development all that well. Far too many of them seem to be throwing processes and ideas at a wall to see what potentially sticks. Sometimes they get lucky and land on a fantastic physical manifestation of those ideas in the form of delicious booze, but way too often these mavericks of distillation are left scratching their heads as to why something didn’t turn out the way they had hoped.
There are a ton of ways to approach product development, and I would never say that my way is the best or only way (I don’t believe in such maxims anyway). But I can share the approaches and philosophies that I have learned and developed over the years and that work well for me. The bigger point is that real product development requires a process and a plan.
What Do You Want to Make?
This may be the most important question you’ll ask yourself during the whole product development cycle, and it’s one that very few people answer correctly or completely. Let’s say you are building a new whiskey. With the massive amount of whiskey on the shelves these days, it no longer suffices to answer this question with “bourbon” or “rye” or “single malt.” You’ve got to get specific — dare I say, hyper-specific. It’s time for research.
Hit your local bottle shop. Drop in to your favorite bar. Taste and ask questions. (This is the fun part for a lot of people.) But the research comes with a caveat: You have to be completely honest with yourself about what you like and don’t like. Take notes and take it seriously. You’re trying to figure out what is in the market and what makes it special (or not). Find your likes and dislikes. If you were making one of these products, what would you have done differently?
While all this fun tasting is going on, you should also be thinking about what the branding and marketing will be for this new product. In the world of craft beverage production, long gone are the days when you could come up with a B.S. story and shoehorn in some liquid to complement it. With the always connected world we live in, people will figure out that you’re full of it rather quickly. Authenticity is massively important to today’s imbibers, so don’t try to fool them.
The goal of all this research? To define your target. If you don’t have a target, it’s like getting in the car without a destination in mind. You’ll just end up driving around aimlessly, hoping to luck out and find something interesting. Sometimes this works, but more often you’ll start to run out of gas and wind up accepting something that is less than what it could have been.
The more precise you can be with defining your target, the better. That’s why you can’t simply say, “I’m going to make a rye whiskey.” It’s far too vague. What style of rye? Will it be spicy and dry, or will it hew closer to bourbon with some sweetness? How long are you willing to mature it, and what do you want in the wood profile? What should the bottle strength be? Is there a certain price point you’re trying to hit? Will it be meant for cocktails, stand-alone sipping, or both? These are just a few of the questions you should be asking yourself. (And remember, they all have to link back to the story and brand in some way. The brand is king.)
The endgame is for you to be able to smell, taste, and see the liquid in your mind. You need to know this product backward and forward before you even make it (let alone taste it). From there, you just need to reverse engineer it. Easy, right?
The Production Approach
Now, don’t go ordering any raw materials just yet. You need to do a bit more thinking first. I said that we’re going to reverse engineer this sucker, and I meant it quite literally. We’re going to look at all the processes involved in your product and work backwards. I’ll use my own distillery’s rye as the target example here.
Iron City Distilling is based in Creighton, Pennsylvania, about 20 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh. The whole region is steeped in rye whiskey history, and we wanted to honor the Golden Era of 1850 to Prohibition. We also knew that we wanted to work exclusively with Pennsylvania farmers as would likely have been done back in the day. The whiskeys of the time were often big, punchy, and rye heavy. Cask character was important, but it had to be balanced with the flavors of the rye, which was floral, spicy, and herbaceous. These were purportedly very big whiskeys with a lovely oiliness and palate coating viscosity. (I’ve tasted some historic examples from before Prohibition and can confirm.)
The rye production process is similar to most other whiskeys out there.
1. Grain harvest and procurement
2. Filling
3. Mashing
4. Fermentation
5. Distillation
6. Maturation
7. Blending/Filtration/Bottling
If we work backwards, then we would be starting our development process with the bottle proof. Considering the brief, 100 proof seems most appropriate. It would give us the heft and some of the viscosity that we need. There would be minimal filtration to retain that mouthfeel, just a light depth filter to remove bits of barrel char. As for the blending, I suspect that the technology of the time gave cooperages less-than-consistent control over the charring process, so we’re going to have a nice mix of char levels in the casks for blending stock: A few char #1s and #2s mixed in with the more standard #3s and #4s.
We know that most Pennsylvania distilleries were utilizing steam-heated warehouses, so we had that built into our distillery plan. This keeps the whiskey warm throughout the entire year. Our warehouse is set so that the temperature never drops below 70°F on the lowest floor at any point during the year. The addition of steam heat was expensive, but we felt it was a worthwhile piece of the puzzle. (Well, I’m not sure our accountant feels that way…)
When it came to maturation, we know that distillers back then were using low entry proofs. We decided to stick with tradition and go with their “standard” of 101 proof. Lower entry proofs pull a lot more wood sugars out of the cask at a faster rate along with color compounds and other oak extractives (the whiskey lactones are one of the odd exceptions and are favored by higher entry proofs). This boosts the barrel character in a shorter amount of time and favors a shorter maturation cycle. Indeed, historically it was not uncommon to see most whiskey consumed at four years old or younger.
Another point to the maturation process was that distilleries back then were using smaller casks, anywhere from 35 to 42 gallons in size. This has proven to be the most difficult bit of my research to reproduce, since virtually all the major coopers these days are as busy as they can be and most don’t want to get into a special project with a long-defunct cask size. Fortunately, I was able to find a cooper willing to work with me on it and we’re currently testing out three prototype casks on our rye. The results seem promising.
We know the distillation of rye in Pennsylvania prior to Prohibition was done on either a pot still or a chamber still. Columns weren’t used. So, we opted for both a pot and a three-chamber still. The goal was to produce a fat, fruity, spicy distillate that sang with rye character. Our pot still builds this beautiful bouquet in the spirit. The cuts have to strike a delicate balance between clean and conservative while still allowing just enough of the congeners to come over to keep things interesting. Admittedly, it took the better part of a year for me to get the techniques dialed in. (Our three-chamber is due to be installed by the end of August 2024, so we shall see what differences that brings into the picture.)
Fermentation is carried out with a well-known rye yeast that helps accentuate the grain character. Our temperatures don’t get too far beyond 85°F to keep higher alcohol and ester production somewhat in check. Finally, we allow the ferment to go 96 hours as opposed to the more modern 72-hour cycle so that our yeast can clean the beer up a bit and let the grain notes sing a bit more.
The mash is carried out in two stages. The raw rye is cooked at 180–185°F for 20 minutes. This temperature range does a nice job of retaining the rye character. The saccharification step is a traditional 45-minute hold at 148°F.
Where we get back to more historical reasoning is the mash bill. I had to do a lot of research and talked with a few different whiskey historians to land on our current recipe. My line of thinking went something like this: Surely the distillers back then were using heirloom grains. I mean, large-scale “commodity” agriculture was still somewhat in its infancy back in the 1850s and past the Civil War. The farmers and distillers likely didn’t think of their grain as “heirlooms,” “heritage,” or any other romantic modern term. They just had their grain that they grew. When harvest came, they would hold back enough seed to plant the following year. So, the question became: Is there a modern rye variety that is closely related to the ryes commonly grown in Pennsylvania back then? And it turns out that yes, there is.
I reached out to Laura Fields of the Delaware Valley Fields Foundation to chat. Fields is a passionate rye whiskey historian and advocate for Pennsylvania distillers. A few years back she began working with a nearly extinct variety of rye called Rosen. During our discussions she told me about how closely related Rosen is to the ryes and flavors I was searching for. It was a done deal. I had to work with that grain.
But something was nagging at me. Rosen is such an expressive rye, and I really felt that in order to do it justice, I should simply do a 100% Rosen rye recipe. Except that back in the Golden Age of Pennsylvania rye, a 100% raw rye recipe would not have been all that common. Most of the mash bills back then ran with approximately 80% raw rye and 20% malted barley. Once again, Laura came to the rescue. She clued me into the practices of Thomas Moore, who ran the Possum Hollow Distillery back in the 1850s. From the research she had done, she believed that his rye mash bill was 50% raw rye and 50% malted rye. It was such an intriguing concept that I decided to run with it.
There’s obviously a lot more to our recipe and techniques than I’ve laid out here, but hopefully you get the gist of the game we’re playing. Successful product development relies on a healthy amount of research, reverse engineering, and, in the case of historical recipes, sometimes a little inference.
The Cycle Continues
But we’re not finished! If you’ve been paying attention, really all we’ve done is a boatload of research and created a plan. Both of these things are invaluable, there’s no doubt. But now we have to actually make the stuff.
Remember: The goal of all that research was to come up with a target. The next step was to mentally reverse engineer the target, essentially making a plan for execution. At this point you can order your ingredients and get to work. So, what are you waiting for? Hop in the distillery and make something already!
Depending on the product you’re trying to produce, you may have to wait some time before you know if you’ve hit the target. For the inexperienced whiskey distiller, that may mean you don’t know how well you’ve done for up to a few years. It’s scary, I know. But rest assured, the initial legwork was not in vain. By taking the time to create a target profile and methodically think out the approach, you have saved yourself an immeasurable amount of time in reaching the true product character that you’re after. And chances are, if you are off the mark, it will be by less than if you were to approach the whole affair completely blind.
So, what happens next? Well, the product development cycle is just that: a cycle. (See graph below). Once you have some valuable feedback on your initial attempts, you may decide that some tweaks and revisions are in order. This in turn often leads to more research, which can then lead you to redefining your baseline for success. And on it goes.
Product development isn’t easy. It’s an endeavor that requires a ton of discipline and focus. But all that effort will make you more efficient in your approach and you’ll find the results of your execution will be of a higher caliber as well.
Most distilled spirits categories have considerably longer development cycles than other products such as beer. If we all woke up tomorrow to the news that IPAs were no longer hot and suddenly the world was thirsting for bubblegum-flavored session stouts (heaven help us) then you can bet that the majority of brewers would have their brewski ducks in a row within a few months’ time. With rare exceptions, we just don’t have that kind of temporal luxury. But developing the perfect product for your distillery doesn’t have to be a Sisyphean task replete with bouts of navel gazing. With enough front-end thought, a pen with ample ink, and some paper, you can make the whole ordeal much more streamlined. Hell, it might even be fun. And if nothing else, the research phase will probably be delicious.
