Photo courtesy of St. Augustine Distillery
Until last month, Florida bourbon didn't exist. State laws made running a profitable distillery challenging, but there was also the matter of aging whiskey in a place where heat and humidity are a constant. Unlike making beer or un-aged spirits, the climate can drastically change the flavor of whiskey. But that didn't stop St. Augustine Distillery from entering uncharted territory.
The distillery relies heavily on tourists and visitors to buy bottles directly from the on-site gift shop in order to fund its production. But at the same time St. Augustine is fiercely local – it's locally owned (it's a community-owned distillery, meaning the entire company was funded through selling shares to locals), locally sourced and has brought the city one of the best on-site craft cocktails bars in Florida.
According to co-founder and CEO Philip McDaniel, the company's dedication to excellence is the seed of its success. Before its whiskey was even released, St. Augustine stared producing a selection of vodka, rum and gin, and it was named the USA TODAY 10Best Readers' Choice Best Craft Gin Distillery in America. We recently talked to McDaniel about the distillery's gin, the challenges and rewards of making the first Florida bourbon and how tourism plays into the company's business plan. Below is St. Augustine's story in McDaniel's words (edited for length and clarity).
Manifesting a dream
Photo courtesy of St. Augustine Distillery
I was retired before we opened the distillery. When I was in my mid-20s, I started a sales-marketing company. I got very lucky and in 1998 a firm wanted to buy it to take advantage of our customer list and the relationships we had. My oldest daughter was 16, and we had some money, and my wife and I decided we wanted to be parents for awhile.
When I was coming out of retirement I talked to people, and I was like, "Man, it would be really cool if we could continue to do things for the community here in St. Augustine, but also have an economic impact." We saw craft distilling was something happening big time in all these great cities, so we thought we should look at trying to bring that business model here. Five and a half years later, here we are.
I tell people if it all ended tomorrow I’d still be so grateful I had a chance to help restore the first commercialized plant in Florida, from a century ago, that was making the first block ice here. And 100 years later we’re making the first bourbon in the state of Florida, we've created 31 new jobs and we’re buying our agriculture locally from Florida farmers.
Before there was bourbon
Photo courtesy of St. Augustine Distillery
When you think of Florida, you think of sunshine and you think of citrus, so we put a lot of both of those elements into the botanicals we chose for the gin. We wanted to make what you call a new-world gin. We said, "Heck, nobody has made a gin in Florida, which is really known for its citrus. Let’s try to make a really citrus-forward gin that’s really going to play well in a lot of classic cocktails." I think anybody who is a gin fan will notice a distinct flavor profile for our gin.
Vodka and rum were made principally for two reasons: One, to create a cash flow that we could use to make some revenue, which would fuel the engine that we needed to keep the business running while we make bourbon. But at the same time, we wanted to make a really quality spirit so that we would earn the respect of our bartenders who were carrying our product, so that when our bourbon comes out, they’re going to be dying for it, and that’s what’s happening.
We just launched our bourbon and it’s sold out of our gift store. People are clamoring for it, so it's creating a buzz in our state.
The impact of tourism
We have an inherent advantage where we are in St. Augustine, Fla. It’s the oldest city in the United States, and it’s a pretty strong tourist destination. We get about 6 million visitors a year to the city. One of the things we have that’s really in our favor is that we have trolleys. People buy tickets, and for $20 or $25 you get to stop off at all these really great attractions – it could be a lighthouse, it could be a museum, it could be a national park.
We were able to convince the trolley and the train to drop guests off as part of their tour. As soon as we did that, we knew we would get an instant number of visitors to the facility every day. So we’ve become the most visited craft distillery in the United States, we believe. This year we’ll have close to 160,000 visitors to our facility, which is about 20,000 more than Buffalo Trace. So that’s really been the marketing plan all along.
The experience
Photo courtesy of Ice Plant
We tell [our guests] about how we make our spirits from the farm direct to the bottle. We teach them about distillation. Most people have been to a brewery or a winery, but probably less than 10 to 15 percent of the people who have been to our place have ever been to a distillery, therefore we can kind of introduce them to the distillation process. Through that we’ve gained a really strong fan base.
We also have an amazing craft cocktail bar in the facility called Ice Plant. They went to New York, they went to Milk and Honey, they went to all those great bars in Brooklyn to figure out what craft cocktails should look like and what a craft cocktail should be, and they did a very quick job of learning and bringing that to Florida. Some of the best bartenders from around the state now work here for us.
Florida's first bourbon
Photo courtesy of St. Augustine Distillery
I think what sets us apart is our commitment to excellence and our willingness to make whatever the investment is to get it right. For me this is almost an issue of state and regional pride.
One of the challenges that a lot of young craft distillers have today is that you see people who had a dream to make spirits, but they never made them before, so they wind up distilling it on their own. Oftentimes there’s a pretty steep learning curve in this industry.
We’re extraordinarily lucky in that the retail gift shop we have allows us to sell the bottles to the public directly, and that allows us to use the revenues to reinvest into the development of our products, and make sure that we don’t release our whiskey too soon, or make sure that we do always get the best ingredients with the botanicals that we use, or hiring the best people to help do our finishing, and final product, mixing and blending.
We hired two of the best people in the country. Dave Pickerell, who’s the former distiller at Maker’s Mark for 15 years, and he’s one of the founders of WhistlePig Rye. We also turned to a couple other people for help along the way. One of them was Jake Norris. He was one of the founding distillers of Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey. The third piece was, how do you manage the heat and how do you manage the humidity? So we put together a very comprehensive collection of 53- and 25-gallon new oak barrels that we bought from Kelvin Cooperage out of Louisville.
The product looks amazing. You look at it, and it’s got this deep, rich, dark red color, and it’s been in the barrel close to three years. It was only in the smaller barrels about a year and a half, and then we transferred the spirit over to used barrels and it really created a spectacular combination. We’ve had to pivot during production and do things differently just to learn what the bourbon will be like and we have to learn what Florida bourbon will be. I think it turned out great.
