What can you tell us about your business? From where are you coming to the distilling world and what were your first experiences?

Well, we are 17 years in business now with Fenton Winery & Brewery. We started in 2008 as a winery, where we bring in juice, process and ferment it then it, and bottle it (we don’t crush grapes and we don’t have our own vineyard). Currently, we are making 20,000 bottles of wine per year. At the time we started we were operating in a small strip mall. In 2010 we became a brewery as well, added beer to our portfolio and expanded to a larger part of the strip mall. In 2014 we moved to the current location, which is a 5 acre property with two buildings. Our production facility is a 10,000 square foot building that holds our offices and the public taproom. We also have a banquet facility where we host about 100 weddings per year. Coming out of the shutdown in 2020, we wanted to expand our business even further. We were talking about opening a distillery on the premises for a little while already, because it would complement our banquet facility. Based on the laws of Michigan, you are only able to sell alcohol that you produce and because of that, we could only serve beer and wine at our weddings. It was about 2021 when we finally decided to go forward with distilling.

Where did you hear about iStill and why did you choose us?

I had been told years ago about iStill by a fellow brewer who was in the industry and traveled around a lot. He mentioned how great, easy and advanced the products were. At that time I wasn’t ready for distilling yet, but it was something that got flagged in my memory once we started looking for equipment. I checked out your website and compared the technology with traditional stills, for which I had some quotes already, but it was way more advanced than what they could offer. Another big thing for me was the access to the iStill University. Once I purchased the still, I started consuming the content immediately. I watched the videos multiple times, because I had never distilled. We had a deal with my wife that I make the products and she sells them, so I had to understand everything. Having the Mini to help me learn and do some R&D was key for me. That was a game changer. It was so in-depth, so well-done that I came out as really knowing what I was doing when I started the actual production on the 200. Basically the production time of the bigger unit was enough for me to learn everything on the Mini and then I just had to scale it up.

I guess you haven’t abandoned the Mini since you have the big brother.

Absolutely not! It is still part of our development process. Currently we are selling about 28 different spirits. We really do everything, from gin, vodka, rum, agave spirit to bourbon, whiskey, brandy and liqueurs as well. I've ventured into ouzo and we also started doing canned cocktails recently. Every time before going to production, these recipes start out on the Mini. For example, let’s say we are working on a new whiskey. We get some recipes together, run them through the Mini and collect small samples from every tenth of a degree. We could end up with 50-70 samples even. Generally, every Monday afternoon we have a manager meeting, which has a panel where every member of the team can taste the samples and together we decide on where to make the cuts. I don’t want to be a one man distiller, I want everyone to partake. I collect their responses, look at the averages then I make the final decision based on the data. This really helps them be involved and understand the processes better. After the final recipe is created, we scale it up to the 200 liter iStill, but only if everyone approves the final blend. Also, for some projects I use the Mini only. For example, I went to Greece last year and fell in love with ouzo. When I came back I started playing with the Mini to create ouzo and it was a lot of fun. I was able to get a few bottles out of it without having to spend a lot of money to scale it up into a bigger production.

It is great to hear that you have a dedicated team that puts in the effort to create something delicious together. How big is this team?

We have about 40-45 people in total, but it fluctuates. That’s the total number in the whole business, but on the production side it is just me and three team members. I have our production manager who also is our winemaker, I have a distiller and then I have a brewer. All of those guys are cross-trained, so the brewer knows how to run the still and the distiller knows how to run the brewery. The rest of the staff are the service team, taproom staff and banquet staff. We have 7 managers in total.

Wow, that is a big team and operation. You said that you are producing 28 spirits yourself. Are you selling it elsewhere or only at your premises?

We do. There are a couple places where we do sell it. Although, from the very beginning, even with the beer and wine, we have been focused on the on-premise sales. 99% of all products are sold in-house. We have a public side of the business, which is the taproom. The taproom averages about 1200 people per week throughout the year. Next to that we have the private side, which is the banquets and weddings. Our weddings average about 140 people and typically we have 3 weddings per week. Last weekend we had four, one every day from Thursday to Sunday. That adds up to about 450-500 people per weekend. We have created a business where there is enough demand in-house and we don’t need to go to markets, restaurants or convenience stores to sell our products. On the banquets and weddings, guests can only drink the products that we make, so we don’t need to go outside and find sales there. We could, but realistically, we would make less money on the products if we started wholesaling than what we can make if we sell them in-house. We brew once a week, distill two or three times a week and we make wine throughout the week, so this demand doesn’t stress our small production staff.

Yeah it indeed sounds like the perfect business plan. How are the guests enjoying your drinks? Do they mind that the big brands are not available at the bar or do you get a lot of compliments?

They seem to like it a lot. Our staff is also very good at explaining to them how the drinks were made and they can actually see the distillery behind the taproom, as there are big glass windows between the two. Vodkas are the number one sellers, but we also sell a lot of rum and agave spirit. One of the big achievements that I am proud of is the coffee liqueur we make. It is essentially like Kahlua. I would put our coffee liqueur up against that. It is so fresh. We worked with a local coffee roaster, doing tastings on different roasts and choosing what type of roast we wanted. I brought the final roast over and used the Extractor to create a coffee extract. That freshness you can pick up in the drink versus the mass produced taste of Kahlua - it is like drinking a fresh cup of coffee with liqueur. The day we made it in the distillery was the best, because the coffee just overtook the place and there was a really nice aroma all around. We are getting ready to do the second batch next month or so. I just got the beans for that. I have also gotten a few awards over the last couple of years for three products. We are big in craft cocktails too. We make everything by hand, fresh pressed juices, everything in-house. People enjoy it.

All sounds wonderful! I would love to visit your premises one day and have the same experience as your guests. You mentioned awards, can you talk a bit more about them?

We got three of them in New York at the Finger Lakes International Wine & Spirits Competition. They use the competition as a fundraiser for a local camp that helps children. I have been entering this competition for years with my winery. Once I started the distillery, I started sending in my spirits and each year I have won something in the last three years. I have gotten a silver medal for at least one of the spirits we have sent in. We got one for vodka, got one for our house gin and then we also got one for aquavit, which is one of our newer products. That is actually the first product that I let our distiller just do on his own from start to finish. After it was ready and released, we sent it to the competition, and that was our most recent silver medal earlier this year. He was pretty proud of that. It literally was the first drink that he made, because he really liked aquavit and I never had it before. I was like, “You know what, why don't you create a product for us? Create the recipe, go through the development, and then we will see how it turns out!” That one he was really proud of because it turned out quite well and ended up getting an award.

That’s an amazing achievement indeed, congratulations to him! Do you have any new products that you are currently experimenting with?

I'm looking forward to our bourbons. We have done a bunch of whiskeys, but with the bourbon, you have to have 51% corn and it took us a while to develop those. I'm looking forward to it, but in order to release them, they have to be for a minimum of two years in oak barrels. I'm really excited and I think we got some great products. We got some local corn and rye for it but it is too early to actually taste it. We have tasted a few out of the barrel but we haven't released it to the public yet. It will be out sometime in the first quarter of next year, probably late March or early April 2025. I think that one is going to turn out really good. It is timed well for the start of the next wedding season then.

Given the outstanding scope of spirits that you are producing with a single still, I guess you are satisfied with iStill, but can you give me a more detailed feedback on the distilling experience?

The whole experience has been phenomenal, there is not a bad thing I can say about that. It met exactly what I had hoped for. My background is engineering, so I am very into technology, into processes and how everything works. Everything that was on the website, everything I had seen in any ad, the product matched it. Also, it is super super easy to use and was super easy to set up. With the automatic pressure adjustments it does the cuts in a perfectly consistent way. Sometimes you are in the same room with the still and you almost forget that it is running, because it just sits there and it is cranking out spirits quietly. It is taking care of the cuts for you, so you do not have to sit there and watch it the whole day. Since I have been in the business for 17 years, I have a lot of brewers or people that want to become brewers and distillers that come to me for advice. Every time, I absolutely 100% recommend iStill. I tell them that they are crazy if they do anything other than that. I am not just saying it because you are recording this, but it really is just a phenomenal product both the Mini and the 200 and I absolutely recommend it to everybody. It is also cool looking and when people see the still, they expect to see the copper and they start asking questions about it being made from stainless steel, so it is a good conversation starter with them. We do tours a lot, so we talk to them about all the different technologies that we have. It has been a phenomenal product and I love what you guys do. Absolutely.

Thank you very much for the kind words. Always good to hear a happy customer. Do you have any feedback or any kind of recommendation that you would like to see us develop for a future product?

No, I really don't, because there is just so much information that has been provided with the iStill University, which I still reference to this day and go back to it to refresh my memory. There is just so much out there, including your website and the blog. You guys seem to be working on new stuff all the time. I get the morning newsletter on Mondays and you are constantly working on new things. I really don't have anything other than maybe, you know, when I was first starting out, getting some information about recipe development, like breakdowns of different spirits would have been useful. Just talking about a specific drink, maybe agave spirit or a brandy, talking a bit more in-depth about it and about the development process. I did watch a Facebook or YouTube video from iStill that went through whiskey, so more stuff like that, but saying this is really a kind of a stretch for me, because you guys already provide so much information that if I need anything I just go onto the blog and I can look for it myself. You guys have been doing the blog for a very long time, so there is information I haven't gone through yet. There is so much information in there that I can typically find what I need without too much difficulty. I am really looking forward to doing the practical course as well. So far the dates haven’t worked for me, but I will get there one day!

Yes, that’s true. Almost everything is out there, you just have to look for it. As for recipe development, we do have this service, where we are helping to design new recipes or finetune existing ones for customers. What are your future plans regarding distilling or growing your business? Anything exciting in the pipeline apart from that bourbon?

We are going to continue distilling, but in that regard I don't expect that we are going to expand too much, other than we might have to distill more often. As far as the still, the 200 works perfectly for us and for the volume we need to get out of that. Actually, we kicked off the largest project we have ever done about a year ago. My wife and I bought a property, an empty lot across the street from our current facility and we are in the process of building a 25 room hotel there.

Wow, that's ambitious!

It will be a high end luxury hotel with 25 rooms, a bistro, a basement bar, and a 60 person event space. Right now, 60 people is hard for us to accommodate, because we have a very large facility that can accommodate up to 300 people. There's also a room next to the taproom that can handle 45 for semi-private events, but we get a lot of inquiries of around 60 people. We have already been working with a builder and we are going to break ground next spring 2025. It is going to be about a year to build. In late 2026, we hope to open to the public. It is kind of a unique direction to take our business, but we do 100 weddings a year and there aren't actually a lot of hotels in our area. Guests have a hard time finding a place to stay. So, we were thinking, why don't we build a hotel? It was always out there as a moonshot idea and when we were in a situation where we could make this step, we started looking into it. Not so long after, the property across the street went up for sale. It is an empty lot, about three and a half acres and we bought it about a year and a half ago. It is going to be about a six million dollar project as it is looking like right now. We want it being built exactly the way we would want a hotel to be built, so it is going to be pretty cool.

What a great timing with the property purchase. The perfect opportunity.

Yeah, the timing was crazy. We just started talking about it more seriously and then it went up for sale shortly after. Nobody had built on it for years and we got it pretty cheap. The stars have aligned for this project and we are in the process. We are moving forward with it.

Good luck with that! I am sure it is going to be amazing once it is ready. Do you want to add anything else before we wrap it up?

Like I’ve already said, I love the products that you guys put out, I love the technology and everything about it. It is really good stuff and I know that you guys are always developing more, which is great. I talk about iStill all the time with people in the industry. Just keep doing what you are doing!