Running a distillery successfully is as much about meeting minimal levels on a lot of specializations as it is about specializing and excelling in just a few. An example? You cannot claim to be the best distillery in the world on all types of spirits, but you can specialize in trying to make the best whisky or vodka or rum or brandy.

You can excel in one category, for sure. But in order to do so, you need all of the bases covered: you need equipment for mashing, fermenting, and distilling; you need barrels; you need to know how to operate a distillery, how to market your products; you need to understand distilling and aging; you probably need to learn how to delegate, as - indeed - there are a lot of bases you need to cover, just to become successful at one spirit category. Too many categories for one person to cover.

Not covering one of the above mentioned fields of expertise or equipment will potentially leave you in big troubles. With distilling knowledge, but without stills, how are you going to make that whisky? With distilled product, but without demand or the marketing savvy to unlock it, how are you going to become successful? And how about you have a distillery but no staff capable of running your equipment?

It is this latter example that triggered us into writing this iStill Blog post. Here is the situation: a new owner to a distillery with iStills has to fulfill an order. The old distiller is no longer employed. The current distiller does not know the iStills and proposes approaches the management is not happy with. Luckily the beer brewers are available for distilling ... only they do not know distilling ... and they have not been trained on the iStills.

After the new management reached out to us, our team (within a day) proposed a plan that included training the brewers and distiller online, helping them out by making one of our most experienced distillers available to them via 10 day parts of support to help them produce the whisky, and by finalizing their training with the iStill Master Distillers Training here in the Netherlands. The proposal weighted both the short-term needs of the new owner and presented a long-term solution for future distilling projects too.

To our surprise, the new management informed us that this would not work, as they were too busy right now! It is interesting to see how some skip what's maybe the most important base skill in a distillery: have people on board that actually know distilling? Others do get it and fully appreciate the amazing set of iStill Services we introduced over the years. It is not just stills we sell, it is actually success that we help deliver on. But it takes TWO to tango, and that wasn't the case in this somewhat sad example.

The answer we emailed the new management? Please see the cartoon underneath: