A few thoughts about the journey so far and the 'business' side of things-
Still size: We are on 100L. I think most people would say 'go bigger'. We started with this because the model was affordable enough for us to start up - but it's clear that going forward, this will have to increase. I think Larry suggests a minimum 380L boiler for distillery to really make sense. I would say that feels about right. Making gin (as we are initially), I think we can get away with a smaller kettle at the start, as the output of saleable product for the input of your time is much greater. Our first foray into making a semi decent quantity of whiskey - is that at the moment, the time and labour involved on the smaller still means that it will not really be profitable or scalable on the current equipment. We are limited by both production area (We are in a small, city-centre location) and power supply though, so huge stills don't make sense here. There's a particular type of still that would probably work really well for stripping large quantities of wash whilst being quite power efficient though...and I imagine in the future we will be using one of those for stripping.
The difference between doing this for fun vs. profit - is that as a business, the bottom line REALLY DOES matter, and so decisions that one might make as a hobbyist, would be quite different as a business owner. As a concrete example - I would really like to produce my own neutral, from Portuguese rice, for our gin. At the moment, it just doesn't make sense to do that, for the business. So we buy in NGS instead. The quality of the final product will not be as high as with a perfect, fastidiously produced in-house neutral as the base - but the production effort with the NGS is reduced such that we can market the product at a reasonable price that we think the market will support.
Probably about 5% of the time involved in getting and keeping this business going is going to be actual distilling. I can't just make whatever I want, whenever I want, I always need to think about DOES THIS MAKE SENSE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BUSINESS?
Some similarities between business and hobby distilling exist there though - where, as hobbyists, keeping costs low and improvising and self-building equipment is often the way things are done. In our bootstrapped business model - it's kind of the same.
If I had a huge bankroll, investors, etc etc etc. I would not open the business the way I have. I would probably head right out, buy an iStill, hire someone to operate it, hire some decent marketers to come up with my branding, image etc, and spend my time running other aspects of the business. THAT looks like the best route to making money. However, I've also seen many businesses run like that (particularly breweries), go bust - where the owners were playing with investors money, and probably didn't run things in the way they would have if it was their own cash on the line. Just last night I was reading about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Londo ... ry_Company which seemed like a great idea, pretty well funded, and managed to go into administration in 2020.
The biggest struggle with this, has probably been the emotional one. I have been plugging away at this project since summer 2020 when I started applying to licenses etc, and there are times when I just wish I wasn't doing it, it's just a huge input of energy, time and money.
The thing that keeps me going, is the thought of the light at the end of the tunnel, the reward for all this toil. And I think we're finally getting there. My goal is to be self-sufficient from this, so that I am not reliant on my day job (which I do enjoy!) to support myself.
One more picture of our Milho Rei about to be milled by our little hammer mill:
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