SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
NOVEMBER 2017
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. They run one of only three farm-based artisan distilleries in Ontario. A great deal of the wheat for their spirits comes directly from an on-site 80-acre early postcolonial- era grainfield. And all the homegrown happiness happens on the island county of Prince Edward at the eastern end of Lake Ontario – just two hours northeast of Toronto. “Prince Edward County often gets more than 600 000 visitors a year,” explained Jeremiah Soucie, the co-owner of and Head of Distilling at Kinsip House of Fine Spirits in Bloomfield, Ontario. “We don’t have to market that much; people find us. It would be an understatement to say that we’re in a very alcoholic beverage-intensive area. For a long time it’s been a growing and competitive wine region; in the recent past it’s become famous for craft beer and cider – and now it has one distillery. We want all those people off-island who are buying our products and who haven’t yet had the chance to visit us to know just who we are.” Who they are is a story that doesn’t begin in Prince Edward County.
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By David MacDonald J eremiah, who is the ‘we’ in Kinsip and how did it all come together? JS: In terms of ownership, it’s a collaborative effort between me, my wife Sarah, her brother Michael and his wife Maria. We purchased the distillery from a husband and wife team here in Bloomfield. It was previously called 66 Gilead Distill- ery, which is the address of the farm. The idea of buying a distillery wasn’t ever a consideration for us because we were initially looking to start one from scratch – we just didn’t know where. The stars aligned for us, really. Prince Edward County had been a meeting place for our young families. My wife and I and our two young children lived in Ottawa at the time
and Michael and Maria and their two young ones, well they still live in Toronto, and so it was an ideal halfway point for getaways. I’ve been fulltime from day one; the other three have day jobs. Michael and Maria commute in quite often – everyone holds a piece to the puzzle. When we took-over the existing distillery it was the first sale of a craft distillery in Ontario. To transition the brand to Kinsip has been an adventure to say the least – and the previous owners have been very helpful over this past year. We’ve positioned the brand quite broadly, and I’m not just talking about what you see online.
We don’t have distillery in the name for a reason. We didn’t
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“For a long time it’s been a growing and competitive wine region; in the recent past it’s become famous for craft beer and cider – and now it has one distillery.”
want to seem like the xyz craft distillery because that’s something everyone can do – that’s kind of ubiquitous now in the distillery world. We were also mindful of things that could be co-opted by the big guys. We do talk about and promote small batch production, but big guys can also do small batch production – it’s all relative. Their small batch may be our yearly production, for example. I always say talk is cheap, which is why educating people who come to the distillery is so important. But that’s a fine line, especially when your philosophy is to allow the product to speak for itself. I don’t work the tasting room often – it’s not my main position here – but I do fill in from time to time. I’m really mindful to not explain to people who’ve just completed the tour what they’re going to taste or smell. I really want the people to judge the spirits on their own merit. I don’t want to personally influence their judgments in any way, shape or form. Being in wine country, people are often passing through on tours of the region and it’s not uncommon to see some grab a glass and start swirling. It’s almost like it’s a habit or an impulse; if there’s alcohol in your hand, it must need swirling. With any spirit, you don’t want to swirl it. You swirl wine to open it up and let alcohol evaporate from it. When you start swirling a 45 percent whiskey, you’re going to get a lot of alcohol evaporating – then you stick it in your nose, it burns, and you’re instantly turned-off.
about spirits. Even if people aren’t going home and drinking our product, we still want them to know how to better enjoy them in general. The first thing I notice when I visit Kinsip.ca is that it’s minimalistic, user-friendly. In no way do you insist upon the product, which speaks to your “talk is cheap” phi- losophy, Jeremiah. If anything, the website is demon- strative of your daringness and your confidence in your products: You advertise right there on your homepage
We really do take the time to educate because we care
what upcoming expos and markets that Kinsip will be attending. JS: I’m exaggerating when I say that we don’t have to market the brand; we’re just very cautious of how we go about doing it. In terms of the festivals we attend, we align our- selves very much with food and drink festivals – but not all of them. We align ourselves more with likeminded people within the OCDA, the Ontario Craft Distillers Association. We’ve certainly connected withdifferent distilleries around the province that share similar values. And sometimes it’s not necessarily distilleries that share similar values. We’ve made connections with businesses that are making small-scale cocktail syrups, cordials, that sort of thing – and there’s a new Caesar mix out there called Walter, which is the craft answer to Caesar mix. We partner with them because they need spirits to sell their products and conversely, for us, we don’t just show up with a bottle of gin or vodka. That’s not to say that our spirits can’t stand alone, because they can, but that’s not what the name, the brand, represents. The ‘Kin’ in Kinsip speaks to the idea of family and friends; the ‘sip’ speaks to cocktail culture and enjoying fine spirits with friends and family. It’s kind of the antithesis of the bottoms-up culture. We took a long time to make it; we’d prefer that you took a bit longer to drink it. So interacting with the cocktail culture, the mixolo- gists out there, is an integral part of your business plan moving ahead? JS: It is, but we don’t have the licensing to be full-on serving cocktails here – yet. But the province is still relatively new to the craft distilling scene. We’re just getting Direct To Licensee in Ontario, which means sales directly to bars and restaurants for spirits. It also means that as a craft distillery, you need to have your products on the shelves in the LCBO for a bar to buy it. Why I say that is simple: for a lot of small craft distilleries, being out there and repping your product is hard to do. There are only a very small handful of places that have spirits reps, people for whom that’s their fulltime job. We don’t currently have that as a fulltime position, but we’d love to get to that point. It would really help influence and market to the bar and restaurant scene in addition to our LCBO listings. They’re a couple of years old and they’ve basically gone coast-to- coast with distribution.
tend to pop-up on the radar quite frequently in this part of the province. That’s the cool thing with craft products right now, there’s such a demand for them that people are actively seeking them out. In terms of networking with the mixology side of the spirits world, we’ve had some pretty colourful experiences. We’ve hosted, and are hosting more in the future, mixology work- shops. “We’re so close to Lake Ontario and to New York State, so you can imagine this was a pretty busy county during Prohibition in the US.” There’s a couple out of Ottawa who’ve taken an old RV – a cool, funky 1970s model – and made it into a mobile bar and we’ve hosted them. They travel where they’re needed and do mixology workshops. They get a group of ten or so to sign-up – I believe it is around $50 for two hours – and you get a real hands-on workshop. You learn proper techniques and presentation – it’s really well-rounded. Opportunities like that really show us that we’re making good, versatile products – including our line of cocktail bitters.
While it adds something to our ability to give recommen-
We have an LCBO listing and we’ve certainly been picked- up by a lot of bars and restaurants.
The sectors of the service industry that are interested in craft distillery products are constantly scanning the isles everyday looking for what’s new, what’s local – so you
dations on how to enjoy our products, at the end of the day people are going to use them how they choose. In many ways, our recommendations are not for the mixology crowd; rather they’re for people who are looking for direc- tion and for something new. These are people who want to be educated; they want to learn how to enjoy spirits in a more refined way. They don’t want to just put a gin and tonic together; they want to learn how to build a drink and how to use ice properly. “The ‘Kin’ in Kinsip speaks to the idea of family and friends; the ‘sip’ speaks to cocktail culture and enjoying fine spirits with friends and family.” You know, it really is. We’re actually at a place right now where we’d love to do more – it could be a business by itself right now it seems. People are always looking for venues. The buildings and barns are well suited for events. We have a hops barn, for instance, that’s similar to an old tobacco drying barn. We’ve hosted one wedding and a handful of parties and from time-to- time a stretch limo willth arrive with bachelor or bachelorette parties for tours. Jeremiah, your white spirits are available in more than 30 provincial liquor stores, LCBOs. Is it safe to say that the grain-to- glass paradigm is gaining ground? JS: Without a doubt. We have an 80-acre farm that we are actively growing our own wheat in. We’re getting some help to do that now, but we will be growing more and more of our own grain in the future. In fact, in the late 1800s Prince Edward County was renowned for its barley and hops and we’re looking at restoring that reputation. When we talk about grain-to- glass, it’s really quite simple: we start with the raw grain right here in Prince Edward County and we’re with it every step of the way to the bottle. We’re consistently influencing the spirit; we’re trying to makeing it better. Our tour is designed to let people look under the hood, so to speak, of the distilling world. We want to let the consumer know that we’re not making something “crafty” like so many of the big brands that use neutral grain spirits, which is highly concentrated ethanol, in their recipes. We’re definitely going to host more of these events in the future. The property, the farm, speaks for itself. Hosting events must be a real pleasure.
turning these ingredients into a high-quality spirit – and that’s no fault of theirs. Right now in Ontario there are 10 times as many craft breweries as there are craft distilleries. The 10 percent, or so, of people who come who have visited a distillery before have only visited a big one in Scotland or in the US, which aren’t nearly as thorough and educative. There’s a lot to take-in on the tour. We have a combina- tion of whites and darks, but I would have to say that our flagship spirit is our gin – we actually struggled to keep it in stock this past summer. Our vodka is also quite good and very popular. All of our white spirits are made using whole wheat, which is unique considering that so many gins and vodkas are made with corn. In craft distilling you want to be different – but not too dif- ferent. You’ve got to have vodka; you’ve got to have gin, but you have to find other ways to stay fresh. Once you’ve proved that your core products are solid you have a bit more of a leash to experiment with interesting supple- mentary products like we have with our barrel-aged maple syrup and bitters. We’ve also found success with infused vodka – it’s pine-in- fused – and it’s somewhat similar to a gin both in flavor and how we produce it. It’s important to note with products like this, that it’s not flavoured but infused. Flavoured spirits simply have something added to them after they’ve dis- tilled; our infused vodka become very herbaceous, rather than sugary, flavoured vodkas from the big brands. Coming from the Atlantic Provinces, I feel obliged to ask you Jeremiah: Does Kinsip have rum in the lineup? Our rum falls on the dark side of our product line. All of our dark spirits are bottled at a pretty high percent. Our rum, for example, is 45 percent alcohol by volume. We actually have some of the oldest craft rum in the province, but I have to say that the rum is the only thing we make that isn’t truly made entirely from local ingredients. What is interesting is the history of rum running in this area. We’re so close to Lake Ontario andto New York State, so you can imagine this was a pretty busy county during Pro- hibition in the US. The whole wheat provides a sweetness that is unfor- gettable.
In addition to the rum, we have a blended whiskey, com- prised of corn, wheat rye, and barley.
The barley is peated or smoky, which is essentially Scotch, so the flavour profile is familiar yet unique.
There’s also our straight rye whiskey. We actually use a pinot noir barrel to finish the whiskey, which gives it a nice subtle flavour. It’s turned out so nice that we’ve committed to more barrel- finishing in the future using different barrels
When we make gin, for example, it’s gin from start to finish. People largely don’t understand the alchemy involved
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such as our rum or brandy.
To add some sweetness, we even have a brandy. While it’s not a popular spirit everywhere in Canada, we have to consider that we’re in wine country. There’s a demand here and there’s also grapes and everything we need to make a good brandy. Our maple whiskey is another quality sweet spirit. For that, we empty out our corn whiskey barrels and fill them with maple syrup. We age the syrup and then bottle it as Whisky Barrel Aged Maple Syrup. It’s barrel-aged and what you have to consider is that when you empty out a barrel, it retains up to seven liters of the liquid content, the spirit, in the wood. It allows you to add other ingredients and draw out the influence of the barrel. Following that, it is filled back up with our whisky which is around 4 years old. It then takes on the characteristics of the maple that was in the barrel. It is whisky first and maple second. It is has a subtle sweetness and hint of maple. I’m sure there’s more than one reader whose taste buds are screaming for a taste of Kinsip after that, Jeremiah. I see that online purchasing and shipping is streamlined beautifully at Kinsip.ca, but I’m wondering what LCBOs carry your spirits – which region in Ontario? Well, on that note, we really never planned on being in the distribution business; but, it allows us to be very specific and choose those places we want to target. We were able to work with a LCBO agent and essentially find those high-performing stores across the Ottawa region, in the GTA – primarily downtown – and here in Prince Edward County. Most of our stores are in Toronto. In fact, our spirits have done so well at those locations that we haven’t been looking for more stores We’ll hopefully continue to add more stores as other LCBO stores see our brand and reach out to us. The key and goal to all of this is getting a general listing. We do have one general listing with our Maple Whisky. With a general listing, the LCBO distributes it where they see fit. The goal is to get a general listing for all of our core spirits. The less time we’re spending coordinating deliveries, the more we’ll have to experiment with new recipes.
For the complete Kinsip lineup, please visit Kinsip.ca/shop .
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KINSIP HOUSE OF FINE SPIRITS
66 Gilead Rd, Bloomfield, ON K0K 1G0
(613) 393-1890
www.kinsip.ca
as spotlighted in the NOVEMBER 2017 issue of SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
www.spotlightonbusinessmagazine.com
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