By David MacDonald L aura, I understand that you and your business partners Rob Heuvel – your husband – and Joe Kelly made the decision very early-on to get behind your vodka, to make it one of you your flagship products. What motivated this decision? LB: While there’s a craze with whiskey and dark spirits, a lot of people are going back to vodka. And vodka has always been the number one selling alcohol – not a lot of people realize this. It goes into so many mixed drinks. But now, there’s a craft culture out there that’s looking for vodkas to sip. Among the 25 or so craft distill- eries in Ontario, we’re one of only three or four that is focused on vodka. We didn’t come to the decision lightly. We’re very focused. We took a lot of time, seven years in fact, doing research on every conceivable aspect of the industry before we got off the ground. It turns out that a lot of companies produce vodka as something to do while they’re waiting for whiskey. Whiskey takes three years; it’s a huge capital investment – and you need revenue. A lot of companies actually don’t produce the vodka; they buy it commercially. They buy neutral grain spirit – NGS – and either quickly re-distill it or just cut it and make it vodka. Some of them cut it to make vodka in order to make gin, so their gin might be their own recipe of botanicals but it’s made with NGS. Our vodka is vodka – nothing is repurposed. We make our vodka with corn and we do get the question often, ‘Why not potatoes?’ There’s a couple of different reasons for that. In PEI and BC and Western Ontario where they make potato vodka, they have easy access to potatoes. We don’t grow potatoes in Eastern Ontario; we’re a
PMS 534 C - Nautical Blue
PMS Warm Gray 4 C - Gray meets cool and warm
PMS 7624 C - Canadian aged red
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • NOVEMBER 2017
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