No matter how prepared someone is to start a new business, there are always surprises along the way. This is doubly so when that new business is a distillery: on top of laws and regulations that, seemingly, no one has ever heard of, trying to get local governments on board in places where distilling isn’t commonplace, and figuring out marketing, while running the rest of the show, the actual mechanics of cooking, fermenting, and distilling can vary wildly in different geographic locations.
When Al Laws, founder of Laws Whiskey House in Denver, Colorado, first brought his new distillery online, he had a suspicion that the elevation, one mile above sea level, would affect his processes. His so-called ‘Bourbon Yoda’ Bill Friel, Kentucky Bourbon Hall-of-Famer retired from Barton Distillery, knew the…