We love being a small-batch craft distillery for so many reasons, including how we can flex our creative muscles and create new unique products, but there are also some downsides when it comes to running products in small batches. We've been asked over the years why the taste of some of our products has changed over time, so we wanted to provide a few reasons why this may be the case.
Our current bottle of Wheat Whiskey above the barrels aging the new batch which will be ready in the next couple of years
We improved the recipe. We'll sometimes update the recipe of a spirit if we think the new recipe is overall better. This may include the final proof of the product being changed, the addition or subtraction of the amount of an ingredient, or the amount of time in the barrel overall. We always strive to improve for the better and we take in feedback from everyone, so if we find there's a trend in the demand for a change of a spirit, we'll often follow through on it.
Sourcing with local ingredients. Our ingredients for our spirits come from businesses as local as possible so we can support our Michigan community. Sometimes our demand for an ingredient doesn't always match the supply of our partners, so we have to transition to make a stop-gap solution, which can cause a change in overall flavor. Whenever this happens we never want to decrease the quality of our spirits, but sometimes it's just different.
Every distillation run is always a little different. We may have the processes down to a science at this point with our products, but we can't always account for every variable that may happen at each step of the way in the distillation process. This can include anything from the potency of the botanicals we use in our gin, to the flavor of the cherries in the concentrate for our cherry products, to the starches in the grains breaking down in the mashing stage. Each step carries a number of potential variables that we most often catch and can adapt, but there can always be a variable that we don't account for until we do that final taste test.
The quality of products we source. Every vendor goes through the same issues we go through when sourcing materials for their products, and sometimes we end up drawing the short straw when they have issues. This is no fault to anyone but nature most of the time as these issues often revolve around raw materials like the weather that the grains grew in or the wood used to make the barrels. Sometimes nature has its own plans, and we most often get amazing quality products due to the reputability of our partners, but they too have unforeseen variables they can't always account for in their own business
Every day is a little different here, and every product is unique in its own way due to the small batch distilling it goes through. It's why we always suggest buying a bottle if you like a spirit when coming to our tasting rooms not only because we can run out of our spirits very quickly, but because each batch is uniquely its own. We also don't always make a product again once it's gone so that we can move on to making different products to sell, which is one of our big pros in our opinion. If there is a large demand for the return of a product, that's when we'll start adding it to our regular rotation of spirits. If you want to find out which products are available now and which ones will be leaving soon head to one of our tasting rooms and try a flight for yourself!
