The Spirit of Grayson College

A new teaching distillery expands student career options and business formation… 

by Andrew Chalk

Just a hop, skip, and an hour up US-75 from Dallas in Denison is a fully-equipped teaching distillery offering an associate degree and a special certificate short course through the college that it is part of, Grayson College. The graduating student will be comfortable making distilled drinks having practiced on whiskey, brandy, gin, agave, vodka, and rum, and be ready to begin their career and enter the job market on the production side of distilling. Augment the distillery courses with business classes and the career possibilities could open up to include marketing, operations management, even an entrepreneurial path to found or co-found a distillery. And with the process parallels and the subsiding market in wine, distilling may offer an alternative or an augmentation of oenology and viticulture skills.

This article is aimed at anyone thinking of becoming a distiller or adding distilling to a winemaking skillset. It looks at the operations involved in distilling, then it goes on to interview experts with long industry experience about the career prospects in the industry. Then it asks those experts about the non-production side of the industry where it emerges there is a consensus that marketing is key.  

The Process of Distillation

Without going to the lengths of taking a full certification, I spent a day at Grayson in one of the classes at the invitation of Distillation Science Director and Professor Andrew Snyder. It was ‘rum day’. 

Making rum

Rum is essentially distilled molasses or sugar cane. Molasses  starts as something like the gunk in the bin below. Run the video to see the bubbling from the gas released by fermentation. Fermentation is the same chemical formula whether it occurs in the making of wine, beer, sake, or spirits. Sugar in a base liquid is converted to alcohol and carbon dioxide. This raises  the alcohol level from zero to about 6-8%  percent and takes six to eight days. 

The fermented molasses are pumped to the chamber at the bottom of a distillation vessel like the column still shown below. Molasses that the pump does not pull up the hose is cleaned out manually and the spent grain goes to animals, 

The column still has more going on than meets the eye. For example, it contains a surrounding steam jacket. Steam from a low-pressure boiler and fills the jacket. This heats the molasses and its more volatile components evaporate up the column. In the process they cool and condense in plates inside the column. From there they are redirected down a tube away from the still to a collection point. This is done twice. The first run is called the stripper run and all the evaporated content generated is collected. It is a low-alcohol (around 12-15%) distillate that serves solely as the distillation liquid for the second run. 

The distilled liquid from the stripper run is put into the tank, forming the raw ingredient of the second distillation known as the spirit run. This is the run that eventually produces high alcohol distillate (about 65% ABV). However, it is also the stage that demands the most skill of the distiller. Snyder says “The art of distilling comes during the spirits run.  Making cuts is the most difficult part of distilling.  Make the cuts too deep and you have less distillate.  Make them too wide and you include off flavors and aromas.  You’ve got to be like Goldilocks and get it just right”. The first liquid to evaporate in the spirit run contains a lot of methanol. It is toxic so must be discarded. This cut is called the head. The last cut is, likewise, named the tail. It is light, but acceptable, so it is added into the final rum. It is the middle cut, known as  the heart, that forms the bulk of the final product. It contains the most flavor and the alcohol is ethanol. 

A Grayson student tests alcohol levels of a batch

Interestingly, during COVID many distilleries produced hand sanitizer, which was in very short supply. I asked Snyder if this came from the head, putting a waste cut to good use. It turns out most of it came from the hearts. “So I was sanitizing in rum?” I asked. Mainly unaged whiskey (white dog) it turned out, as corn is cheaper than molasses.

The distilled strength, so called cask strength, is reduced to 40% ABV for sale and the final product is bottled and labeled for sale. 

Andrew Snyder checks the still.

A Career in Distilling

The students I met on the course were all very engaged. But what kind of job market awaits them? 

THe still at Ironroot Republic Distilling

The Craft Distillery

I spoke to Jonathan Likarish, Founder/Distiller at Denison’s Ironroot Republic Distilling, which is literally just down the road from the Grayson Teaching Distillery. Ironroot is in the craft sector. They make about 5000 cases/year (on the Saturday morning that I went down with Snyder’s class for lunch you could meet and talk with the founders and senior management in person as they engaged with the public in their packed tasting room). They plan on expanding.

Best characteristics in a young distiller -

“Flexibility. Looking for a willingness to get hands into all aspects of working in  a craft distillery. Analysis, the blending side, lots of sweat.”

Jonathan Likarish - Founder/Distiller Ironroot Republic

Ironroot is developing their internship program in which they have had students from as far away as Scotland. There is a need for more teaching distilleries in Likarish’s view. Their Scottish intern came from Heriot Watt university in Edinburgh where he took a degree in brewing. Ironroot also wants to hire new graduates. What is Likarish looking for in them? “Flexibility” is the word that best summarizes it. “Looking for a willingness to get hands into all aspects of working in  a craft distillery. Analyzing, the blending side, lots of sweat.” he says.

The Texas whiskey distilling industry has been booming. There were six distilleries when Ironroot was founded in 2014, now there are 50. Balcones, Waco, was acquired by the world’s largest distiller, Diageo who are expanding its sales internationally. TX Whiskey, Fort Worth, was acquired by Pernod Ricard. Giant, Houston, has grown to be the largest distillery west of the Mississippi and Garrison Bros., Hye, the first legal Texas whiskey distillery, has boomed while remaining independent. These kinds of industry facts translate into a good job market for students in distilling. Likarish cautions that the market is in what might be called a pause right now and there may be signs of a “Bourbon glut”, but he is optimistic about the long term. Interestingly, I saw an investor presentation a few weeks later that was predicated on a serious bourbon shortage. Estate Barrels “invests in the Predictable Value of Aged Bourbon”. Part of the model is overseas demand swamping the US industry’s ability to increase output. That is a great scenario for jobs!

The Larger Distillery

Chad Auler brings the perspective of the large distiller and marketer. He co-founded Deep Eddy Vodka in 2010 in Dripping Springs. Five years later, he and his partners sold it to Heaven Hill Brands when it was producing over half a million cases/year.

After some time figuring out his next move, he co-founded Milestone Brands in 2016 which sells multiple spirits. The two largest brands are Dulce Vida tequila and Empress Gin.  Their fastest growing brand is Empress Gin. It is the 5th largest-selling, super-premium gin in the USA. Milestone bought it in June 2022 and has nearly doubled sales in two years. Interestingly, although a multi-spirit company, Milestone owns no production facilities. Chad’s interest and expertise is in marketing. Building brands. While stressing the importance of an excellent product, he emphasizes that marketing is crucial too. So Grayson distilling students may want to complement their distilling knowledge with marketing classes. 

Auler’s life took a huge shift this year when his father, founder of Fall Creek Vineyards and the man who created the Texas Hill Country AVA, passed away suddenly. His mother asked him to step in as CEO, a departure from his previously independent career path. 

Now he has run a distillery and a winery. Here is a Sherman’s March through some of his findings:

• He finds wine marketing currently much more “traditional” than spirits marketing. Spirits marketing gives the producer much more scope than wine marketing. He hopes to bring some ideas from the spirits world to the wine world (but wants to keep them close to his vest for now);

• Spirits success can be almost instant (witness the growth at Deep Eddy and Empress Gin). By contrast, Chad describes wine as usually “a long slog”; 

• For Texas wine, it is also “in state”, whereas Milestone’s spirits are in multiple countries;

• Hiring young marketers into either spirits or wine he would look for the same thing: social media expertise;

• He sees crossovers in production of certain spirits and wine too. For example, tequila and its treatment of the agave piña vs. a winery and its treatment of grapes. So distilling students may wish to pick up enology and viticulture classes. Grayson offers both (and is a consistently underrated creator of Texas winemakers);

• A positive note for students: he is optimistic on the spirit industry’s growth in the next 5-10 years. And, in response to my explicit question, he does not see the neo-prohibitionist movement as a long-term threat.     

The Wine and Spirits Producer

Spirits production jobs are going to be more stable than wine production jobs in the opinion of Lee Fuqua, founder of Fuqua Winery and Duckworth Distillery in Dallas TX. He shares the optimism of the two other industry experts about the industry’s growth prospects in Texas and the country as a whole. 

An Encouraging Picture

The Grayson Distillery and industry experts taught me a lot about the distilling business. I started out motivated by the downturn in wine sales and the negative effects it could have on people entering the industry. What I found was that a career pivot to spirits, or the augmentation of winemaking skills with distillation skills could help ensure continuing career success.