At Iron City Distilling, our sister company is the historic Pittsburgh Brewing Company, which has been in business since 1861. Best-known for producing some classic (and delicious) American lagers such as Iron City Beer and IC Light, they keep themselves pretty busy day-in and day-out.
Their beer is a part of the cultural fabric of western Pennsylvania and the kooky, fun-loving “yinzers” that inhabit the region. Theirs is the beer of coal miners and steel workers as well as the well-coifed hipster bartenders taking pride in the brewing history of the City of Bridges. Basically, there are always orders for beer, and business is good.
One day about two years ago, I was walking down the hallway and passed my buddy Brandon Mayes, PBC’s director of brewing operations. He looked flustered. When I asked him what the problem was, he replied, “Nothing. Just the damn production schedule is messed up again.”
To which I replied, “What the fuck is a schedule?”
To be clear, I was having a bit of fun. Of course, I know what a schedule is—it’s just that I view production scheduling very differently from my brewery brothers and sisters. For them, production is based on orders. In fact, the vast majority of production taking place at PBC is only scheduled if an order comes in. (Not a problem, since PBC is one of the few major breweries currently in growth mode with the majority of their brands.)
As a distiller, I can’t work like that. Sure, we get orders. But the orders themselves are only a small component in how we decide how much to make and when to make it. Whiskey, with its long maturation cycles, simply cannot be “made to order.” Even our gin takes around six weeks to produce, making the order-to-production decision tree more than a little complicated to execute.
For all our talk as distillers about the elevated form of liquid art that we hand-forge in our distilleries and warehouses, it can be easy to forget that making liquor—no matter how high-concept or artisanal—is still an actual business. To ensure there’s a cash flow to support the continued production of our boozy masterpieces, we need to make sure there’s some semblance of a plan.