The market may be tough for distillers these days, but some are finding success by taking to heart the mantra of “own your backyard.” These distillers are focusing on creating unique, memorable experiences for their consumers on-site—more of a “make your living room amazing” philosophy. Few producers have embraced this philosophy more than Hard Truth Distilling in Nashville, Indiana.
Building Visceral Memories
The business started in 2009 as Big Woods, a brewpub and gastropub. The owners expanded with more restaurants, then with the Quaff On beer brand in 2012, and Hard Truth in 2015. The current Hard Truth experience didn’t start to take shape until 2017, when they broke ground on the current facility. It’s located on a 325-acre working farm, with 90 of those acres zoned for commercial operations.
“We knew we wanted to have a lot of space,” says Ian McCabe, president of business development. All that room lets them offer a wide variety of experiences for their guests. They knew from building the other parts of the business—as many as nine restaurants at one point, down to seven now after some consolidation—that they wanted to make it memorable.
“We found that creating an experience with the consumer that built a real memory and a real neural pathway, … [meant] they could connect to [it] in a viscerally significant and emotional way,” McCabe says. “It built a brand loyalty and a sense of immediacy between the customer and the brand. And you do that one person at a time. So, building Hard Truth, it was always the vision to create a place where the guest experience was a direct embodiment of our brand.”
There are a variety of ways to take in Hard Truth, including:
- Visitors can sign up for the Get Lost tour, where they ride shotgun in a side-by-side ATV to tour the campus, learn about the company and the history of whiskey in Indiana, and enjoy some tastings along the way.
- There are regular distillery tours as well as an Inside the Barrel tour for a more in-depth look at Hard Truth, the local history of distilling, and the opportunity to thief a barrel sample.
- Cocktail classes are popular among visitors who are curious about how to best use the spirits they find on-site, and they’re also an accessible entry point for the numerous bachelor/bachelorette, retirement, and other parties that come through, McCabe says.
- For the Tiki Cruise option, the staff drives visitors out to the on-site “beach” that the distillery built; it’s alongside the retention pond they had to install for fire suppression.
“We built the pond, and we were looking at it and we said, ‘We should have fun with this,’” McCabe says. “So we built a pavilion, we filled it up with sand, we have a tiki bar, and we take you out on a pontoon boat that’s dressed up in palm fronds. You get some cocktails, and you putter around, and you learn about the history of tiki and how that relates to whiskey, and it’s just a good time. We try to have these sorts of tiered sets of experiences, between a distillery tour that is informative and fun and educational—and any whiskey lover [or] any Joe Schmoe off the street can enjoy—to these more advanced single-barrel experiences, and the things that are more pure fun.”
Hard Truth even offers an opportunity, via the Moonshiner’s Experience, to make and take home a bottle of your own unaged whiskey. When they established the current location, a lawyer friend explained that they could legally set up a still in the forest and distill publicly. So, they built a whole package around it—visitors check in at 8 a.m., enjoy a big cinnamon roll and spiked coffee, head down to their cabin at Shiner’s Creek to run a finishing distillation, take an ATV tour, enjoy a campfire lunch that generally includes cornbread and some sort of game (such as venison or rabbit stew), make some moonshine cocktails, and finally customize the label for the bottle they’ll take home.
Revenue Streams that Lead to Sales
Those experiences are all on top of the distillery’s day-to-day operations, which include a 300-seat restaurant, outdoor music venue, and pop-up bars around the property.
Recent events that Hard Truth has hosted include “The Charred Truth,” a qualifying competition in June for the World Food Championships, and a barbecue competition in late July. The distillery also hosts an annual harvest festival in the fall.
“When we get really busy, we’ll see somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people a week come through,” McCabe says. “It is a huge benefit to the bottom line. It’s just great to have multiple streams of relatively immediate daily revenue. And I think we’ve seen a lot of distilleries leaning into finding ways to build revenue streams outside of distribution, outside of that incredibly competitive war.”
He says Hard Truth sees a direct connection between their success in distribution and their success in building a memorable on-site experience, whether it’s one of the tour programs, catching a concert, or just enjoying a great dinner and cocktails.
“Having a diverse set of experiences that really give everybody a chance to engage with our brand has been huge for us, and it’s propelled our growth in a real way,” McCabe says. “It’s not an accident that our best markets are within three, four hours of our distillery space. Folks come here from those places. We love that they come here, and they spend a little money, but I love more that they’ll go home, they’ll remember the experience, and when they’re out in the market and they see our product there, it’s not just another new whiskey or another new spirit on the shelf.”
That correlation between Indiana tourism and retail sales is real, he says. “The more people that we engage here and have a great time with here, within the beating heart of the brand, it just pumps them out into the blood vessels of the American body, where they can find our products near their home.”
Photos: courtesy Hard Truth
An Invitation to Join the Creativity
One of the most unusual stand-alone events at any distillery in the country takes place in Denver at Stranahan’s, which in May celebrated the 10th anniversary of its annual Cask Thief experience.
Cask Thief originated as a small, word-of-mouth opportunity for local single-malt whiskey fans to enjoy some of the individual barrels that go into Snowflake. (The annual release of that whiskey is an event in itself, with “Stran-a-fans” traveling across the country and camping out for days at the distillery for the chance to get in line.)
Snowflake is an annual exercise in blending, where the Stranahan’s team works to push the boundaries of malt whiskey. However, head blender Justin Aden says there hadn’t been an avenue for consumers to try the individual components that go into the blend. In 2018, Cask Thief jumped from that small, low-key event into a full-blown ticketed experience that showcased Stranahan’s global reach in sourcing barrels.
These days, the event features food trucks, live music, and the chance for customers to wander the distillery campus largely unhindered. Aden curates a selection of barrels—generally unique barrel finishes—which are spread out over the grounds for visitors to sample (and potentially buy a bottle or two).
The Stranahan’s team works hard to minimize redundant barrels from year to year. It would be easy for half the selections every year to be repeats—things such as port, sherry, and red-wine finishes—but Aden says he scours the world for interesting opportunities to pair their malt whiskey with an outside-the-box finish.
Those barrels are often one-of-a-kind opportunities; the 2025 Cask Thief featured barrel finishes of sweet Hungarian Tokaj wine, chicory liqueur, Spanish orange wine, Colorado sour ale, Texas sotol, and more. They sourced and filled some of those barrels two years ahead of time, Aden says, with that event specifically in mind.
“We’re really pushing the envelope and casting a wide net, looking for really creative barrels—specifically for Cask Thief—so we don’t just have repeats,” he says. “It’s been a big challenge, but it’s also been a lot of fun when you really dive into it and you explore the entire world, not just things you can get your hands on easily.”
Aden describes looking back at the list of Cask Thief selections over the past 10 years and seeing things that were likely unprecedented at that time, such as a release called Sherry Garcia—a single-malt aged in a sherry barrel, then in a tequila cask.
“That kind of creativity, I think, was such a fun draw for the fans to say, ‘I might have just had a whiskey that’s one-of-one on the planet,’” he says. “I think the public and our fans really latched onto it because it was such a novel experience. We did some wacky barrels, and a lot of those aren’t really commercially viable on a national scale. [But] that’s secondary to what Cask Thief [is] about, which is just letting people know how much we appreciate them, letting them feel part of this thing that we’ve had going for 21 years, and really just having some fun altogether as a community.”
Showing Appreciation to Loyal Customers
Aden says the response continues to grow. Stranahan’s broke records for both visitors and bottle sales, hosting about 1,200 ticketed guests for Cask Thief in 2025 and selling about 2.25 bottles per person.
Lander Otegui, executive VP of marketing and innovation at the distillery’s parent company, Proximo Spirits, says that 90 percent of attendees were at previous Cask Thief events, and that 10 percent of attendees traveled there from outside of Colorado.
“We want everyone who attends Cask Thief to walk away with the most memorable whiskey experience they have ever had,” Otegui says. “That feeling doesn’t just get them to buy a bottle tomorrow—it builds a loyal customer for years to come.”
Aden says many attendees now go straight to the merchandise line before tasting anything, so they can buy their full allotment of bottles before things start to sell out. He adds that the distillery could likely accomplish something similar without all of the pomp, but that would undermine the ultimate goal of Cask Thief.
“We could just do a rare-bottle drop,” he says. “You tell people to line up and nine o’clock, we start selling bottles, but that’s not what we wanted to do. We really wanted to show what’s fun about this industry, why we got into this industry, and really show our fans appreciation. We wouldn’t have any of this without our fans—‘Thank you so much for your support. Here’s some cool shit we’ve been doing. Hope you like it.’ If you don’t remember to have fun with this, what are you really doing it for?”
Photo: Courtesy Stranahan’s
“Let’s Get People in the Door”
When Jonathon and Katie Nelson decided to buy a local Minneapolis distillery in 2024, the first challenge was to build the brand.
Jonathan also owns an event-marketing agency and has experience with packaged consumer goods. Flying Dutchman Spirits had been around since 2016, but the Nelsons found that the vast majority of potential customers were unaware of the distillery.
“When we were going through the purchasing process, it took four months,” Jonathon says, “and during this process, 99 out of 100 people we talked with had never heard of it—even people that live five minutes from here.”
The Nelsons worked to reduce the cost of their packaging, redesign the labels, and overhaul the distillery’s physical space. They put all-new furniture in the tasting room and added accent lighting to upgrade the experience. Jonathon says the vibe has gone from “college dorm room” to “cigar lounge.”
“Some people said they thought it was cool because it almost looked like a coffee shop,” he says, “but it really didn’t match the pricing model of the cocktails. It just didn’t seem very upscale.”
They also added a half-dozen 85-inch TVs and a stage for live music, along with lighting and a PA system, as well as food—with a focus on shareable things such as pizza, chips and guacamole, and Bavarian-style pretzels.
With the distillery’s presence refreshed, Jonathon says, the focus is attracting guests and building awareness of the distillery.
“We handed out over two million buy-one-get-one cocktail coupons in the last 12 months, without an expiration date on them,” he says. “We get people that grabbed coupons from events last year in September that are coming in now. Let’s get people in the door, get them signed up on the rewards program, and then push out once or twice a month some type of offer for them, to push them back into the cocktail room so we can continue the brand-awareness component.”
They’ve added cocktail classes to the tasting-room experience; it includes a tour of the distillery, food, a T-shirt for certain classes, and instruction on how to make six different cocktails.
“We go through some background information, history on our spirits, on the brand,” Jonathon says. “Show them all the spirits, then give them a list of a couple of drinks that they can make, and then we teach them how to make them with our bartenders and give them the recipes. When we teach them how to make the drinks, they typically will buy a bottle when they leave.”
Those classes have been so popular that Flying Dutchman has had to add time slots, even restructuring their retail hours to accommodate more sold-out sessions of 12 guests each. To-go cocktails were also popular early in the Nelsons’ tenure there, but the program has been shelved for the moment because it was time-consuming and because they’re working hard to keep enough product in stock.
Flying Dutchman hosts a variety of other events, such as a ticketed Halloween party, an ugly-sweater party with Santa, Valentine’s and “Galentine’s” Day events, and private parties. Brand-building efforts extend off-site to local events, where they offer spirits samples, hand out BOGO cards, and wave the company flag.
Building the Brand for Retail Sales
So far, those efforts are bearing fruit. Jonathon says they generated more than 3,000 new registrations for the distillery’s rewards program in the first 13 months they owned the distillery. There are days when they max out the tasting room’s 125-person capacity.
“It’s been nice to see that,” he says. “I’ve done some secret shops around the Twin Cities at other distilleries on some of our Friday and Saturday nights. They might have 12 people there, and we’ll have 75 people at ours.”
Jonathon says that on-site success—including a 50 percent jump in tasting-room sales—has fed a tenfold increase in distribution sales, as well. Under Minnesota law, tasting room visitors are allowed to buy only one bottle at the distillery—so, they encourage customers to buy at liquor stores, where there’s no cap.
“Brand awareness is the biggest thing,” he says. “As we continue [building] that brand awareness, we’ll then be able to start pushing them to purchase our products in retail.”