E261 Paul Lachowich

This week's guest is Paul Lackeridge, who is the director of operations and head to Stiller at Elora Distilling Company. As the first employee hired by Elora Distilling Company, Paul has been instrumental in shaping a company's operations and product offerings. In our interview with Paul, he shared his journey from film production to his extensive background working in the industry, where he has held various roles such as bartending and beer brewing before eventually becoming a craft distiller. We talk about the current state of craft, beer, and spirits.

We discuss the industry challenges, product development, and the importance of personal engagement in promoting and selling spirits. We cover several of Elora Distilling's approaches to innovation, plus a couple of their upcoming product launches, and we cover a number of other points of conversation as always. You can follow Paul online on his personal Instagram at P. Lackawich, which is spelled P-L-A-C-H-O-W-I-C-H.

You can check out Elora Distilling at Elora Distilling Co. on Instagram and on the web at eloradistillingcompany.com or simply check the show notes for all the links as always. We had a great time talking with Paul, and you'll enjoy this episode as well. Enjoy the show.

And we are back with another episode of the industry podcast. My name is Kip, and this is Dan. And that's me. How's it going?

Great, man. How are you? Oh, still loving life and living the dream. Good for you, buddy.

Thanks, man. Thanks. Great. Yeah.

Try my best. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing exciting to report.

Work is still great. Yeah. Great. All right.

Moving right along. I was on the check to keep on your deposit. I'm not going to get a bit too much. There you go.

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So yeah, in Biblioth is the app for you. And if you are looking to update your cocktail list right now, I might recommend some fine spirits from a Lord of Distillery. And joining us right now is the head to Stiller and Chief of Operations of the Lord of Distillery. Paul, how are you Paul?

You're doing great. Thanks for having me guys. Yeah, thanks for doing it. Thanks for joining us on this lovely Monday evening.

Yes, we want to obviously talk a lot about the story. I think anyone listens to the show and I also work with the Lord of Distillery. So big supporter of all the products there. But before we get into the Lord of Distillery, let's talk a little bit about you Paul.

How did you first get involved in the service industry? So I came to the service industry. My first degree was in film and I was had some success in film. I was doing some freelance jobs in Ottawa at first and then moved to Toronto.

But obviously both when I was in college and then afterwards I needed a way to actually pay the rent. So I got a job at the Alpenicast, which was a small pub in the Rideau Centre in Ottawa. And at the time I was getting sort of freelance jobs in Toronto. So I'd be gone for two weeks, three weeks at a time and going back and forth.

And then I came back from one job and I was like, hey, if you ever want to just move to Toronto. And I said, well, I'm thinking about it. He's like, well, if you do this job waiting for you there, I got you set up at the Alpenicastling on Yonge Street in Toronto. Do you want to head down?

So within like a month I had sleeping on my friends couch. I was moving to Toronto and then kind of worked my way through the service industry from there. I've been bars for about 13 years. Everything from bartender to bar manager running everything.

And then kind of worked from there into the distillery. Were you still doing a lot of film work at that point? Film and TV work? Kind of.

Yeah. So when I first went to Toronto, actually, the other thing about me is that I'm an award-winning film producer. So we did a couple short films and I was, we got one of our biggest ones was called the Curiosity of Penny Parker. And it was in a recipient of the National Street Institute's drama prize.

And we ended up playing at a bunch of film festivals. This was in a very, this was like 2007. So it was like, there wasn't really streaming. Like YouTube was kind of still getting figured out and stuff like that.

So there was film festivals and like TV sales and stuff were still the deal. So we sold to like the movie network and CBC. It's like a five-minute film. And I got to kind of travel North America that way.

We went to New York and California, Rhode Island a couple of places around North America and was doing the film festival scene. Things like that. Came back. Started a production company.

Was working doing my own freelance stuff. But kind of got to a point where I was bartending and working in the industry to pay the bills. Anyways, sort of fell out of love with film. Sort of decided to focus more on the hospitality part of it and actually try to build a career in that industry.

How does that work when you're traveling all around for the film festival circuit? Like you just go to all these different festivals, show your five-minute film and then like yeah, just maybe tell us a little bit of an idea of what that's like. It's kind of like my experience now getting stuff into the LCBO. It's a very opaque process.

So basically you go in like a site at the time there was a site called Without a Box. I don't even know if it's around it so far removed from it. But it would list every film festival like in the world and send them a DVD or send them a stream or whatever. Sometimes actually sending a beta tapes to some places it was at long ago.

There was still like the industry standard at the time. But then they view it and you'd hear back from them to hear you're in or you just wouldn't hear back from them at all. So we submitted to probably about 50 film festivals and I think we played in about 20 of them. But after that process, basically yeah, we travel down, show it, typically there'd be some sort of festival hotel or something where they'd set us up for the hospitality part of it.

And then you're trying to sell the film to a production company or the ideal goal is like you get recognized as someone who's made a short film and hopefully then you get a deal to make a full length film. Is that sort of how it works? Yeah, I mean there's a couple steps. So first, this is like 2007.

So now it's just like you put something on YouTube and you make it on the off of it. Maybe I don't know. Yeah, so I went to the Curiosity Party using that one as an example. We went to Palm Springs.

We found a distributor and the distributor handled the sales and things like that. And that was kind of the big mountain to climb in the Canadian film industry specifically because there isn't a ton of private investment. It's a lot of grants and like public funding. So you kind of have to build up your resume enough to find your footing in those grants and get yourself into that sort of club.

Like find that next level where you can actually consistently get money to make feature films. So that was kind of for me in the film industry. I did do some like corporate stuff and things like that, but just never really got over the hump of being able to do feature films because it's like we're going from like a budget of like tens of thousands of dollars to millions, right? It's not a lot of money.

That's hard to find that money just out of nowhere, especially in Canada. Yeah, I can imagine. So at some point you get a little maybe disillusioned with the whole process of that and you're like, well, maybe I'll just concentrate on what is actually paying my bills, which is the sort like bartending serving running of our restaurant or whatever. And then at some point you get involved and excited about brewing.

Yeah, yeah. So I was kind of weird. I started at Home Brewing in 2013. I got like a Mr.

Beer Kit at a place in Kensington Market, which is just like hands of syrup, you heat up and you boil and you put in a fermenter and add some really like shitty dry yeast that's been sitting at room temperature for probably two years and you make the stuff that kind of tastes like green apple and isn't that great. But I'm one of those people that's just a lifelong learner. So once I started doing that, I started thinking about it and I started thinking about ways to improve it and I started thinking about how to do that. And then I was like, well, if I want to learn how to be a brewer, then I need to get into the beer world and that kind of led me to Volo in Toronto.

So back, the original Volo location was on Yonge Street. And this is like, if you look at the staff that's worked out of Volo over the years, like you have some of the best brewers in the province, have had like a tour through there. They had a brewing on site, but it's a very much a beer culture place. So just from being there as well as like becoming a nationally recognized beer judge, becoming a person judging national competitions rather and like working on stuff like Sussarone and programs like that, I really got into the beer and brewing aspect of it and grew my career that way.

So it came a time after closing down the old Volo opening up beer, Ria Volo in Little Italy and being kind of on the opening team there. I was in charge of curating the tap list and working on managing the beer program, which is like, for me, at the time it was a dream. It was just incredible to be in a civil, it was a really cool time. It was just incredible to be like steering the ship of like a beer bar that people look to decide to decide what beer to put in their bars.

So I opened up a program where I started collaborating with other breweries and brewing beers with them and getting experienced on professional systems. So stuff like Dominion City and Merit, I went to Quebec at one point and brewed at Dunham. And like when you do these collaborations, there's always like varying forms of involvement. Some of them, they just like, some of them, it's a photo op and then you just spend their drinking.

Some of them actually work on creating a recipe, but I gave me a lot of practical experience. Around 2018, my wife and I kind of made the decision to move out of Toronto to move originally back to calling what where she's from. And I kind of was like, okay, I think I need to like, I've been working my butt off in the hospitality industry for over a decade now. It's time to like kind of take a breath, figure out like what I can do and how I can stay connected to the things I love like hospitality and brewing and beer and drinks and general and how I can do that.

So then I got, that's how I got into brewing. And I was kind of touring around at the time. We eventually ended up down here in Ferguson, my wife, Amy got the job as a general manager of a lower brewing company, but I was working in very at first at Redline. And then I was at Waterloo Brewing and then I went to Block 3 in St.

Jacobs. All the time I was doing courses, reading every book I could about beer, learning about like anything I could basically. And I kind of reached a point in my career where I kind of felt like I, and this is a very cocky thing to say, but I kind of felt like I had learned all I wanted to learn about beer. So I started learning about the stilling, which is wild.

And then once I got, I was living in Ferguson at the time and I saw the job posting for the Lord of Stilling Company. And I had still at home that I was only distilling essential oils and water on, no spirits of course. But I decided to apply for the job and I figured I'd get maybe like a, like maybe if I can get an interview then I can see the distillery and get a tour and this could be part of my learning journey. And I went up basically walking out with the job, his head to store and as the first employee hired there.

So yeah, that's like, I want like you covered a lot there. So we'll back up. So we'll jump too far ahead. Yeah, that's okay.

I do want to talk a little bit more about the beer side though, where you, so you got at some point, how did you get linked up to be a natural beer judge at these competitions? Like how did that, was that just through Volo? No, so the BJP, the beer judge certification program has, it's basically a testing program. It's pretty, it's all run by volunteers, but they're all over the world.

And I was humbling at the time and there's a homebrew club GTA Brews which is still very active. And there was a group of people from there and a lot of them I knew because they had been coming into Volo and drinking and doing stuff like that. Then I kind of linked up with them and we formed like a study group and we got a brewer, Aaron Broadfoot actually ran the, she ran the, she was a BJP judge and she ran the test for us. But we ended up getting together a test and we wrote it and I ended up passing it.

Once you do that, you run a list and you start getting invited to stuff. Okay. So before, so there is like, there's kind of a two step process. It's an online test that you write and then once you write the test, then you can do things kind of as a, you can kind of judge, but more so as a steward, like an assistant.

So you're sitting, listening, learning or listening to more experienced judges. So I started stewarding a couple times. I don't think I stewarded that much because just because of the gap between of like when I wrote the written test and then when I did the actual tasting exam. And then yeah, basically being in Toronto at the time, it was where all the, like both the Ontario and Canadian brewing awards were there.

So I kind of just got filtered into that mailing list and started judging those awards. And so now then when you started doing your own brewing and working for breweries, you're also doing a lot of your own research as you mentioned. You're reading everything you can. Talk to me about the process of like learning how to become good at brewing beer and trying different, sort of like when you got into the process of trying your own creative ideas with it.

Yeah, I mean, like a large part of that was a little bit, like part of that was home brewing because it's one of those things it's for the right person, someone like me. It's just like a whole, I like learning about as much as I can about anything I'm interested in. So I just got really interested in it. I started learning about, it's part of the journey of becoming a beer judge.

I had to learn about basically every style of beer and learn how to judge it because you don't know what you're going to get on the exam and the written exam, multiple choice exam, the entrance exam, they ask you about everything. So learning about different styles and some styles and like, well, I've never tried that before. So I got to kind of try to make it myself for, I've got to seek out breweries and have that. And like we're talking like 2015, 2016, which was like a really, really explosive time for the beer scene in Ontario.

There was breweries opening, there was a lot of excitement around it. The beer scene was just making like exponential growth every month it seemed like. And it was like, I think, I think there was like 10 craft breweries and all of a sudden there was like a thousand. Yeah, and they were doing everything.

Like all of a sudden like, like giant like regional or like province wide breweries are doing like some historic style of Polish smoked wheat beer, like, you know, 100 years ago and stuff like that. So there was a lot of opportunity at the time, which was really great. So very much sorry, as beer goes product of the time and being kind of in Toronto, which had a very vibrant beer scene at the time, it was growing really quickly. Did you feel like when you say that you got to the point where you pretty much kind of got to the point where you felt like there was not much more you could do with beer?

I'm sort of curious about that because do you also feel like beer has like we've done it now? Like everything, I feel like everything is happening. I don't feel like I'm ever going to get a new beer or the new beers that they're trying to put out. They're just trying to expand on something and they just make this shit that's like, I don't know, like just trying to make the same thing happens with cocktails where you're trying to push the envelope so much because everything's been done that you come up with something that actually just doesn't even taste good.

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of thoughts on that. Like one, I think for myself, it'll never feel as exciting because you never go back to your first love. I mean, like you think of like the first time you heard your favorite fan, it seems like, at least speaking for me personally, like you can never hear entertainment for the first time again. Right.

So everything else after that's going to sound boring, right? But yeah, I think a lot of that has to do with kind of the contraction that's been happening. They kind of started during the pandemic. I think breweries, especially crappies had to become more profit focused, especially in our area where we are right now in KW and Guelph.

It's a lot of it's either like big semi corporate entities or like owner operated stuff. And in both of those, what's very important is other breweries are closing is that you have to keep the lights on, you have to pay the bills. So that's why like craft loggers have had a huge explosion. There's other these politics aspect of it too.

It's like in that really exciting time in 2015, 2016, there was a lot of those like almost jackass style beers where it's like, oh, this is a 13% quadruple IPA that no one could possibly enjoy. Right. But the fact is it's got this high alcohol and we can talk about this or that's the example that goes a lot. Or it's like, here's a beer with something in it that no one would like some sort of weird discussing fruit or something that no one would ever want.

Yeah, like did this beer specifically made it taste like hand cream? Like, you know, like. And with my work, and like there was, and I'm not ragging on it, but when I was doing like stuff with casés in Toronto, there was a lot of a lot of people were trying because you have like 300 cast all in one place. So you got to like kind of stick out.

So someone does it. So there was a lot of things where someone would be like, oh, we threw a piece of a skateboard in this year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to try that because that's weird.

And I think that people are kind of like, we're over that kind of start of the beer scene and we've very much more matured and people have kind of settled into what they like. Unfortunately, that's kind of stand out creativity a little bit. And I think, yeah, that big boom of like the crappy or scene in Ontario coming from like nothing to being like huge. Those styles I was talking about before, like those whole ish that smoke we fear from, you know, the 1800s is like people tried that they did it.

They're not going to go home and drink that after work. They're going to go home and drink like a longer and I get whatever they used to. Right? Yeah.

And that's the thing. Right. So it's like the profit thing is important. But it's also like as I was going for a stressor, like, well, yeah, like I like to try and do things, but like, and sometimes Dan will go to the liquor store and buy like a variety of like craft beers and I'll try some of the ones that he has over here or whatever.

And like, I'm like, okay. Yeah. That was super creative. It's interesting.

It actually tastes good. I will drink one of those in my life ever though. And then so how do you like you can't run a business that way? So eventually they all do have to go back to making loggers and pills and like the odd stuff.

Like the stuff that people are going to drink on a regular basis. Otherwise the door is closed. Oh, totally. Yeah.

Yeah. I find that even the RTD markets kind of becoming like that too. And they're ready to the right to poor market as well. There's those like weird ones that like, yeah, you'll buy.

I do the same thing with beer and I do the same thing with the RTD because it's most of my job. So I'll go to the LCBO or wherever and I'll buy a bunch of different ones and I'll try them all. And yeah, totally a lot of those flavors. And just like, oh, that was cool.

They did that. It was an interesting thing. But from an actual like sensory or enjoyment point of view, that's not something that I would consider again. Yeah.

Yeah. And unfortunately, everybody's business is based on return engagement. So it's like, you're making a whole bunch of those beers and people are going to try once. And then that's it.

That's not a very profitable business. Do you find that? So then when you moved into the stealing option, the er, the distilling industry instead, did you, did you find that there's more like to be creative into stealing now than there? And then we've kind of reached the apex of the beer situation?

It's hard. I mean, I find more so in distilling than with beer, like in 2026, I guess, 2026. I find more so in distilling with beer. People are very habit based.

Like one of the, you never want to say this is a fortunate situation, but something that benefited the distillery was the tariff situation forcing people to reconsider what they're drinking. Right. So in the case of our spice rum, which has had like huge growth over the past year, it's because you can't get so jerry's, you can't get cracking. But I found this and like, because we're doing a lot of LCBO tastings right now and you're watching the people come in.

And on a Friday night, it's someone who comes in and they're grabbing their bottles and they're grabbing their two cans of, you know, white claw or whatever. And they're walking out. They're not even looking. It's just like they have grinders on their eyes.

So people are a lot more the idea of going in and tasting a bunch of stuff at a distillery isn't as, isn't as well formed as it isn't beer. So in that case, I think there is growth because I think people will catch on to that as time goes. But I'm curious as to what the tolerance is from the Ontario beverage scene sort of appetite for a bunch of different flavors and different new innovation in that field. Well, and it's also hard to change people's drinking habits in like liquor.

Like I feel like people are more open to trying different beers. I was like, oh, you're just walking the beer shelves. Oh, I haven't tried this one before. It has a cool looking can or whatever.

But like, like you said, if someone drinks vodka, they know Smirnoff, they know it's cheap. They probably don't, they're going to mix it with something anyway. So like they spend less attention to what they're drinking. So talk to me a little bit about that for like a smaller distillery and the challenges of sort of selling your product.

We should mention this. And I do often is that all natural and local ingredients in or as much as humanly possible, local resource ingredients in all our selling products. So as a result, because it's a smaller operation, the price is a little higher. Talk to us a little bit about the challenges of trying to sell that to not just the general public, but also to bars, restaurants, what have you.

Oh, yeah. I mean, and kind of building on what you're, what we were kind of talking about too before we do anything. One thing we found because we're in all our and it's a tourist village. Like it's we, I just did the stats for this at the end of the year for our staff and other people that came in.

We had 23 people, 23,000 sorry. We had 23 to be out of business. 23,000 people buy liquor at our store this year. And of those 23,000, 1800 of them are returning, returning guests.

Everybody else was new. It was their first time walking through the door. And the thing is kind of like, as you were mentioning, buying a can of beer, whatever, it takes, it's three bucks. You drink it or you pour it down the train who cares.

If you're looking at a 750 mill bottle of vodka or gin or whatever like that, that's a big commitment. That's something that like, if you don't like it, then you've wasted, you've wasted a significant amount of money, especially if you find multiple things. So one thing we started doing right off the bat was we do 200 mill sizes of everything. We didn't want to do the 50 mill sizes, the little airplane bottles because we found that if you give people the option to buy that, that's what they're going to get.

And we didn't want to do a bunch of $5 transactions or whatever. So the 200 mill, we find a lot of people are doing, especially at Christmas time, especially in the summer as well. It's all come in and they'll buy like three, four, five, six of those, which is kind of like the same idea as going to like a brewery and buying six different cans. Sure.

Yeah. That's kind of how we dealt with that. That barrier there. We also make sure like in our own place, we really, we offer everything for tasting.

We talk to people about the product. We explain it. When you're in a place like the LCBO or even a bar, you're not there to do that. That's the thing, right?

Yeah. You're relying on a separate staff to do it for you and let's face it, they generally don't. Yeah. And that's one thing that like, I can give the LCBO some grace on that.

Like I want the Fergus LCBO is like literally steps from my house. And I walk into that and our lemon cello is sitting on the bottom shelf in the like, would cure a section and like the staff doesn't know anything about it. So it's like, it's kind of difficult in that regard. But I mean, I think a bar where the staff is there and there is that culture of talking to the bartender, trusting your bartender of getting those recommendations of talking about the spirits.

We really have to make sure that we're communicating with the bars sort of how, what it's about what we're doing because we have had that like in using Fergus as an example, we've been in every bar in Fergus pretty much, but we get in there and they buy one bottle of something and it sits there for six months because they're not selling it or they're not like it's someone has to see it and point to it and say, Hey, what's that actually sell it? And then they don't reorder because, you know, it just it's their end eyes. So we've kind of, we've been working on trying to get that, how to solve that problem, how to get the staff to get the staff to want to talk about it, want to use it in their cocktail menus, want to realize the value of the fact that yes, our rum costs more than Captain Morgan's, but we also use real ingredients. We're hand splicing vanilla or hand grating nutmeg or cracking cinnamon.

We're doing this stuff, whereas, you know, big mass producers are just dumping in flavor serves. That's right. And it's like very, yeah, it's like they're basically making vodka and just adding artificial flavor to most of the stuff that you're tasting there, right? So, and that's why like when I'm going around in my role for the story, that's basically what I'm preaching at all points.

And then I'm always offering to the staff, like if you ever want me to come and just do a tasting with your staff, because the key is to get the staff excited about it. And then hopefully they would push it, right? And if you also think it's put a face to the product helps a lot too. So yeah, that's a lot of, it ends up being a lot of my roles, just driving around and talking to bartenders and showing my face.

Like that helps a great deal. Now it doesn't always lead to sales, but that's the sales game. Yeah, building on what you said, like, so I was down in November for the, I'm from Susam, originally. So I had a chance to go to Northern Ontario, and to do this, the spirit of Sudbury Festival there, which was outside of the super cool.

But we were pouring there and the booth beside me to my left was calling wood. And it was like, it looked like a chef who had just gotten off his shift and was still in a chef's life with his, and Dan on doing samples of that. And then on the other side was 40 Creek. And it was a guy that I had literally seen working outside of the North earlier.

So these were like hired people who like, who didn't send it. So when I started talking to guests there, I said, Hey, like, I'm the, like, these are my products I made, these I'm the founding distiller. I'm the director of operations on a part owner now, like telling them the stuff people were like, grateful. They were like, wow, you came.

Like, it's like other places. And then the same thing we try to do with our LCDO tastings. Like, we can't, we're not going to drive to Ottawa to do a tasting unless we're already there. But like, the founder Marty has been doing all of the tastings in our local area.

He was just down in Toronto doing one too, because people do appreciate that human touch. The fact that like, we're not like some, there are some RTD manufacturers in spirit spaces where they do way more business. So millions of dollars more business than us. And they have less employees and they're basically marketing companies and they freelanced everything out.

Whereas like, we're the ones who are actually there in the trenches who are cornstuffs, we're talking about our stuff who are doing that. And I think people really appreciate that. I think it, I think that's exactly right. Like, I see it during doing my roots as well.

Like people, like, and people like to support local. So that helps as well, especially if you're in that region. Backing up to talking about when you like, like applied for the job as the distiller. So Marty, as you mentioned, is the owner and founder of the story.

And his partner, basically the story I got from Marty is they like to go around the world traveling and drinking cocktails at different spots. And then basically they decided it would be a good idea to open their own distillery. That's, that's the sort of short, the cold notes version of the story. Correct?

Yeah. Okay. So you go in there. You have no distilling experience whatsoever.

You just have brewing experience. No, that's obviously adjacent, but not the exact same thing. Why, why do you think that they thought you were the guy for the job? I mean, the way they had, so they had went to a, so I don't know if they still do that, but last straw, you said you like a learned to distill course because this is before, so you figure in 2020, this is one of the first cohort of distilling students from Niagara College were coming up.

I think maybe I was first or second. It was still very like, there wasn't any formal distilling training in Ontario at the time. Like you had to go out of province or even out of country to learn how to do it. So they were kind of like looking at the option of, do you have someone who's been doing this for a little bit for some time and like knows fermentation, knows recipe design, knows blending because when I was at Waterloo, I was blending RTDs.

That was my job. Like it knows these things. Or do you get a student fresh out of school who might not necessarily have the supervisor or management part of it, plus the systems, the programs. The way that our distillery is set up and kind of this was something that went back to last straw and kind of how they, how they were like coached to do it is that it's pretty, the actual distilling part of it is pretty, I wouldn't say it's foolproof, but it's pretty straightforward.

The hard part is the master's, the fermentation, the recipe design. So me as a, someone with a background in brewing who had, you know, three quarters of the whole position and then could learn how to run the stills and I was doing some home to someone, but I mean, very different. It's, I think from their point of view, that made sense, right? Because, and that's how we do our hiring right now too, because we have gotten students from Niagara College and we've gotten a lot of really great team members who have come out of there.

But sometimes like every year we have a co-op student and that co-op student is never a distilling student. They're food science majors, they're chemical engineers, they're people who like distilling and want to learn about it as a potential career path. We hire brewers, like our head distiller right now is a, our other distiller is a brewer. We hire them because that's the reason that we've kind of become a de facto distilling school in a way, where we're showing our share, if we can bring the right people in and they have that background, the infirmentation science or even just like sanitation knowing how to like, you know, move things like you worked in a, like even a chef would be well, would be well qualified for a distilling job.

We can teach the rest if they're the right person. You know what I mean? Yeah. So that's sort of how I feel like when hiring for my own business as well is like I, there's lots of things I can just teach you myself if you have a certain foundation of basics.

And so like, it comparably would be like, oh, if you have steps of service now because you learned that working at a charcoal restaurant, great. I can teach you everything I need you to do at my spot, right? Like, that's kind of similar. So how much, like, so you hired, so say you hired someone to work on your distilling team there.

How much creativity do those people get in any sort of distilling process and how long does it take for them to sort of get that trust from you? Honestly, it's something that I really, I really want to try and nurture in people and I wish that we've had some really great staff members who have done some really great things. I almost wish that people would take the ball and run with it a little bit more in that way. Like Jeff who's working for us right now is really great at that.

He's come up with some really great products like our maros that we're doing and things like that. But a lot of people are a little bit, I can see how it can be a little bit intimidating to come into an artist's business and being told like, make something. And part of the issue is, and I think people's, everybody's brain works a little differently. Like, for me, one of the main super exciting things about taking the job was that I can walk in and I can shape the program, like in shape.

Like Marty and Mark and the owner say, I had a wish list that they were kind of like, here's what we want you to do now. Go do it. And then like, do it how you do it, right? So basically, not everybody can do that.

It's hard to like walk in and have that process and say that, especially in a way. We had that certain level of confidence in like, but you had a background to do it with the beer thing because you've been doing it for so long. You were confident that you knew how flavor profiles worked and whatever. And that's the big thing, right?

So coming from like, coming out of college, you don't know shit about flavor profiles. You learned in a book, right? It's super scary. Yeah.

So we do get that. It's something that like I have been, like I've been doing this for six years on March 1st, working at the facility. And I'm not going to say I'm at the end of my creativity because I just created a new RTD. We have coming out in a month or so.

But I've done a lot. And the good thing is, is now that Jeff's there, he can kind of start creating more products. I'm ready to like, I want more saptic of them and be like, hey, I have this really cool idea for the spirit. There has to be some rules.

I mean, like, that's something that people want to drink or something. It does cost us the money to create stuff. So you don't want to create something and have it like something you have to dump. Right?

So yeah. But the good thing about distilling, sorry to interrupt you, other than like beer or anything like that, is that we can always read a steal it. That's right. Yeah.

It's never at all. It's never at all. It's always. Yeah, exactly.

One of our like most popular gin, this universe maxim is started with us. Basically, when we were making our martini gin, it took about 11 recipes, something that we were all happy with. And we had to get into the vodka into 95% alcohol. But we found that even at 95%, there was a little bit of that gin flavor left.

So we started using that as the base of another gin. And just from that, like, sort of happy accident, we were able to do that. So now we actually purposefully redistilled gin to make Juniper's maximus, whereas before it was just kind of getting rid of the waste. But we have like this opportunity.

So like my original still that I was like home distilling on, we had that it's a little four liter still. So we encourage people to make their own stuff. Like we had a lot of people coming in and asking for Jegri a little while ago, which is kind of like an Indian style rump. And we decided to try to make a batch of it.

And we did that. And we just sold it. I don't think necessarily we nailed it. And we have like, there's little things that we let people kind of show some creativity with too.

They're fairly low stakes, like things like making a cocktail syrup. We can make our own bitters too. You can make a, you know, you make a one liter batch of bitters and it's 20 bottles. And if it doesn't hit, then it doesn't hit.

But it's not a big deal. I know what you mean too, because that happened to me with cocktail creation at my bars. I just kind of hit the point where I've been doing this for so long. I just need to turn this over to the people I've hired to run the bar for me.

It's like, I can't do it anymore. Like I just felt like creatively spent now maybe. But then sometimes I think, well, maybe I'll get back to it now that I've had a break. But I also feel like I'm so far out of the game that I don't know if I can do it anymore.

So it's like. Speaking from my experience, when you do have those moments, when you have an idea, then something hits though, right? Like, you know, it's a good idea. Because you're like, okay, this is going through all this fog of like, I don't know, like, I don't know if I can do this anymore.

I don't know if I can do this anymore. And I'm like, oh, no, I have this idea and I'm passionate about it. It's like, you know it's something that I don't, maybe not always. But you know it's something that it feels like it's going to work, right?

You want to pursue that, then you know it's something worth pursuing. And it probably never goes fully away, I guess. But I'm just like, I feel like my confidence isn't where it used to be anymore, right? Like, because I haven't been doing it for so long.

I wanted to go back again a little bit. So when you get the job, like, so for me, looking at it this way, I would be like, if I decided to open a distillery or a restaurant or a cocktail bar, I would already have in mind the person I wanted to do it for me. Or I was going to be doing it myself. So I'm just sort of curious of like what you know about Marty.

Like, to me, it's like, oh, they want to open distillery and then they were like, well, we're just going to put up an open post for a guy who's going to make all the booze for us. That seems nuts. And with no intention of ever, like, so no intention of ever doing it themselves, either. They just wanted to have it super cool and like good on them for like building that beautiful space right in the middle of downtown Allory.

It's awesome. Perfect location for it. Like I said, nice little doors now, but like not having any idea who was actually going to make the booze for them. I mean, not to my own horn, but that could have gone wrong so many ways.

So back to it's still there six years later. Like, let's get it over here. That's like great. Yeah, we're not crazy.

Well, may I say they found the right guy, Paul? But like, crazy risk. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's not like it was a cheap endeavor to build a distillery.

Yeah, I mean, like, like, that's like my kind of brain is like how I would operate as a business. I'd similar to you. Like, I'd have something in mind. Like, and that's where like now that I'm I'm in the director of operations where I'm in charge of all departments and we had our chef just like randomly quit.

Uh, the beginning of November, like, no, notice, we was, you know, you can always kind of see the writing on the wall with these things. Just like suddenly suddenly all of a sudden I woke up one day. We didn't have a chef. And so I said, well, you know what?

I guess I'm these next two months in the kitchen trying to figure out how this part of the business works and learning anything about it because you never want to be in that situation for me. Anyways, we're like, you know, if something like that happens where all of a sudden you're you're doing things out of desperation. We're doing things when that's what happened the last time, only enough the last time our chef left, we're just like, okay, who's the first person we can get in here. And we were like really strong.

And we, you know, we did it. We hired well and we kind of we got, we got, we got a successful summer and everything like that. Not knocking. They got it used to work there.

But it was just like, okay, who's the first person we can get in? What do we get them in? What do we need to get them in? And like, I don't like working from a spot of desperation.

So I'm sure you get the stupet is like, if you understand what's going on, then you can always, I don't want to be a chef. I don't want to work in the kitchen. Yeah, this is the first time you have to, at some point, if you're a small business owner, especially in the service industry or service in the Jason industry, at some point you will end up doing all of the jobs. Yeah.

If you're confident when you're doing the job rather than being like staying up and I think like, what am I going to do? Yeah. I'm like going to like get someone to come in. You know, so like, yeah, luckily, we got through December's very busy month for us and now we can take a breath in the January and February and kind of.

Find someone to run our food program and go from there. But yeah, it was a decision I made with the idea of, you know, not creating future stress. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. So, I mean, like I said, luckily worked out, but also like a crazy sort of business plan to like just be like, they wanted to still in that region and just no idea at that point who they were who was going to actually make the booze and it all worked out.

But again, like you said, it could have gone terribly wrong. And I don't think they knew what they were getting into like no disrespect. And I think Marty would even say this. But once you factor in the incredibly restrictive tax, which is backed off a little bit with Canada strong initiatives, but up until August of 2025, like the tax was incredibly restrictive and the profit margins were incredibly low.

Like it's mind blowing. Like what a risk. You have to be really passionate about it to do it. Yeah.

And gone from making it work. Yeah. And the products are absolutely amazing. So it really, really did end up working out.

But like you just brought like got my backup about the L.C.V.O. in two seconds there. But I we are not going to I'm not going to derail this podcast to bitch about the L.C.V.O. for another episode of this.

Listen, our listeners are tired of hearing it. Me neither either. Yeah. What I do want to talk about is what's going on actually at the story.

So exciting. Obviously you were awarded Canadian Spirit Awards previously, but even bigger news recently World Spirit Awards as well. So talk to us about some of the acclamations. Yeah.

So most recently was the we went to gold in the world spirit's masters for a lemon cello in the food category. So that's pretty awesome considering that like how we're being judged like on the world stage, like it's just produces from all over the place like Italy, things like that. Well, let me tell you. Yeah.

So we're standing shoulder with people. So being being able to say world class, we have the hardware to prove it is kind of a nice thing. And then our special secure one silver as well in the coffee category, which is pretty awesome. But I think for me, what I was most proud of was our first wins, which were in 2022, our elemental vodka, one gold and our great expectations, one gold in the gin and vodka categories respectively in the Canadian Artisanals Spirit Awards, which like that was the first.

It was kind of weird because it set up a it set up a weird precedent because it was the first awards we'd ever entered in right off the bat. The two things we entered one gold medals and I'm just like, oh boy. We entered one a couple years later. We took a year off because I was kind of nervous.

I mean, a couple years later, and we went to silver for a spice rum and a bronze for a whiskey and I was like, oh man, gross. No, we're really fortunate to have the success. That's also what you get for con your gin great expectations. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, hey, it's a good expectation for a vet at least. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been pretty exciting to have that success and have that validation.

A big part of what we're kind of doing, looking forward in 2026 is to try to enter more competitions and get that stuff because it's, you know, it's not just for our own benefit. It's trying to do that kind of what we were touching on earlier. Like, how do you say that this justifies the price or how do you get that final stream to get bars or even like LCPO staff, like interested in what you're selling? Like, how do you communicate to them that, hey, this is good.

This is not just involved on a shelf and like having those awards. It just gives some third party validation that, you know, what we're doing. And like you don't need the validation to know that it's a good product. If anybody tries it and has any sort of a power, they're going to figure that out.

But for the layman who like these awards do make a difference. It's like, I always say about like, if you go to the vintage section in the LCPO and you don't know that much about wine, well, getting those like 92 point ratings or whatever, they don't mean that much to anyone who knows a lot about wine. Like, if you're an average consumer, you see like, oh, this one got rated 90. Well, it helps you distinguish that one from a different bottle, right, that you might purchase.

So these awards do have an economic impact as well because it makes it more likely for a random consumer to go in there. It's like, oh, maybe I want to try a different kind of gin today. And then you're sitting over the gold medal or like, you know, I'm looking to make an espresso martini at home. Is there something better than Kallua?

And there's most certainly is. There's like, now we see silver medal for the cafe noir, right? Like it does have an economic impact as well. It's like a sort of inflated ego impact as well, right?

Yeah, no, totally. Yeah. I think it's really helpful. Yeah.

Okay. So before we let you go talk to us a little bit, is there anything that you want to announce going forward? You mentioned a new RTD? Is there any news you can break on the show?

Yeah. So we will have out mid February a brand new RTD, which will be our third. We didn't really like go too hard into RTDs comparatively to a lot of other distilleries. We're very deliberate in it.

We have our Cangid and sonic, which is our gin. We have the Appareto, the Royal Spirit, which is our Appareto, like our app, or all, like with Ontario resources. And it's really awesome. But we're going to do, because our rum has been such a huge thing for us.

It's been really like what's been driving our distillery over the last year and a half or so. We've had like explosive growth in the LCBO in our own retail store with the LCB. With the rum, we figured, hey, let's do a rum. They're doing one called Royal Yacht Club, which is based on a cocktail that Mark and Marty had in Bermuda.

This is an aside. They had this kind of talking about their history. They had this notebook just full of everything they've ever drank in their class. Right.

Yeah. Which is great. Yeah. It's coming through that.

I'm like, what can we put in a can? And so we actually would be our RTDs more as like cocktails than RTDs. But yeah. So it's really yacholab.

It's going to be our spice rum with pineapple juice, mango, and a bunch of a little bit of lime and we make our own triple sec as well. So we're going to have a little bit of that in there. So it's based off the classic luxury hotel cocktail. I think it's going to be pretty awesome because we sell this cocktail in our hospitality spaces and it's one of our best sellers.

So it was a no brainer to make something out of that. That's really good. And I think it's going to be awesome, especially in the summertime. Awesome.

And the one thing I would like to say before we let you go as well as like as my own pitch for the products is like, when you talk about your triple sec, the cafe and the water, the limoncello, the difference between the stuff that Laura makes and like what you get from like the beginner's brand or the bull's brand or whatever that you get in the LCBO. Those brands have a synthetic taste to them. And all the allure liqueurs have like the richness of the actual fruit that you're making or the coffee bean or whatever it is that you're making. You can really taste the difference on that.

And that also transfers into the RTDs because you're actually using the gin, not vodka with gin flavoring in which most RTDs use in like when they're doing a gin and tonic et cetera, right? So. Yeah. Yeah.

With that like breaking any ideas or anything like that when I was making, when I was blending for another place doing RTDs, there was like several products where there'd be like tequila, this or gin that or whatever. And there was no actual, like it'd be maybe we'd get like a one bottle of gin and a 300 hectare batch and then the rest, which is vodka with gin flavoring. That's right. Yeah.

And that's what we're doing. Yeah. We're painstakingly actually doing it all by hand. Even our like royal spritz were masserating real spices in it.

We're not adding flavors. We do use natural flavors in some of our products, but when we do that, we're not just buying something out of a catalog. We actually are working on developing it typically. We'll go to a flavor house and we'll get four or five different flavors.

We're going to feed back on it. And we're actually developing the flavor ourselves. It's not just like picking something off of shelves somewhere. Yeah.

I always say like the companies that I work with, I'm like, I mean, I make no sense for me to work for places I don't believe in because that is very difficult to sell. You're just selling shit. You don't believe in. But like, it's very always very easy to sell all our products because I believe in them and the product is amazing.

This sounds like a pitch on my own podcast, but it just happens to be true at the same time. So yeah, anyone, if you're listening, allure the story, you know, you can't go wrong with any of the products from allure the story. Paul, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was great to talk to you outside of work.

Thanks for doing this and give our listeners the rundown on where they can follow you, the story, whatever, what's going on. Yeah, sure. Anywhere in Ontario, you can order our products off of our website, awardisselingcompany.com at alluredisselingco on Instagram. Facebook is just awardisselingcompany.

Myself, yeah, you can find me on Instagram at P-L-A-C-H-O-W-I-C-H. I'm sure that'll be in the show notes as well. But yeah, we're just looking forward to a really exciting year. Our advice around is huge and the LCBO is not selling it.

Please ask them for it. It will sell well for them. You'll enjoy it too. And especially for you, my friend, congratulations about to have a second child.

Yeah, best of luck with all of that. And hopefully you'll get a little time off to enjoy it. Yeah. I know you haven't had a lot in the last year.

We try to time everything to be in the off season. So my new kid who I don't know the gender of yet will be born probably around the time the spot pass comes out. So hopefully it'll be nice and slow. Alright, congrats, buddy.

Thanks again. Congratulations. Thanks. Take care.

Thanks guys.