Maker’s Mark has an unwavering commitment to keeping their distilling process unchanged. Unchanged to the point that they do as much as they can by hand. But operational growth is driving innovation in ways that are quite remarkable.
They still use 6 original cyprus vats (12 feet deep and 12 feet across) to do their brewing – those and an additional 40 stainless steel vats. They slow grind their grains rather than smashing them. They have their own supply of yeast, that’s been in the family since before prohibition. They distill their mash down to 120 proof alcohol. Barrel it in new oak barrels charred inside for 45 seconds. Hand roll their barrels into their warehouses. Rotate them from the top racks to the bottom racks after 3 years. Then taste them after 6 years to make sure they’re done. If the taster’s agree that the batch is acceptable then they bottle it and hand-dip it in their trademark red wax.
That’s a formula they don’t want to mess with. It’s been successful for them and they believe they can grow their market because of it. However, as they have grown over the past few years they have found other challenges arise that have forced innovation. One of the main obstacles was what to do with their by-product wastes. As a small operation, they gave most of the leftover grain by-products to local farmers. But soon they had more than local farmers needed and it didn’t last long enough to ship.
Cue necessity and innovation. Rather than take the traditional route of building a centrifuge that could get the water out of the grain, in an expensive and inefficient manner, Maker’s Mark instead took a chance. They built a slow-screw process that squeezes out enough of the water that the grain can be shipped to regional farmers (instead of just local ones). Then the waste water is anaerobically processed (which is innovative but also produces a horrid stench) to create methane gas that is pumped back to the distillery to heat the mash vats.
In fact, before we arrived the natural gas company had called Maker’s Mark to question why their usage had dropped so much. Their process has been live for about 8 months but they are already seeing how it will help them expand their operations.
What intrigued us about this stop on our #iroadtrip was how they’ve been able to find new ways to make the operation scale without losing their distinctive hand-made process.
Considering that so much of social media wrestles with this same question, what other lessons can we take from Maker’s Mark?
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