An email proclaiming “Rock Town is hiring!” turned our attention to the Little Rock distillery, which will soon complete its sixth year in business.
Three days later we were sitting in founder Phil Brandon’s office at his 15,622-SF Rock Town Distillery at 1216 E. Sixth St., in what has been dubbed “innovation alley,” a hot area that’s also home to Lost Forty Brewing and Rebel Kettle Brewing & Tap Room.
Brandon told us the hiring — for a full-time distiller and a full-time production assistant — was to replace a couple of workers rather than reflective of a big expansion, but he had news of growth just the same: Rock Town Distillery’s sales in the first four months of 2016 are up 67 percent compared with 2015.
Brandon has come far since 2010, the year he opened the state’s first legal distillery since Prohibition. That distinction is important to him. Opening almost any new business presents inherent risks; opening a distillery, an expensive proposition, in Arkansas in 2010 posed more risks than usual.
But with his “passion for whiskey” and a background in business, Brandon, a Little Rock native and son of Phyllis Brandon, the longtime editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s “High Profile” section, was ready to take that risk after he was laid off from Alltel following its acquisition by Verizon in 2009. Brandon, who has a degree in electrical engineering, said: “I had the business background. I had the engineering background. I had the artistic drive. I played in bands for years. I felt like I’m a pretty creative person.”
Having worked in industrial automation for 14 years, Brandon said, he had the opportunity to call on “every manufacturing plant in the state of Arkansas.” And at Alltel, Brandon worked in information technology, performing, among other tasks, project cost management.
“I know how things are made. It was applying a passion that I had for this idea of making my own whiskey and for spirits in general, vodka and gin and rum, to start a business.”
Opening a distillery is capital intensive; Brandon is the majority owner of Rock Town and has investors, though he declines to name them. And he obtained a Small Business Administration loan as part of President Barack Obama’s stimulus package.
Brandon also is Rock Town’s head distiller, the one who develops the recipes for the company’s products, which range from single-bourbon whiskey to rum, vodka and gin. His work has earned accolades, among them inclusion in Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible for producing the “2015 U.S. Micro Whisky of the Year” for Rock Town’s Single Barrel Bourbon Whiskey and in 2013 the Best Bourbon award at the World Whiskies Awards in London. In 2011, Brandon’s Gin won a “Double Gold” medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, and there have been many more honors.
Rock Town’s latest offering is a coffee liqueur that uses single-origin Guatemalan coffee from Leiva’s Coffee in North Little Rock.
Brandon sources what he can in the state, with all the corn, wheat and rye used in Rock Town spirits coming from Arkansas farms.
Rock Town started with Glazer’s Inc. distributing but switched in March 2015 to Moon Distributors. The distillery’s products can be found in 16 states, the United Kingdom and Germany and in about 300 Arkansas liquor stores and 50 to 100 restaurants in the state.
Getting into restaurants can be difficult, Brandon said. “The restaurant business is tough. It’s hard to get your product in and you’ve educated a bunch of people on it, and the next thing you know, they’re gone and there’s somebody new and they’ve never heard of you and you have to start all over again.”
But he gets good support from a number of restaurants and bars in Little Rock, among them the Capital Hotel Bar & Grill, which “is using quite a bit of our stuff,” Big Orange, Loca Luna, Big Whiskey’s, Red Door and So Restaurant-Bar.
Rock Town produced a little over 10,000 cases of spirits last year, with Rock Town Vodka its best-seller.
The distillery is open seven days a week and conducts popular distillery tours — it’s No. 12 among 83 “things to do in Little Rock” on TripAdvisor. The tours account for 33 percent of the company’s business, Brandon said. “We have probably close to 600 people a month come through.”
He’s got five full-time and four part-time employees, and Brandon, almost six years after opening Rock Town, said he’s breathing a little easier. “Things are going gangbusters now.”
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