 This is Bill Doyle and Sophie Cursant on Vermont issues, and we're proud to introduce Ryan Christiansen, President of the Caledonia Spirits, welcome, and we're so pleased that you're here. Well, thanks for having me. It's a great thing for a town of 10,000 to have the Caledonia Spirits. How many such businesses are there in the country, must be every state has? For the distillery, we're a part of what we call kind of the craft distillers. Craft is kind of a funny word because nobody really knows exactly what it means, but smaller distilleries focused on producing better quality, smaller batch kind of products. But the state of Vermont has, I think it's about 24 distilleries now, which is quite a few. When we got started, there were three. That was in 2011. Talk about your decision to come to Montpellier. Well, so we've been growing our business pretty steadily in Hardwick since 2011. It's been on a very steep incline, and three years ago, really four years ago, we started to really fuel the pressure. We could tell we were running out of space, and we needed a bigger space, and we wanted to be able to make more products, too. We started searching out where could we expand to in Hardwick, and we really couldn't find a site in Hardwick that met our needs. We needed land, we needed a city sewer system, we needed space. Ideally, we wanted it to be not disconnected, but all under one roof, so our marketing folks and artist stillers are all working under the same roof. I like to joke that I spent half of my time, and I don't know if it's a joke anymore, traveling in between facilities. How many acres do you have? We currently have a 6,500 square foot space in Hardwick, and then we have a downtown office building that we rent. And then additionally, we have offsite warehousing in Morrisville, and then we have offsite inventory in various states that we distribute to. Once we move into Montpelier, we're going to have about 26,000 square feet. We'll have our distillery, we'll have our barrel house, we'll have our offices, a retail room, a cocktail lounge. It'll all be under one roof, and that's going to put the team back into one space, which will really work well. Talk about some of the amount of the taxes that you will be paying. Montpelier is an expensive town, but it's also a town with a lot of opportunity, so we weighed that. Montpelier actually is one of the only towns I found to tax personal equipment. So that was a tough pill to swallow. We found out that the equipment that we bought in Hardwick and paid for is now going to be charged a personal property tax, which we evaluated that, and we're at peace with that. That could be better. How much are we talking about? I don't have those figures in front of me. Roughly. It's substantial. The personal property tax is not as substantial as the property taxes, but it's a steep increase to what we're used to in Hardwick, as well as water rates. But the population of Montpelier, the access to population, proximity to I-89, and just an incredible vibrant community here in Montpelier, it was a tough decision. As we weighed those things, we said, I think we can do a lot of retail business right at the distillery, which means we're interacting with our customers, and that's going to offset some of the expenses of the decision. Just being a capital city help? I think so. Montpelier is the capital of Vermont, and Vermont is the state that has more breweries and distilleries per capita than any other state in the nation, but there's no brewery or distillery in the capital. So we saw that as a real opportunity. It seems like how Montpelier has gone all these years without a brewery or distillery, I'm not sure. Of course, it's got three-penny tap room, which is one of the greatest places to drink a beer in the entire nation, so maybe that checked the box for the beer thirst, but there's no distillery here, and we think there should be. Well, I see the article in the Times targets of the free press. There are businesses as one of the largest, very significant that they moved here, and the fact that it will be significant to the people of the city of Montpelier. I hope so. We employ about 40 people right now, so that's 40 jobs. Some of those folks are on the road and working in other markets, but we bring those people, right now we bring them to Hardwick. Most of our jobs are right here in Vermont, wherever we choose to locate, and we're growing steadily. I think we've hired three or four people per year every year that we've been here, so we're actually hiring three positions right now. Before I ask you to ask a question, anything else about the decision to move to Montpelier? Montpelier has just been great. As we started out in that search in Hardwick, we quickly found there wasn't a space in Hardwick for us, and so we extended the search, and the search extended all the way to Lindenville, to Waterbury, to Morrisville, and Montpelier just happened to fall on that radius. Actually, this was the time when Jesse Baker was the assistant town manager. I met Jesse through one of our employees, who's an old friend of Jesse's, and Hallie Picard, and Hallie said, you and Jesse should just meet. We did meet. The three of us went for a walk down Berry Street, and I totally fell in love with Berry Street, and particularly when we got to the end, and I said, look at all this space. Of course, I didn't want to put anything on Sabin's Pasture for a variety of reasons, but on the other side of Sabin's Pasture, that undeveloped 4.3 acres of land, it just seemed like a really wonderful place. It's got this industrial, but we bring this farm-to-bottle feel with our brand that it just seemed like the natural space for a distillery, and then positioned right over, looking over the riverfront, that means our people are coming to work in that really beautiful setting, with the Winooski River flowing right in front of their desk, and it just seemed like a great opportunity. Can I say a little bit about your past? Yes, so I actually got started, my path to becoming a distiller, I started as a home brewer, and I was making beer at home. Eventually I opened up a small retail store selling home-brew supplies, and then that progressed into the desire to get into a commercial brewing space. And on the path to commercial brewing, I met a guy named Todd Hardy. Todd is the founder of Caledonia Spirits, and he's a beekeeper, and he's a particularly interesting entrepreneur, and I had very little understanding of distillation, but I'd read quite a few books about it, and distilling is not legal at home, whereas home brewing is. So you can make beer at home, and that's perfectly fine. You can practice that. Distilling, you cannot do that at home. So until you're in that commercial setting, you really aren't legally allowed to really know what you're doing, and that sounded fun, that sounded like a real opportunity to learn. So when I met Todd and got a sense of his commitment to agriculture, and sort of his beekeeping background, and how he wanted to bring that into distillation, I think I just realized that I like making beer, but I wanted to learn something new, and distillation was really captivating. So I jumped on board with Todd, and we brought some products to market, and the market really liked what we were making. So we just continued to make more, and reinvest in quality control of making those products, and educating ourselves, and building a team. And now today we distribute the same products to 33 states. And we also export to Montreal, Denmark, Hong Kong, Japan. And we're dabbling with Ontario right now. And total dollars are we talking about? Well, we sell about, I mean, dollars swing all over the place, because if we sell at a retail level, we sell our bottle for $35.99. That's about the price point that you'll find our bottle throughout the nation, but transport to California and things like that, it moves. But we now sell about 40,000 cases. That's 4.5 liter cases, so about 40,000 cases globally. That's our entire company. Before asking Sophie to ask some questions, say something about yourself, Sophie. Well, I have, it's a kind of an odd correlation. But I've been thinking, I had the opportunity to read the education of Little Tree a few years ago. Did you ever read that book? No. I assumed you boys would have. So it's about an old Indian who's a distiller. What do we think? It was maybe 1915 in Colorado. And he sort of, like you say, it's highly dangerous. You're not supposed to know anything about it. And you have to do it in secret. And it's kind of a heritage. And I'm wondering if your family had interest in brewing, or if there was like some heritage that you found as a young man that sort of was the cement behind this? Not for me personally. Todd's family is in the distilling heritage. So Todd's family is actually the founding family of J.W. Hardy Scotch in Scotland. Does he live here? Yeah, Todd lives in Greensboro for a month. And so Todd, and that distillation can often be kind of a skill set that's handed down. Todd wasn't actually distilling, but I think that planted the seed of interest of distilling. And Todd is really, Todd's a farmer, you know, and he's truly a farmer. He actually, he comes, I met him as a beekeeper, but now he's an organic grain farmer. So Todd's actually now growing more grain than he is raising bees for honey production, but we're buying barley and rye from Todd's farm in Greensboro to make our whisky. But you know, I think it's often forgotten that particularly with distillation, but also with beer brewing and winemaking, I mean, these are agricultural practices. You know, this, like the idea of distillation, we don't distill to get drunk. We distill to preserve agriculture. You know, if you say you're an apple farmer and you, you know, have a, have a bumper crop of apples, you can either lower your price to sell all those apples or you can make them into brandy and sell them next year. Or apple champagne, charge twice. You can ferment it or, you know, if you ferment it, you've got a shelf life of say three to five years. If you distill it, you've got a shelf life that'll outlive all of us. Right. Right. So, and it actually gains value over time. So it's, it's kind of like the original farmer investment, right? It's a long-term investment for a farmer. But I think people often look at spirits and they go, oh, this is a, a, a vehicle for intoxication. Or get rich quick scheme or something. Yeah, but, you know, it really is a vehicle for preservation of food. And, you know, that's why farmers and distillers get along so well. Well, every culture in Vermont is a great tradition. And so you're in line with it, a great tradition. Absolutely. I mean, we're, we're, you know, our, our distillery in Hardwick, we're buying bags of grain ground up from Todd. But in Montpelier, we're going to have silos filled with grain. You know, so this is really, we're investing in the ability to do a lot more with farmers, which, you know, the farming industry is really tough right now, you know, between dairy or, or kind of conventional corn farming. You know, there's commodity pricing that drive that market up or down and you're sort of at the mercy of it. But if you're growing, you know, organic grain for whiskey production and there's not so much of a rigid market that you have to comply with, you know, it's really more about working with a distiller to make sure that your bottle hits the market for the shelf price that the, that the market will bear. Right. Which I think brings a lot of, a lot of excitement to agriculture. Selfie. Well, I'm just saying, I mean, you've got a nice lead in here to the experiments that maybe you guys have created to provide such a wonderful product and I'm wondering what those look like. So, you know, Caledonia Spirit's got started on a vision of bringing the agriculture of beekeeping into distilling and we've nurtured relationships with beekeepers and, you know, we used to buy 650 pounds at a time. 650 pounds of what? Of honey, honey. And now we're buying, you know, now we're negotiating for 90,000 pounds of honey, you know, per purchase, which is great because it's coming from the same farmers and we're basically paying them the same price per pound, you know. So they're, they're, instead of selling us 1% of their crop, they're selling us 90% of their crop. So that's taking the beekeepers out of sales and marketing and putting them, you know, at the apiary with the bees making sure that the bees are doing well because quite honestly the bees need the beekeeper right now. The beekeeper can't be on the road selling honey. The beekeeper needs to be making sure that the bees are doing well. What's the cost of a pound of honey? We pay between three and four dollars a pound, usually. But a pound of raw honey at the market, you know, but that's when you're buying 90,000 pounds at a time. A pound of raw honey at the market is, you know, ten to twelve dollars, you know, for one, one pound. But anyway, on the experimental side, we see that as a really successful relationship with a farmer. And we want to do it again, you know. So that's kind of our mission. So we have this experimental brand. It's called Experiments in Agricultural Rectification. It's a mouthful, I realize. But it's intended to kind of rectify agriculture. We see agriculture as a fairly broken process right now. And we think distilling is a good way to fix that. And so our first product, we worked with the Farnham's maple operation out of Plainfield. They actually happened to tap, they tapped several trees in Plainfield, including some trees on my own property. And we made maple vodka from maple syrup that they harvested, partially from my land, which made it really exciting. But we made about 150 cases of vodka. We took that vodka to market. We actually held an event at their sugarhouse during Sugarhouse Open Weekend. We only brought 60 bottles because we thought that was way more than we could ever sell in a weekend. And it sold out in three hours. So we probably should have brought three times as much. But that was on the dirt roads in Plainfield. That was such a successful collaboration because we brought a lot of people that were there for spirits to see their maple operation. And we found a lot of people there to see their maple operation that said, I didn't know you could do this with maple syrup. So there was a really wonderful kind of cross-pollination there. And education. I mean, that seems like. Another really fun project, just one more. This is very experimental. Nothing's gone to market yet. But I really like this product. We've been working with Richard Wiswall from the Cape Farm. Do you guys know Richard Wiswall? Yeah. Well, Richard is a burdock farmer. So he grows burdock, the pest that sticks to your shoelaces and your clays. Yeah, he grows burdock and he sends it. I believe his market is in Japan. He's sending burdock root. You don't harvest the flower. You harvest the root. And it's loaded with sugar. So Richard called us and said, could you make any spirits out of this? Well, as it turns out, you can. And we made some really interesting spirits. It almost tastes like tequila or mezcal. It's really interesting. It's really earthy. We're totally in love with it. But the idea of building a spirit brand out of what we all think is kind of an invasive pest. It seems like a very, very Vermont-y thing to do. I think you're bringing it right in here. So this is our core product. This is called Barhill Gin. This is a gin. It's a grain-neutral spirit distillate through juniper. Juniper is what makes gin into gin. You have to have juniper. And then we sweeten it with a little bit of raw honey. But this particular bottle is actually the bottle that we brought to our groundbreaking event last week, where the governor, Phil, actually opened this bottle as sort of the celebration. So I've been carrying this bottle everywhere I go. It's a pretty special bottle to me. Well, OK. So the beeswax that you seal it with comes from Vermont. Our beekeepers that we're working with are actually in New York. It's an old farming relationship of Todd, our founders. They're on the other side, which a lot of people want us to be buying from Vermont beekeepers. Yeah, I want to know what the ratio is. We're buying, currently, we're buying some honey from Singing Cedar apiaries in Rutland. But to be honest, we buy so much honey that most Vermont beekeepers don't have that much. And they would be better off to sell it for $10 or $12 a pound. If you're harvesting 30 pounds, you should go get $10 or $12 at the market. But if you're harvesting 90,000 pounds, you need to find a buyer that's going to pay you a fair market price. So we haven't found many beekeepers in Vermont on that scale, but when we find them, we love to buy honey from them. But our core beekeepers are in New York. So the Juniper, where is that coming from? The Juniper is shipped in from an herbs company on the West Coast. And what other components get to make the turn? The Vermont grown stuff would be, we buy barley from Todd. Oh, right, OK. Well, we buy rye from Todd. That's the largest volume that we buy from Todd. But the barley we buy from Todd, this all goes into our Thornhill whiskey. So it's 84% rye, 16% barley. The barley Todd then takes, this is quite a story, Todd takes the barley, he harvests the story, he brings it to Peterson quality malts in Moncton, Vermont. He malts the barley. Then it goes back to Todd's farm. Todd smokes it with a smoker that he's built, with cherry and applewood from the farm. And then we're bringing it right now, we're bringing it to Elmore Mountain bread. They have a great stone mill. We're milling it there, and then we bring it into the distillery and make the whiskey out of it. It's quite a few steps in the process. So how long does that process take? It sounds like it's like six months. Well, Todd, well, if you include the growing season, you know, there's quite a cycle there. It's harvest season right now. Actually, my next stop today is to go up to Todd's farm and help him, you know, work on harvesting the rye. And so that's really the case then. It is just an annual crop as well. It's a seasonal crop, yeah. Let's talk about new products. Oh, who knew? I didn't know that. Yeah. So new products, we're really focused on whiskey. We really would like to be in the whiskey market. We've been making whiskey for five years now. What's the definition of whiskey? Great question. Whiskey is a category of spirits. So bourbon is a whiskey, scotch is a whiskey, rye is a whiskey, corn whiskey is a whiskey. We've made some bourbon, but we're mostly focused on rye whiskey, particularly because that's what Todd wants to grow. So that rye just seems to be what is best suited for the Greensboro soil. Well, northern climates as well, right? Yeah, I mean, rye is incredible. I actually love to listen to Todd talk about the rye, because you plant the rye in the fall, and then the snow falls on it. And then you harvest it the next season. So Todd likes to say that any rye that lives through a winter, just like any vermontra, gains a lot of character in the process. And I think he's onto something there. I think that's not just good marketing. I think there's some truth to it. Well, what you're doing is a great plus for agriculture in Vermont. Yeah, we hope so. It seems wonderful. I mean, are you actively seeking to make your resources from Vermont, or is it just happenstance? Well, I mean, to be honest, there's not a lot of people growing grain. Todd's growing grain because nobody was growing grain. Todd's a farmer at heart. He's an entrepreneur. And bees don't do terribly well in Greensboro. It's incredibly cold up there. Although, I'll tell you, Todd always has some hives. And he planted, well, he planted rye, and he planted barley. But he also does clover for cover crop and green manure. So he lets his land rest as he should. I mean, you can't just constantly pound on the soil. You have to get this rotation going. So he plants clover. And his bees have been doing better than ever since he started growing whiskey grains. And that's purely accidental, but because there's so much clover up there. There's so much for these bees to feed on. Well, and the rye. Right, the rye. And the rye, everything else that's farmed up there. But particularly the clover, when you started doing the cover cropping with the clover, it really made the bees more productive. So who knows? Maybe Todd's headed down the path to get back into the commercial beekeeping again. So if a person wants to grow grain, they should grow it more in the southern part of Vermont. Generally, that's what we find. But Todd has been doing really well up in Greensboro, which is, you know, Greensboro's the part of the state that, I mean, there's probably already snow there. Right? It's past the point of the jaw. I've left Hardwick on to Greensboro. And, you know, it's 40 degrees in sunny and Hardwick. And Greensboro has six inches of snow. It's kind of a magical place. Well, I learned that when I moved to Vermont and the first night had come and my wife put some milk in the refrigerator and a froth. So I mean, in other words, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. That was Johnson, though, right? That was Johnson, Vermont. Johnson State College. Oh, wow. Sophie, how about some questions? Well, we were wondering about the development agreement. With Montpelier. And maybe that was a question on a lot of sensitive ground. Yeah, of course. The city has been really supportive of our project. And for the most part, it's been all positive from the community. But there's been a few people that say, hey, is this a good use of tax dollars to pay a private or to help a private industry business get into town? But the way that the optics of it look sometimes are the cities throwing all this money in a private company. But the reality of how that situation went was we found this land. We really wanted to buy this land. And the price tag was pretty high on the land. And then we ran into all sorts of issues, environmental issues, crossing a railroad track, access, infrastructure. It really became just not feasible. We just couldn't buy that land and properly deal with the environmental concerns of that land, which we really wanted to do. That was the first land. Is there 4.3 acres? But the first thing that we did was a phase one and phase two environmental study of that land. Because there's quite a long history with the granite sheds dumping granite debris over there, there's a neighboring property that we were concerned about. So we felt like we did the right thing in doing that research. The research came back that there were some issues to deal with. We started to look at the cost of those issues. And basically, it became impossible. And by that time, we'd already been talking with Montpelier. And we had to let them know that we probably weren't going to be able to do this project. And so Montpelier said, well, let's see, where can we collaborate to help? If there's some infrastructure things, maybe there's some budget that we could help. But we need to calculate it so that this brings a return to Montpelier. Our property taxes are going to bring that return, as well as the personal property tax, as well as we hope. And these aren't even involved in the calculation. Driving tourism and jobs and all those other wonderful things. But the way that it was calculated, and I didn't do the math, I just understand that it needed to be done this way was that I think it's on a 10-year payback. So in the next 10 years, we'll bring more revenue in, significantly more than we took out. And to be honest, since we did that math, our project has only gone up in price by quite a lot. And we haven't revisited. No, you've got to expect it to double. Montpelier was so supportive. We needed power out there. We needed access to sewer. We needed to get across those railroad tracks, which is a really hard thing to do. The railroad's very protective of who they allowed across the tracks. But then most importantly, we needed to figure out what to do with the soil that was contaminated. And we found great solution on all those items. But if not for the support of Montpelier and the willingness to really look at this as a good, logical kind of business decision of does this business bring good to the town, and what are the numbers? Are we right side up or upside down on this? And what did you do with improving the soil? So we found this great solution. The first option was truck it all off site. And I'm an environmentalist. I don't believe that that makes any sense. To take dirt, there's sort of a level of where the components of the soil can be. And we were just on that threshold. I didn't look at this dirt as dangerous soil by any means. But because of where it was. And I was told that basically any downtown soil, if you test it, if you do an environmental study of any downtown land, it's above Vermont's threshold of, yeah. So we're all living in a contaminated world, unfortunately. It's not until you go try to build something new that you find out about that. But the thought of trucking, it was about $400,000 worth of dirt trucking. Just to remove it, just to send dirt to a landfill. Which just sounded so counterproductive to me. So our architects came up with this wonderful idea called dynamic compaction. And where you bring in this big crane with a very large weight, an eight ton weight. And it just picks up the weight and it drops it over and over and over on this grid formation. And what that does, well that site, the reason why we had the contamination issues were because that site was filled with all sorts of granite debris from the neighboring granite sheds. So in some areas it was as high as I think nine feet of new soil that had been dumped in the last 30 years. So you can't build on top of that. So the other big cost we faced was we were gonna have to drill piers of our foundation all the way down to the native soil. So dynamic compaction allowed us to squeeze that soil so that it had the structural integrity of native soil and allowed us to keep that dirt on site. And then we just put two feet of new soil on top of that. So instead of trucking dirt off to truck dirt back in, we left dirt there and truck dirt on top of that and squeezed it so that it's strong enough to support a building. And I'm giving like, the engineers and the architects can really educate people better than I can. But that's my understanding of building it. You have to see the complexity of what you're doing. Yeah, it was quite a process, but it was really fun. To watch a crane, I kind of like... We watched it too. Yeah. It was neat to have that crane down there. It was just so massive. It's like Fred Flintstone technology. It's just like the world's biggest hammer. Would you say it was an eight ton weight? Eight ton weight. I love that. Whoop-pow! And that weight actually came from, it was the driveshaft of a giant Navy ship. That's how they make these. They take this big driveshaft and they cut it and they make these weights out of it. So there's one company on the entire eastern half of the US that does this and that's who we hired. Now when you guys were doing the pounding of this location, did you see any negative outcomes in the river? Like were there granite chunks coming out into the river? No, it's all pretty stable. It didn't really move. We did it with one strike, a tree popped up. So there was a tree in that soil, so which was kind of interesting. I didn't get to see that, but I don't think it was buried very deep, but I think it was basically a surface tree. Now we didn't see anything and we've been working very closely with Stone Environmental. Stone has been overseeing the entire project as well as making site visits to make sure we're very cognizant of the river location. Right, I see the drain that goes down towards the river now. Yeah, and we have the fencing up to minimize any sort of dust and debris and things like that. It's good you guys are following the rules. It's a pretty central location actually. We have realized in the alcohol industry, you have to follow the rules. Oh yeah, I bet. You don't make it very long. Wow, and so as a new bar facility, do you guys plan to let people experiment and give you suggestions? We want a burdock beer or we want a... We love to interact with our customers and honestly that's why we're moving to Montpelier. We have a very small retail space in Hardwick and it's really hard to get people to Hardwick, but being in Montpelier, it's just, we saw it with the groundbreaking. We had 200 RSVPs to the groundbreaking. We estimated we had 350 people show up plus press and that's a huge group for our Hardwick facility. We can't pull that kind of population even with a lot more marketing, a lot more advertising of the event. So we can already see that Montpelier is going to be a great location for us, but that gets, we want artist stillers to interact with our customers. And we want to know what did we do that you like? What do we do that you don't like? How do you take our products and make it into a cocktail that you like? It's always great feedback. Well, it's certainly great for the city of Montpelier and Washington County, but it has a lot to do with the state itself and the object is to grow our agriculture. Absolutely. And our agricultural businesses. I mean, this provides a very nice venue for young entrepreneurs in the business, farming, agronomy worlds, right? And then also for people who want to participate in a sort of scientific career. Yeah. I mean, it's a really nice opportunity. And where'd you go to high school? This is one of Bill's favorite questions. I went to high school at Twinfield High School. Oh, did you? I grew up in Plainfield. Oh, that's so neat. Yeah. So, I mean, have you felt that your education helped you to be able to handle this question in Vermont specifically? I mean, as a farm community? I think Twinfield's a really small school and Plainfield's a really small community. So I think probably the most valuable lesson of that path was understanding how important community is, but also how important business is in community. My folks own the Plainfield hardware store. So I grew up working in a small town hardware store, which some might argue that gave me some insight to how to build a distillery but in other various things. But I think the working in that hardware store really, I saw the importance of that little, it's a very small business in a very small town, but how the community kind of rallies around a business and how businesses feel, I mean, I often think back to seventh grade if you didn't have Plainfield hardware, where was everybody gonna go? We're gonna drive to Home Depot when you needed one bolt to fix the shelf that was falling down. But now you look at that business, that's a very difficult business and small town hardware stores are going out of business all over the state or all over the country, I mean, everywhere. The Home Depots and sort of these large corporate entities are coming in and squeezing out the mom and pop shops so that we're all forced to drive further and buy things that are really built for sort of disposable one time use mentality as opposed to fixing what broke and, you know. Anyway, I think that's really kind of ingrained in me that business is community, community is business and those two things have to intertwine, which is, we were very vocal about that when we first met with Bill and John Holler and everybody, Jesse Baker, that we really wanted the bike path to go right by our distillery. We wanted those people to feel invited to our distillery. We wanted towns people to feel invited to get to the river by means of at our distillery because we want people to feel comfortable in our space. I mean, this is really a community business. Right, business for the community. You know, it made people feel comfortable but the economic aspects for the city of Montpain for the state of Vermont are enormous. Yeah, yeah, I hope so. I mean, I think this is just the beginning of this distilling industry. I mean, if you look at craft brewing and craft distilling, I mean, distilling is following a very similar path and that means that somebody once produced a study that said, I don't know if it's accurate or not, but basically right now distilling is at sort of 1997 of where brewing was, right? So 97 to 2018, beer brewing went crazy. So if that's true and this is only 1997 of craft distilling, then it's only growth and it's a lot more jobs, it's a lot more tourism, it's a lot more exciting. It's a lot more birdock spirit that we get to make. You have enough land if you want to expand? I think so. There's not a lot of expansion opportunity in that space but just Barry Street in general, there's some older buildings there that I see as maybe potentially we could expand into those spaces but our facility is really well designed. We've maximized that space but it's really designed to do quite a lot of throughput. So I think it'll last us for some time, but. That's great. Sophie, any questions further? No, but I'd like to say, you know, I'm really glad to see a young entrepreneur making it happen in Vermont. It's a team effort for sure. From Plainfield or Vermont? Yeah, it's a wonderful thing to see and to actually see that crane out there making space useful and making a space that was just kind of beautiful outlaying of Montpelier that was unusable actually part of the economy and part of the asset that Montpelier can offer. So I think that's a big deal and it's a real honor to meet you and to have you here with us today. Is there a favorite experiment that you've had with your brewing or with your distilling? Well, my recent favorite is definitely what we're doing with bird oaks. I mean, when I go home tonight, I'll get my mail and I'll probably get a bird ock on my sleeve and it's a total. So if we can make that into a bottle of spirit that people can take home to enjoy their weekend, I think that's a real win. So that's kind of got my attention, but Bar Hill has been just an incredible product and first off, I'll just say that this is a gin that everybody must try because we sell this gin to people that don't like gin. That's our business model has evolved. It was not intentional, but we have people come into our tasting room and they say, I don't like gin. What else do you make? And we say, well, try the gin and they try the gin and they say, I like gin. That's gin that I like. And that's done very well for us. We started this business thinking that we'd be a whiskey distillery and we still intend to be, but the success of this gin has kept us very focused on gin production. In presence is the credit to the state of Vermont and we're so pleased that you were able to be with us today. Selfie, would you like to say something? I second that motion. Well, thank you guys very much. It's an honor to be here. Thank you, thanks very much. Good luck. All right, thanks.