Phil Brandon  0:00  

flavors generated from the place where you are. It’s what’s available. What what is interesting. I like to experiment. I like to try things like to make different things, but also listen to what the market wants, but it’s also what do I like and what do I think I could do well, so you know, we’re doing some pretty cool stuff beyond just buying some flavors and pouring them into it.

 

Nate Disarro  0:24  

Hey, it’s Nate Disarro and welcome to titans of industry, the podcast where I talk to industry leaders and innovators who are at the top of their game and leading the pack in their fields, uncovering some of the best stories in today’s business landscape. In this episode, I speak with Phil Brandon, the founder, CEO and head distiller of rock town distillery. When faced with a layoff during his corporate IT career, Phil took his passion for whiskey and transformed it into an iconic Arkansas operation, and is the first to ever distill bourbon in Arkansas. Using his background in engineering along with his MBA, Phyllis put his entrepreneurial talents to the test by creating the Rocktown brand, distribution process, manufacturing standards and a whole lot more. He has been creating handcrafted award winning spirits that you can find in restaurants, liquor stores, and he’s winning contests all around the world.

 

Now, let’s get to the episode. But before we do, let’s talk about content, strategy and Video for marketing your business. Our team at content Titan is committed to great storytelling, no matter what industry you’re in. It’s crucial to engage, entertain, inform and captivate your audience. And video is the best way to do it. Having worked with people and organizations of all shapes and sizes, our team has the experience to deliver the right content at the right price. We are easy to do business with and we know how to get you results. Visit content titan.co to learn more.

 

Now, here’s the episode with Phil Brandon.

 

Phil Brandon, thanks so much for hopping on the podcast with us. I met you I think about a decade ago, and your company was only a couple of years old, I think at the time. And here we are in this beautiful tasting room. Give me the the short story. How did how did we get here? Oh, gosh, yeah, it’s it’s kind of crazy. But yeah, thanks for having me on your podcast. This is really cool. It’s great to see you again after all the years and you know,

 

Phil Brandon  2:33  

we were over in on East Sixth Street and a warehouse that we had turned into a distillery. But prior to that, you know 2009 I basically incorporated the company we got started in 2010. I had been laid off from my job at Verizon Wireless after they acquired Alltel and was

 

challenged was trying to figure out what to do with my life and decided that in order for me to stay in Arkansas, which was my home state and

 

my wife’s home state and our family was here to start my own thing and I wanted to be creative and do something that I thought was exciting and turned out it was starting a distillery

 

Nate Disarro  3:25  

so I know you were in it, is that right? Yeah, it roll. I had a risin

 

Phil Brandon  3:31  

Yeah, no, it wasn’t like I was plugging in computers or working on servers. But it was the interface between business and I T helping the to talk to each other. Alltel developed a whole lot of custom software. And so I got to help with some pretty cool projects there.

 

Nate Disarro  3:51  

So why a distillery? I mean, you know, when that time period in your life came well, I was it. Let’s let’s forget the technology. I mean, there’s a lot of technology here but yeah, let’s move into spilled liquid.

 

Phil Brandon  4:04  

Well, you know, it’s just kind of one of those things that happened. Wasn’t like I grew up as a kid and my my dad was a moonshine er and his dad and you know, it was in the in, in the back of my mind to always want to do it. It was really I enjoyed drinking whiskey. I kind of got into the geek factor where I’d go on the internet at work. Of course I’m at work right but you know, our projects were slowing down because Verizon had acquired Alltel and there was less things to do during the day and but you’re there in your office doing things anyway and so I buy a bottle over the weekend from Scotland or you know, Kentucky or wherever and you know, a Monday after consuming it, you know not to access Over the weekend, but you know, responsibly, I would research the distillery. And I learned about the science of distilling and that sort of thing. And I’ve got a engineering background electrical engineer by degree and a master’s in business. And it was like, wow, this is, you know, pretty cool. You know, I like distilling This is neat. whiskies. Delicious. But then I learned that there are craft distilleries starting up throughout the country. Now, this was 2009. It wasn’t that popular back then. But there were some out on the West Coast and some on the East Coast. And I was like, wow, you know, that would be pretty cool. I knew about craft brewing. But making beer wasn’t really didn’t capture my imagination, but making whiskey. Now, that could be pretty cool. And so I took the skills that I had learned at all till about putting a package together of, you know, this is the statement of work, this is what it’s gonna cost. These are the things we have to buy to be able to do it. And, you know, scoping a project basis, basically, well, I decided to turn my own idea into a project. And I scoped it. And so I went to, you know, the manufacturers that make the stills and got prices and got, you know, ideas for who to call as a consultant. You know, in it, we use consultants all the time, right? We’re installing a software package and IBM is the consultant and you hire them or somebody else, that’s a licensed consultant, and bring them in. So I was using that same sort of technique to start a distillery and ended up hiring a guy that was a former master distiller for Maker’s Mark named Dave pickerel. He was kind of the Johnny Appleseed of craft distilling. At the time, he helped hundreds of distilleries start up. And he was my consultant, and I, you know, put together a package. Business Plan, you know, went around the banks. only need one. Yes. And that’s all I got, was one, yes. Got an SBA loan through the stimulus package during the Great Recession, and raised a little bit of money from friends and family rolled my Alltel 401k, put all my chips on the middle of the table and roll the dice. And so that was how I got started.

 

Nate Disarro  7:58  

I love that story. And it’s interesting, because you essentially took a blueprint that you knew worked in the Alltel world in the Verizon world, and how to get sort of a product to market, move it over to a brand new industry that you hadn’t been a part of it all and sort of just said, well, we’ll change this change this, but ultimately, the blueprint is kind of the same, right? And I work with a lot of clients all the time. You know, we do videos and create content for people all over the place. And we’ll work in one industry tomorrow and another industry the next day. And we’ll take what we saw here and bring that idea to a different industry. Right. Like, oh my gosh, we’ve never thought of that before. It’s like, Yeah, but I mean, we’re not genius. We’re just saying, right? Yeah. And nine times out of 10. It works across platforms, people just don’t think like that all the time. Right. Yeah, no. And I think, you know, when we talk to people that start businesses, and they’re kind of trying to figure things out, like, I mean, the blueprints, they’re just kind of have to shift a few pieces around. Right?

 

Phil Brandon  8:55  

Yeah, you know, and it was very similar type of, you know, figuring out what it would take to build something, you know, from a software perspective, or from a real hardware perspective stills and pumps and tanks, and, you know, all that sort of stuff. And then process was a big part of it, you know, we process spirits and distill them, and that’s, you know, a process of making something and prior to all tell for 14 years, I worked as a sales engineer, calling on manufacturing plants, selling industrial process controls. So I had a lot of familiarity with how industrial processes work. So, that background coupled with the skills that I developed at Alltel with putting together a package enabled me to start Rocktown you were

 

Nate Disarro  9:57  

primed and ready to go and you had developed a tasting palette. No one was good, good spirits, but

 

Phil Brandon  10:02  

I practice really hard.

 

Nate Disarro  10:06  

It’s one hobby turned profession that I think a lot of people practice that just don’t ever make it to the professional level,

 

Phil Brandon  10:12  

right?

 

Nate Disarro  10:13  

So as you develop the brand, how did the brand come about? How did you determine what types of spirits you wanted to make? Where do you start with all that versus where you’re at now,

 

Phil Brandon  10:23  

you start a distillery and you need to name it something. And a lot of distilleries in Scotland are named Glenn FIDIC. Glen live it, you know, and they’re named around where they are, like, the, the, you know, river or the island sky or what you know, the hill that they are from. So I wanted to try to figure out a name that I didn’t want to call it little rock distillery, I didn’t want to call it Arkansas distillery, but something that was, you know, paid, I guess, homage for lack of a better word to where we’re from. And rock town, you know, popped up on Wikipedia, as you know, a potential nickname for Little Rock. I’d never heard it called that before. And I was like, oh, that sounds cool. You know, it kind of has an older sound to it. And it? You know, you could people always ask, well, what’s rock down? I was like, we’re from Little Rock. And they’re like, oh, make sense. You know, it’s not completely obvious. But once you get the connection, it makes sense. So that was the brand, I was going to call it Rock town. And then, you know, what are we going to make first? Well, you know, I want to make whiskey or you know, bourbon. Bourbon has to be aged. And so then you need something to sell, though. While that’s aging. So what can you make the doesn’t require aging, and yeah, that’s vodka and gin. So those are our first three products that we started making, of course, we only started selling vodka and gin, you know, initially, but bourbon came later. So that was kind of the impetus. And we got started with that. And then it’s just listening to the market. Around 2011, the moonshiners show on Discovery Channel got to be a big thing. And I was like, Well, I guess I need to make a moonshine. And I came out with, you know, regular corn whiskey and then the apple pie. And apple pie was super popular. And the moonshiners show, gave it credence and you know, it was off to the races with that. And now we probably have literally, I don’t know 50 different products, from flavored vodkas to the Coors, to gins to different styles and types of whiskey from Bourbon to write a single malt. I like to experiment I like to try things like to make different things, but also listen to what the market wants, but it’s also what do I like and what do I think I could do? Well, and yeah, so that’s how that came about.

 

Nate Disarro  13:20  

So as a well versed consumer, not necessarily a well versed, practitioner and how this stuff kind of comes about. So when you think about developing a new product, what all goes into that piece of the process.

 

Phil Brandon  13:37  

Sometimes it’s you know, what is readily available. So when I started making bourbon for, you know, the first bourbon ever made in the state of Arkansas, well, what are the typical ingredients and bourbon it’s has to be at least 51% corn, and then there’s wheat or rye, typically as a middle grain between the corn and the malted barley. And rye wasn’t really farmed in Arkansas. So wheat was so I could get wheat so I decided to first bourbon would be a weeded bourbon. And I used Arkansas corn, Arkansas, soft red winter wheat and malted barley and made bourbon. And then beyond that, it’s like well, what else can we do and I finally got a farmer in Arkansas to grow rice. So then we made our rye whiskey. And then I started experimenting with different mash bills for bourbon, where I take the weed out and put something like chocolate malt in the middle or golden promise malt from Scotland, or peated malt or unmalted barley. I’ve done one with rice now. So there’s, you know, lots of creative options to try different things. used to see, and you don’t always know, on the whiskey side how it’s going to turn out because it has to be aged. So, you know, my initial attempt was to just change the same 9% of the mash bill that I used, we would 9% of other grains to see if would the grain really make that much difference in the flavor? And by gosh, it sure does even just 9%. So I learned a lot through that process. And our newest bourbon is is called La harp low, right. And it’s a bourbon that has a low amount of rye in the mash bill just 12%. Right. And, you know, just see how that would do since we’ve got right and available now. And so just things like that. What’s available? What, what is interesting, what can we do easily enough? And that’s kind of what I do.

 

Nate Disarro  16:05  

I love it. You brought up a couple of interesting things. First of all, you know, you started your business in what is now east village before East Village was cool.

 

Phil Brandon  16:13  

We were the first thing there. Yeah, I’d like to

 

Nate Disarro  16:17  

think you contributed to the culture of you know, hey, let’s actually do something over here right and generated something that people came to and then all of a sudden now it’s it’s becoming a thriving little spy. There’s loss for the brewery, of course, and right, you know, you’ve got a coffee shop and a business in your old space and railyard barbecue joint next door, right. But now you’re literally on Main Street in Little Rock, Arkansas. So obviously, regionally, you are homegrown. But you use ingredients that are also homegrown, right? Was that a decision from day one? Oh, yeah. Why? Why stay local?

 

Phil Brandon  16:58  

Well, it’s a thing and whiskey where that’s similar to wine. And it’s this idea that flavors generated from the place where you are. And its terroir, you know, it’s a French word, I probably butchered it just then. But why would I buy corn from Indiana, you know, through a major manufacturer that would bag it and send it to me when I could, you know, find a local farmer, find a grain elevator, get it, you know, prepared and clean for me and I could use Arkansas corn to make a true Arkansas bourbon. It just made sense from a whiskey and, you know, wine world kind of thinking so, and then, you know, I source all my boxes locally, and, you know, use local suppliers as much as I possibly can, because those relationships are just so important. And be able to drive over there, you know, see the guy that you’re buying from out at dinner, you know, all those kinds of things where you develop those relationships with local suppliers, you know, is is invaluable. So, yeah, it’s always been really important to me to source locally.

 

Nate Disarro  18:22  

So been at this a while now, for like 12 years, probably have learned a few things along the way. What what keeps it fun, what keeps you going and motivated to kind of wake up every day and try something new come out with a new product?

 

Phil Brandon  18:38  

I don’t know. You know, I just love it. We’ve come out with probably two new products this year. And two last year, we started doing a lot of the Cougars. And you know, that’s been exciting. It’s exciting to you know, I’ve got some tremendously great people working with me. And you know, to work with them every day is exciting. I’ve got great distributors and relationships there that are fun to work with. And then you know, there I said it again, you know, traveled to Chicago to whiskey fast to you know, pour our whiskies for people from all over the country to travel to Maryland to work with those people and or travel to Seattle, get to, you know, go to Chicago for a conference or New Orleans for a conference. So it’s really just, it’s dynamic, it’s fun, it’s interesting. I you know, the any given day for me could be anything from there’s a problem with a boiler or the air compressor, so Oh, you know, with my electrical engineering background, I can troubleshoot the electronics to getting in Adobe Illustrator and modifying a logo or a poster to get a t shirt made for a bar to, you know, working on pricing schemes and market tactics for a distributor in a new state, to negotiating pricing for bottles and things from suppliers and working on supply chain management, to you know, repairing the dishwasher or we had a plug behind the one of the bar wells start smoking on Last Saturday, so I spent most of Saturday repairing a plug for the dishwasher. So it there’s so many different things I was up on the roof two days ago, looking at gas pipe sizing to see if we could get a new boiler and whether we had enough gas to supply that. There’s, it’s never the same thing every day, and it’s exciting and different. And you know, and and it’s a great responsibility. I have 25 employees now where you know, I have to come in and do payroll, I have to come in and make sure that the you know, bank statements balance and all that stuff, too. So it’s fun because there’s there’s a lot to do and and a lot of different things to do. So I’m not doing the same thing every day. Well, you

 

Nate Disarro  21:47  

check pretty much all the boxes of a stereotypical entrepreneur, doing all those things, including the brand itself, right? Didn’t you kind of develop the look and feel of the brand and early on you were doing your own photos and everything? Yeah,

 

Phil Brandon  22:01  

I was doing my own photos. No, you know, luckily, as time has progressed, I’ve got a person that takes a lot of photos and does social media for us. And she’s been doing a great job for the last four years or so. And, and I do have an artist that works with me on labels, but you know, I get into Illustrator and tweak them before I submit them, you know, for approval at the federal government and all those kinds of things. So I still keep my hands in those things. But you know, luckily, I’m able to, to let some experts help me now where Yeah, I mean, the first, you know, website I developed by myself, you know, in WordPress to, you know, today, we’ve got some developers that helped me, you know, so it’s nice to make progress, but not have to do everything yourself, but at least I have enough knowledge to be able to speak with him about it, you know,

 

Nate Disarro  23:10  

yeah. You mentioned earlier, you just developed a line of law course, right? You know, every time I turn around, go to the grocery store, there’s or the liquor store, there’s some new type of canned seltzer or like cooler flavored drinks, you know, the industry is getting more and more creative and releasing more and more products. It seems like so What trends are you seeing and how are you trying to kind of keep up and keep things going? So that, you know, people continue to see the brand and get curious about it.

 

Phil Brandon  23:41  

All right. Well, you know, there I go, you know, again,

 

Nate Disarro  23:47  

I tried to do a little ticker.

 

Phil Brandon  23:50  

It’s a drinking game every time Phil says, you know, you have to take a shot or have any Rocktown.

 

Nate Disarro  23:59  

Listen, you could sell a lot of product that way.

 

Phil Brandon  24:02  

Well, you know, the one thing I’ve decided I was going to avoid up to now is been the seltzer craze. I looked at it really hard a couple of years ago, and it was obvious this was going to be a big part of the market. And everybody else saw the same thing. And if you ask any liquor store owner or any distributor today, they probably get pitched 50 New seltzers any given week, you know seriously there are so many new ones out there. And it was a whole new thing. I don’t carbonate anything. So I would have to get a co2 tank that was enormous. Learn about carbonation and how to prepare those and how to buy a canning line and the whole thing and it was just gonna be enormous. So I just decided I just wasn’t going to do seltzers while it seemed like there was an opportunity and everybody in their brother have gotten into it and and there’s going to be some shakeout, obviously but while that was going on, I had a local restaurant group, yellow rocket concepts come to me and say, hey, you know, we use a lot of triple sec and our margaritas. And could you make a triple set because cuz we’re not real happy with the service that we’re getting. And they’re having a hard time getting it because of the pandemic and blah, blah, blah. And we really need a good triple sec, because we believe it’s really important in a good Margarita to have a great triple set. So I was like, Well, I don’t know, let me try you know, so I went back, I’ve got a room in the back that’s kind of my lab. It’s not really a lab but it’s just a room. It’s more

 

Nate Disarro  26:05  

fun to call it all right, it’s the laboy

 

Phil Brandon  26:07  

Tori and I went to work with different oranges in different you know, ingredients to come up with a triple sack and I finally landed on one and I thought it was pretty similar to what they were doing but a little bit better, a little bit less sugar. But uh, you know, delicious triple sack, I thought and they agreed. And now we have the triple sec in all their restaurants, which is awesome. But it also showed me that there was an opportunity in the market between the really high end quatro gram on yeas and they’re really low end to Cuypers and other triple sects that are out there for a handcrafted triple sec to be kind of in the middle there price wise and but you know, super high quality and so I decided to also do a ginger liqueur and then an elderflower liqueur. And then we just came out with our creme de cacao. And I’ve got a couple of more on the drawing board and so it’s just kind of like seeing where the opportunity is and you know there’s a little gap in the market there that I think we’re filling really nicely and they’re just playing delicious. So you know for the elderflower we went and harvested Arkansas elderflowers, we use a vacuum distillation technique to extract the flavor of the elderflower. So you know, we’re doing some pretty cool stuff beyond just, you know, buying some flavors and pouring them into a tank, you know,

 

Nate Disarro  28:00  

which essentially is the the definition of a craft distillery, right? I mean, you kind of get to have Yeah, your right lab and you go in and kind of play with things and you’re not just following a recipe day in and day out. You’re constantly figuring out what does the market need? What are the customers need? What is you know, what’s going to make a better product than what exists? Right?

 

Phil Brandon  28:20  

Yeah, absolutely.

 

Nate Disarro  28:22  

I love that. Well, for anybody that’s unaware of who yellow rocket is probably your favorite restaurant is on the list of restaurants they own heights taco Tamale and local lime specifically, right? Known for their margaritas, absolutely phenomenal margaritas. So go, go hit him up, get a margarita and, and then go by your local liquor store and grab a bottle Rocktown and make your own. So shifting gears a little bit, talking about sort of the business as a whole, you know, we’re storytellers at heart. That’s what my company does. And that’s what I’m passionate about. And to me, business is about how good is your story? That’s what people are buying, you know, you got to have a good product that’s a given. Yeah, but ultimately, they’re, they’re choosing your product over something else because of the story behind it. And maybe that story is it’s a maid with better ingredients that’s going to make my tastebuds feel better. But to you what, what part does storytelling play in your business? And how do you use that to kind of move your business forward?

 

Phil Brandon  29:28  

Wow, okay, that’s a tough one. You know, marketing is storytelling and having a great story and we tell the story at every tour that we give about how I was in corporate America got laid off, said screw corporate America, I’m gonna do my own thing and I wanted to start a distillery and you know, wanted it to be in my hometown and be all about Arkansas. And so that’s kind of our initial story, our origin story. And that’s kind of the story that we tell. Once you kind of get out of Arkansas, you kind of just tell the story about handcrafted dedication to quality, that our passion is our spirit. That’s our slogan. And tell the story about how we’ve been able to continue to grow and continue to win major international awards for our products that are handcrafted right here. And, you know, Little Rock, Arkansas. So

 

Nate Disarro  30:38  

I love it. And it’s a story that, you know, I got drawn to and connected to 10 years ago, and the story hasn’t changed. But the brand certainly has developed because of the story. I’m graphing in

 

Phil Brandon  30:48  

that Yeah, absolutely.

 

Nate Disarro  30:50  

I love that. You know, there I go. Add another shot to the counter. When you look at, at the industry, we talked about this a little bit before we started the interview, it’s something people are drawn to visually, it’s very intriguing. You know, every bar you go to has some different display of the bottles, and a lot of them, backlight them so that the colors really stand out, you know, the bottles are beautiful, the color of the the spirits is really attractive to look at. But it’s an industry that a lot of people don’t know the guts of. So what’s something that you feel like is unique to this industry that a lot of people don’t know what’s kind of one of those secrets of the industry that would surprise people?

 

Phil Brandon  31:37  

Well, I think people today are a lot more curious about where things are come from and how they’re made than they’ve ever been before. And we’re really big about telling you know, how we make everything, and telling the story of the products from the corn that we buy from Arkansas farmers. And that sort of thing. I don’t know that people really realize about spirits, how incredibly regulated, it really is. I mean, Bourbon is arguably the most regulated consumer product on the planet. And then we’ve got the federal government, you know, watching everything we do, every label we put on a bottle is submitted to the federal government, every formula for anything we make goes to the federal government, we send five reports a month, to the federal government for what we do. The fill tolerance on each bottle is within a tolerance that’s given to us by the federal government, the amount of alcohol or the proof is regulated. And we have highly sensitive, very expensive instruments to measure that so that we are within that tolerance. We pay federal excise tax on every drop that leaves the building. All those things that people, you know, really don’t realize it’s not making widgets and trying to get them in Walmart. Every state has different permits. So for me to sell in the other states that I sell in, I have to be permitted in that state. Some of the states require us to pay excise taxes directly to that state, if the product leaves Arkansas and goes to that state. It’s just a quagmire spiderweb, whatever you want to look at regulations throughout the state. Throughout the United States, it’s actually easier for me to sell my product in the United Kingdom than it is to sell it in Georgia. It’s it’s crazy and became very evident during the pandemic, when people were ordering online for things to come to their house and realized I can’t order a bottle of vodka to come to my house. Why not? And there’s a lot of regulations, why not? And more and more of that starting to open up in some states, but it’s, you know, regulations that were written in 1932 at the end of prohibition that are still being used today. And there’s some modernization that needs to happen, but I don’t think people really realize that so.

 

Nate Disarro  34:39  

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, you still hear in Arkansas about counties that just became white counties and

 

Phil Brandon  34:45  

right, we’ve got, you know, almost 50% of our counties are still dry.

 

Nate Disarro  34:51  

It’s crazy. Yeah. Well, here we are. Speaking of, you know, nobody grows a business without running into challenges and and having to overcome failures. And what’s something that stands out to you going from day one when you had a bottle Jana bottle of vodka and aging barrel of bourbon that you couldn’t sell yet? To where you’re at today? What’s what’s one of the biggest challenges you’ve overcome?

 

Phil Brandon  35:17  

So many, so many challenges. Pick a good one, right? Um, you know, initially, our products when they came out weren’t any good. And that was a huge challenge that I had to overcome and took took several years. And there’s still people today that judges by the first batch we ever made. But we’ve won over more than we’ve not. And, you know, I’m very happy to say that today we make some of the best stuff there is. One of the challenges midway through was, we were in that building over on East Sixth Street. And we had outgrown it. And we needed to move, or we needed to stay and remodel that building. And it was a big decision point. Do we stay or do we find somewhere else? And initially, we were gonna stay and then this building ran now. I had a real estate friend, and he happened to send it to me, just he didn’t know I was in this decision point or anything, just an email, Hey, this is a building that’s come available, thought it might be good for something like what you do. Now initially, I said no thanks. You know, we’re gonna stay where we are. And then a week later, I was like, Well, wait a minute, let me let me go take a look at it. And yeah, four years ago, June, we’ve been in here for years. Now we move to Main Street here. And this building’s 26,000 square feet versus 15,000 square feet. So we had a lot more space, I had gotten the law passed, to allow us to sell drinks. So buy the drink, and have a bar. And so I created the bar and open the bar. And that’s been a big, you know, success for us. So that was a real kind of inflection point decision point. That we were very lucky to find this building and lucky enough to then buy the building and not rent. So yeah, those were two really important challenges that we’ve faced and overcome.

 

Nate Disarro  37:42  

Yeah, what always pays to have good friends that, that you never know, when something’s gonna pop up. And more people, you know, the more relationships you have, right, the more luck comes your way?

 

Phil Brandon  37:54  

Absolutely.

 

Nate Disarro  37:55  

I love that. I like to talk a lot, you know, podcasts, obviously called titans of industry, who are the titans in your life, who the people in your life that you kind of look up to or respect as leaders or industry innovators that you’re kind of constantly paying attention to?

 

Phil Brandon  38:12  

I look up to all the other fellow craft distillers other distilleries that are out there, I follow the industry very closely. One of the my mentors is a guy named Nick Pierce, who invested in the distillery and you know, kind of helped me shape shepherd the distillery from where we were, I guess, it’s been a year ago, maybe two years now. I bought all the investors out. So now we’re 100% family owned by the brand and family, which is basically me and my wife. So, but we still talk, Nick and I do on the phone quite a bit. And he owns a large liquor store. And so he’s able to, you know, have some visibility into what’s going on in the market. And so it’s, it’s been great to have him as a as a mentor.

 

Nate Disarro  39:23  

I love it. I like this question next, because every business has its own unique answers to this question. But in my mind, every business has to have ideas, culture, and execution to stay afloat. So how would you rank those in order of importance, ideas, culture execution, and everybody’s answers a little different? So there’s no right answer here. I’m just curious.

 

Phil Brandon  39:52  

Wow, yeah. Culture, I think is one of the most important and having a great culture. We’re People can work with you. And Excel. And I worked really hard to try to be a leader that people can follow and have a great culture. I mean, you can’t have execution without an idea to execute. But I think I execute really well. Our just in time manufacturing system that we work through supply chain management, all that execution stuff. But if we didn’t have an idea for a product that was selling, and we didn’t brand it, well, it wouldn’t sell. So those are, you know, tied for second and third, I think together. So that’d be how I would rank it. Yeah.

 

Nate Disarro  40:56  

Yeah, that’s, like I said, there’s no right answer.

 

Phil Brandon  41:00  

No, come on, what’s the right answer?

 

Nate Disarro  41:02  

But well, you know, I could give you my version, but nobody cares about that. I don’t know, from a personal level outside of business, even though as an entrepreneur, there really is no outside of business hours. But what do you do to keep yourself sane and kind of, you know, is there anything you do on the on the outside world that influences how you are as a business owner.

 

Phil Brandon  41:25  

So I’ve got some fairly unusual hobbies. Since I was in the sixth grade, I’ve been a flutist. And two and a half years ago, wasn’t a pandemic decision, I’d already decided it pre pandemic. But I decided my wife’s a church organist, and music director. And once a year, I would play the flute in church. And that Christmas of 2019, I played the flute in church and I decided I wanted to try to get good at the flute again, and I started taking online flute lessons. And then I went to a flute store in New York City, and bought a, a professional quality flute, which I had always wanted. And since then, I’ve been working very hard at classical flute. And I play every day and take a lesson every other week. And really enjoying that I used to be a really big tennis player and got really good at not really, I got pretty good at tennis. And there’s so many parallels between being a musician and being being a athlete, you get the same sort of, if you practice, you get better, you get the same sort of understanding of the levels of skill. As soon as you think, well, if I just get to be this good, and then you get to be that good. And you go, Wait a minute, there’s so much more to learn. And you get that good new like way oh, you know, so and that, you know, levels of ability between somebody that’s at the peak of the game like a Roger Federer versus somebody in Little Rock, Arkansas, playing four or five, tennis, you realize that gap between somebody that’s playing in the Berlin Philharmonic and, and you know, somebody that’s, like me, so it’s, it’s intriguing and interesting. And you’re always able to learn something different. You’re always improving. And so that’s exciting to me. So I, I play the flute.

 

Nate Disarro  43:50  

Well, unique hobbies but but very interesting. A million years ago, I worked in the snow sports industry in Colorado, and got to work with a lot of professional skiers and people in that realm. And totally understand what you’re saying about you know, when you, when you get good at something, and you think you’re good, and then you see somebody at that expert level, you realize, like, I mean, I may be able to ski fast downhill on a straight slope. But when I see a professional skier come in, and ski twice as fast and cut twice as hard and do it with a margin of error. Very small, right? It’s a whole different world, you know, and I think that about a lot of the Olympic sports because they’re not the quote unquote, normal big sports, you know, you see these guys go out and compete at Olympic level, and you’re just like, oh, my gosh, there’s

 

Phil Brandon  44:36  

a level of skill. And the dedication that it takes to get to that level of skill is just phenomenal. People don’t really realize it unless you’re in that specific skill to understand that somebody that’s at the elite level is elite, because they can do things that most of us can. Yeah, no.

 

Nate Disarro  44:58  

Well, you mentioned a minute ago out this whole thing that hopefully we’re pretty much through now the pandemic, you started your business in the great recession. And then we’re on the backside here of this global two year pandemic. What did that do for your business? Some people, it hurt incredibly, some people, it actually did really good thing. So obviously, I spent plenty of time at the liquor store. But I can only imagine what it did for your business.

 

Phil Brandon  45:27  

Well, it was incredible. I mean, we were well positioned in a lot of liquor stores, and we’re able to continue to sell through liquor stores. So our I didn’t take a day off from March 2020. Till, you know, December, we were working nonstop. Not only were we making our normal products and shipping those out the back door to our you know, distributors and stores and that sort of thing. But we also shifted the retail part of the business to hand sanitizer, and we sold hand sanitizer to the public, but we also donated a ton of it to hospitals and schools and homeless shelters and that sort of thing. So we were extremely busy and very fortunate that it was really a very busy time for us and all our all my employees were able to stay on and are still here today. And we were able to be stewards to the community as well as our customers. So it was for us. I won’t lie, it was a good thing.

 

Nate Disarro  46:55  

Well, I’d love to run into a few quick hit questions. This has been a really fun conversation. I could probably go all day but for the sake of everybody, we’ll start to wrap things up. You mentioned a lot of audio books. Do you have a best favorite book or what’s the latest book you’ve listened to?

 

Phil Brandon  47:13  

I’m listening to pappy land right now, which is about pappy Van Winkle and all of that. You know, Mark? benioff’s, Trailblazer, radical candor. You know, Jeff Bezos is biography. And this one was pretty cool. Every boy every good boy does fine. Which is a an acronym btw. Yeah. Yeah. For for the for the musicals. Yeah. And it’s a it’s a classical pianist talking about his development from a child to be in a classical pianist. And so it was interesting to listen to him tell his own story. He narrates the book about going to the conservatory for for music school and that sort of thing. So it’s pretty interesting.

 

Nate Disarro  48:13  

Very cool. Radical candor is great as well that yeah, that whole concept I think everybody should

 

Phil Brandon  48:19  

care personally, but challenged directly I use that a lot.

 

Nate Disarro  48:23  

Yeah, absolutely. What’s a part of your daily routine that you cannot skip?

 

Phil Brandon  48:31  

I don’t skip breakfast. I I grew up on cereal. So I eat cereal every morning.

 

Nate Disarro  48:40  

Are you more of a Netflix or news guy?

 

Phil Brandon  48:43  

today? I don’t watch as much news. Just because it’s all so bad. But yeah, I do watch a ton of Netflix and the other streaming services for sure. Love it.

 

Nate Disarro  48:57  

What about favorite podcasts? Is there one that your is your go to you don’t miss an episode.

 

Phil Brandon  49:03  

You know that? There’s whiskey cast, which is one about whiskey which was is the OG for for whiskey podcasts the the new one on the block, which isn’t so new anymore. Now it’s called bourbon pursuit. And then there’s a few marketing ones. Jay bears. There’s a couple of fully ones I listened to. But yeah, yeah, no, I always. I used to always listen to rock and roll in the car and more and more. It’s podcasts.

 

Nate Disarro  49:39  

Love it. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever given or received?

 

Phil Brandon  49:47  

I mean, when I was starting a company I got told by several people don’t do it. And that ignored it went ahead anyway. It was more like motivation. So it kind of was a reverse Staying. So that would probably be right.

 

Nate Disarro  50:05  

Do you have any newly formed habits a lot of people got into new habits, whether good or bad through the pandemic or you know, just shifting of, of culture, you know?

 

Phil Brandon  50:17  

Yeah, I guess I did get a peloton, and and do ride that several times a week. I like to rode bike on a real bike and but I don’t get to do it as much as I’d like to wear the peloton, I can, you know, this morning at 610. I got up and did 30 minutes. And you know, I feel a lot better during the day because I do that. So been working really hard on that.

 

Nate Disarro  50:51  

You ever kind of tag team that and the flute practice at the same time? No, absolutely not. No way. All right. So if you could write a book, what would the title be?

 

Phil Brandon  51:04  

Don’t do it.

 

Nate Disarro  51:07  

Hey, I mean, listen, I think so many businesses start the same way. You got this idea. You feel confident in it. And everybody out there says no. Right. And I think there was

 

Phil Brandon  51:17  

one person that said yes, and it was my wife. And and, you know, God bless her. She has stood by me all the way through, but she believed I could do it. When you know, people in the industry that not in distilling, but in Little Rock that were very successful that I talked to about it, were like, Man, I wouldn’t do it. And I want to have so there you go.

 

Nate Disarro  51:44  

Oh, I bet they’re drinking your your whiskey right now. So the peloton, obviously a great great purchase, but fairly pricey for all standards. What’s the best thing you’ve bought in the last year for under $100?

 

Phil Brandon  52:01  

I’d say it was a bottle of compost box spice tree. I like it. It’s a blended whiskey from Scotland from a craft blender. And it is delicious. So

 

Nate Disarro  52:21  

very cool. All right, as a musician, yourself, who’s your favorite artist or musician?

 

Phil Brandon  52:28  

Oh, that’s tough. That is very tough. He goes through so many different, you know, time periods in your life, who you like, you know, I, I’ve always kind of been. Like, if I’m learning a piece, I’m listening to that piece and listening to somebody play that. So I’m not always listening to the same thing over you know, same person. Sure. There’s great flute players, you know, that I admire. I’ve always, you know, I was a YouTube guy. I know, that’s kind of, you know, generic, in a sense, but I’ve been to more YouTube concerts than any other concert probably. I really liked the police in staying as a kid. So you know, I really, like, you know, that type of music, so. Oh,

 

Nate Disarro  53:30  

all right. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask, What’s your favorite cocktail?

 

Phil Brandon  53:35  

Favorite cocktail is a sazzle rack. So we make of a off menu version of it here called the Phils rack. And it’s it’s my little, my little riff on it. So that would be what I would order

 

Nate Disarro  53:52  

to we’re gonna get to know the secret.

 

Phil Brandon  53:55  

Well, the secret is, you know, for a SAS Iraqi would wash the glass with the herb St. So that means you pour it in, and then you pour it out and the residue in the glass provide some flavor and I leave the Arab saint in. So gives it a little bit more licorice flavor. And I really liked licorice. So that’s at Phil’s.

 

Nate Disarro  54:23  

I love it. I didn’t know that was your drink. And I was just in Kentucky with a client who ordered a Sazerac and told the bartender to leave it. Really? I think you’ll know who it is. I’ll tell you in a minute. But yeah, it was funny. So that’s, that’s funny. That’s good to know. Yeah. Well, Phil, thanks so much. This has been amazing. Love hearing your story and seeing the brand doing so well. If people want to check you out, where can they find the product? Where can they find you online?

 

Phil Brandon  54:56  

Just go to Rocktown distillery.com and Go to the word of bisection. And you can click on your state and or your zip code and figure out where to get it. So thank you very much, Nate. I was been great visiting with you. And thank you so much for having me.

 

Nate Disarro  55:12  

Phil Brandon 0:00
flavors generated from the place where you are. It’s what’s available. What what is interesting. I like to experiment. I like to try things like to make different things, but also listen to what the market wants, but it’s also what do I like and what do I think I could do well, so you know, we’re doing some pretty cool stuff beyond just buying some flavors and pouring them into it.

Nate Disarro 0:24
Hey, it’s Nate Disarro and welcome to titans of industry, the podcast where I talk to industry leaders and innovators who are at the top of their game and leading the pack in their fields, uncovering some of the best stories in today’s business landscape. In this episode, I speak with Phil Brandon, the founder, CEO and head distiller of rock town distillery. When faced with a layoff during his corporate IT career, Phil took his passion for whiskey and transformed it into an iconic Arkansas operation, and is the first to ever distill bourbon in Arkansas. Using his background in engineering along with his MBA, Phyllis put his entrepreneurial talents to the test by creating the Rocktown brand, distribution process, manufacturing standards and a whole lot more. He has been creating handcrafted award winning spirits that you can find in restaurants, liquor stores, and he’s winning contests all around the world.

Now, let’s get to the episode. But before we do, let’s talk about content, strategy and Video for marketing your business. Our team at content Titan is committed to great storytelling, no matter what industry you’re in. It’s crucial to engage, entertain, inform and captivate your audience. And video is the best way to do it. Having worked with people and organizations of all shapes and sizes, our team has the experience to deliver the right content at the right price. We are easy to do business with and we know how to get you results. Visit content titan.co to learn more.

Now, here’s the episode with Phil Brandon.

Phil Brandon, thanks so much for hopping on the podcast with us. I met you I think about a decade ago, and your company was only a couple of years old, I think at the time. And here we are in this beautiful tasting room. Give me the the short story. How did how did we get here? Oh, gosh, yeah, it’s it’s kind of crazy. But yeah, thanks for having me on your podcast. This is really cool. It’s great to see you again after all the years and you know,

Phil Brandon 2:33
we were over in on East Sixth Street and a warehouse that we had turned into a distillery. But prior to that, you know 2009 I basically incorporated the company we got started in 2010. I had been laid off from my job at Verizon Wireless after they acquired Alltel and was

challenged was trying to figure out what to do with my life and decided that in order for me to stay in Arkansas, which was my home state and

my wife’s home state and our family was here to start my own thing and I wanted to be creative and do something that I thought was exciting and turned out it was starting a distillery

Nate Disarro 3:25
so I know you were in it, is that right? Yeah, it roll. I had a risin

Phil Brandon 3:31
Yeah, no, it wasn’t like I was plugging in computers or working on servers. But it was the interface between business and I T helping the to talk to each other. Alltel developed a whole lot of custom software. And so I got to help with some pretty cool projects there.

Nate Disarro 3:51
So why a distillery? I mean, you know, when that time period in your life came well, I was it. Let’s let’s forget the technology. I mean, there’s a lot of technology here but yeah, let’s move into spilled liquid.

Phil Brandon 4:04
Well, you know, it’s just kind of one of those things that happened. Wasn’t like I grew up as a kid and my my dad was a moonshine er and his dad and you know, it was in the in, in the back of my mind to always want to do it. It was really I enjoyed drinking whiskey. I kind of got into the geek factor where I’d go on the internet at work. Of course I’m at work right but you know, our projects were slowing down because Verizon had acquired Alltel and there was less things to do during the day and but you’re there in your office doing things anyway and so I buy a bottle over the weekend from Scotland or you know, Kentucky or wherever and you know, a Monday after consuming it, you know not to access Over the weekend, but you know, responsibly, I would research the distillery. And I learned about the science of distilling and that sort of thing. And I’ve got a engineering background electrical engineer by degree and a master’s in business. And it was like, wow, this is, you know, pretty cool. You know, I like distilling This is neat. whiskies. Delicious. But then I learned that there are craft distilleries starting up throughout the country. Now, this was 2009. It wasn’t that popular back then. But there were some out on the West Coast and some on the East Coast. And I was like, wow, you know, that would be pretty cool. I knew about craft brewing. But making beer wasn’t really didn’t capture my imagination, but making whiskey. Now, that could be pretty cool. And so I took the skills that I had learned at all till about putting a package together of, you know, this is the statement of work, this is what it’s gonna cost. These are the things we have to buy to be able to do it. And, you know, scoping a project basis, basically, well, I decided to turn my own idea into a project. And I scoped it. And so I went to, you know, the manufacturers that make the stills and got prices and got, you know, ideas for who to call as a consultant. You know, in it, we use consultants all the time, right? We’re installing a software package and IBM is the consultant and you hire them or somebody else, that’s a licensed consultant, and bring them in. So I was using that same sort of technique to start a distillery and ended up hiring a guy that was a former master distiller for Maker’s Mark named Dave pickerel. He was kind of the Johnny Appleseed of craft distilling. At the time, he helped hundreds of distilleries start up. And he was my consultant, and I, you know, put together a package. Business Plan, you know, went around the banks. only need one. Yes. And that’s all I got, was one, yes. Got an SBA loan through the stimulus package during the Great Recession, and raised a little bit of money from friends and family rolled my Alltel 401k, put all my chips on the middle of the table and roll the dice. And so that was how I got started.

Nate Disarro 7:58
I love that story. And it’s interesting, because you essentially took a blueprint that you knew worked in the Alltel world in the Verizon world, and how to get sort of a product to market, move it over to a brand new industry that you hadn’t been a part of it all and sort of just said, well, we’ll change this change this, but ultimately, the blueprint is kind of the same, right? And I work with a lot of clients all the time. You know, we do videos and create content for people all over the place. And we’ll work in one industry tomorrow and another industry the next day. And we’ll take what we saw here and bring that idea to a different industry. Right. Like, oh my gosh, we’ve never thought of that before. It’s like, Yeah, but I mean, we’re not genius. We’re just saying, right? Yeah. And nine times out of 10. It works across platforms, people just don’t think like that all the time. Right. Yeah, no. And I think, you know, when we talk to people that start businesses, and they’re kind of trying to figure things out, like, I mean, the blueprints, they’re just kind of have to shift a few pieces around. Right?

Phil Brandon 8:55
Yeah, you know, and it was very similar type of, you know, figuring out what it would take to build something, you know, from a software perspective, or from a real hardware perspective stills and pumps and tanks, and, you know, all that sort of stuff. And then process was a big part of it, you know, we process spirits and distill them, and that’s, you know, a process of making something and prior to all tell for 14 years, I worked as a sales engineer, calling on manufacturing plants, selling industrial process controls. So I had a lot of familiarity with how industrial processes work. So, that background coupled with the skills that I developed at Alltel with putting together a package enabled me to start Rocktown you were

Nate Disarro 9:57
primed and ready to go and you had developed a tasting palette. No one was good, good spirits, but

Phil Brandon 10:02
I practice really hard.

Nate Disarro 10:06
It’s one hobby turned profession that I think a lot of people practice that just don’t ever make it to the professional level,

Phil Brandon 10:12
right?

Nate Disarro 10:13
So as you develop the brand, how did the brand come about? How did you determine what types of spirits you wanted to make? Where do you start with all that versus where you’re at now,

Phil Brandon 10:23
you start a distillery and you need to name it something. And a lot of distilleries in Scotland are named Glenn FIDIC. Glen live it, you know, and they’re named around where they are, like, the, the, you know, river or the island sky or what you know, the hill that they are from. So I wanted to try to figure out a name that I didn’t want to call it little rock distillery, I didn’t want to call it Arkansas distillery, but something that was, you know, paid, I guess, homage for lack of a better word to where we’re from. And rock town, you know, popped up on Wikipedia, as you know, a potential nickname for Little Rock. I’d never heard it called that before. And I was like, oh, that sounds cool. You know, it kind of has an older sound to it. And it? You know, you could people always ask, well, what’s rock down? I was like, we’re from Little Rock. And they’re like, oh, make sense. You know, it’s not completely obvious. But once you get the connection, it makes sense. So that was the brand, I was going to call it Rock town. And then, you know, what are we going to make first? Well, you know, I want to make whiskey or you know, bourbon. Bourbon has to be aged. And so then you need something to sell, though. While that’s aging. So what can you make the doesn’t require aging, and yeah, that’s vodka and gin. So those are our first three products that we started making, of course, we only started selling vodka and gin, you know, initially, but bourbon came later. So that was kind of the impetus. And we got started with that. And then it’s just listening to the market. Around 2011, the moonshiners show on Discovery Channel got to be a big thing. And I was like, Well, I guess I need to make a moonshine. And I came out with, you know, regular corn whiskey and then the apple pie. And apple pie was super popular. And the moonshiners show, gave it credence and you know, it was off to the races with that. And now we probably have literally, I don’t know 50 different products, from flavored vodkas to the Coors, to gins to different styles and types of whiskey from Bourbon to write a single malt. I like to experiment I like to try things like to make different things, but also listen to what the market wants, but it’s also what do I like and what do I think I could do? Well, and yeah, so that’s how that came about.

Nate Disarro 13:20
So as a well versed consumer, not necessarily a well versed, practitioner and how this stuff kind of comes about. So when you think about developing a new product, what all goes into that piece of the process.

Phil Brandon 13:37
Sometimes it’s you know, what is readily available. So when I started making bourbon for, you know, the first bourbon ever made in the state of Arkansas, well, what are the typical ingredients and bourbon it’s has to be at least 51% corn, and then there’s wheat or rye, typically as a middle grain between the corn and the malted barley. And rye wasn’t really farmed in Arkansas. So wheat was so I could get wheat so I decided to first bourbon would be a weeded bourbon. And I used Arkansas corn, Arkansas, soft red winter wheat and malted barley and made bourbon. And then beyond that, it’s like well, what else can we do and I finally got a farmer in Arkansas to grow rice. So then we made our rye whiskey. And then I started experimenting with different mash bills for bourbon, where I take the weed out and put something like chocolate malt in the middle or golden promise malt from Scotland, or peated malt or unmalted barley. I’ve done one with rice now. So there’s, you know, lots of creative options to try different things. used to see, and you don’t always know, on the whiskey side how it’s going to turn out because it has to be aged. So, you know, my initial attempt was to just change the same 9% of the mash bill that I used, we would 9% of other grains to see if would the grain really make that much difference in the flavor? And by gosh, it sure does even just 9%. So I learned a lot through that process. And our newest bourbon is is called La harp low, right. And it’s a bourbon that has a low amount of rye in the mash bill just 12%. Right. And, you know, just see how that would do since we’ve got right and available now. And so just things like that. What’s available? What, what is interesting, what can we do easily enough? And that’s kind of what I do.

Nate Disarro 16:05
I love it. You brought up a couple of interesting things. First of all, you know, you started your business in what is now east village before East Village was cool.

Phil Brandon 16:13
We were the first thing there. Yeah, I’d like to

Nate Disarro 16:17
think you contributed to the culture of you know, hey, let’s actually do something over here right and generated something that people came to and then all of a sudden now it’s it’s becoming a thriving little spy. There’s loss for the brewery, of course, and right, you know, you’ve got a coffee shop and a business in your old space and railyard barbecue joint next door, right. But now you’re literally on Main Street in Little Rock, Arkansas. So obviously, regionally, you are homegrown. But you use ingredients that are also homegrown, right? Was that a decision from day one? Oh, yeah. Why? Why stay local?

Phil Brandon 16:58
Well, it’s a thing and whiskey where that’s similar to wine. And it’s this idea that flavors generated from the place where you are. And its terroir, you know, it’s a French word, I probably butchered it just then. But why would I buy corn from Indiana, you know, through a major manufacturer that would bag it and send it to me when I could, you know, find a local farmer, find a grain elevator, get it, you know, prepared and clean for me and I could use Arkansas corn to make a true Arkansas bourbon. It just made sense from a whiskey and, you know, wine world kind of thinking so, and then, you know, I source all my boxes locally, and, you know, use local suppliers as much as I possibly can, because those relationships are just so important. And be able to drive over there, you know, see the guy that you’re buying from out at dinner, you know, all those kinds of things where you develop those relationships with local suppliers, you know, is is invaluable. So, yeah, it’s always been really important to me to source locally.

Nate Disarro 18:22
So been at this a while now, for like 12 years, probably have learned a few things along the way. What what keeps it fun, what keeps you going and motivated to kind of wake up every day and try something new come out with a new product?

Phil Brandon 18:38
I don’t know. You know, I just love it. We’ve come out with probably two new products this year. And two last year, we started doing a lot of the Cougars. And you know, that’s been exciting. It’s exciting to you know, I’ve got some tremendously great people working with me. And you know, to work with them every day is exciting. I’ve got great distributors and relationships there that are fun to work with. And then you know, there I said it again, you know, traveled to Chicago to whiskey fast to you know, pour our whiskies for people from all over the country to travel to Maryland to work with those people and or travel to Seattle, get to, you know, go to Chicago for a conference or New Orleans for a conference. So it’s really just, it’s dynamic, it’s fun, it’s interesting. I you know, the any given day for me could be anything from there’s a problem with a boiler or the air compressor, so Oh, you know, with my electrical engineering background, I can troubleshoot the electronics to getting in Adobe Illustrator and modifying a logo or a poster to get a t shirt made for a bar to, you know, working on pricing schemes and market tactics for a distributor in a new state, to negotiating pricing for bottles and things from suppliers and working on supply chain management, to you know, repairing the dishwasher or we had a plug behind the one of the bar wells start smoking on Last Saturday, so I spent most of Saturday repairing a plug for the dishwasher. So it there’s so many different things I was up on the roof two days ago, looking at gas pipe sizing to see if we could get a new boiler and whether we had enough gas to supply that. There’s, it’s never the same thing every day, and it’s exciting and different. And you know, and and it’s a great responsibility. I have 25 employees now where you know, I have to come in and do payroll, I have to come in and make sure that the you know, bank statements balance and all that stuff, too. So it’s fun because there’s there’s a lot to do and and a lot of different things to do. So I’m not doing the same thing every day. Well, you

Nate Disarro 21:47
check pretty much all the boxes of a stereotypical entrepreneur, doing all those things, including the brand itself, right? Didn’t you kind of develop the look and feel of the brand and early on you were doing your own photos and everything? Yeah,

Phil Brandon 22:01
I was doing my own photos. No, you know, luckily, as time has progressed, I’ve got a person that takes a lot of photos and does social media for us. And she’s been doing a great job for the last four years or so. And, and I do have an artist that works with me on labels, but you know, I get into Illustrator and tweak them before I submit them, you know, for approval at the federal government and all those kinds of things. So I still keep my hands in those things. But you know, luckily, I’m able to, to let some experts help me now where Yeah, I mean, the first, you know, website I developed by myself, you know, in WordPress to, you know, today, we’ve got some developers that helped me, you know, so it’s nice to make progress, but not have to do everything yourself, but at least I have enough knowledge to be able to speak with him about it, you know,

Nate Disarro 23:10
yeah. You mentioned earlier, you just developed a line of law course, right? You know, every time I turn around, go to the grocery store, there’s or the liquor store, there’s some new type of canned seltzer or like cooler flavored drinks, you know, the industry is getting more and more creative and releasing more and more products. It seems like so What trends are you seeing and how are you trying to kind of keep up and keep things going? So that, you know, people continue to see the brand and get curious about it.

Phil Brandon 23:41
All right. Well, you know, there I go, you know, again,

Nate Disarro 23:47
I tried to do a little ticker.

Phil Brandon 23:50
It’s a drinking game every time Phil says, you know, you have to take a shot or have any Rocktown.

Nate Disarro 23:59
Listen, you could sell a lot of product that way.

Phil Brandon 24:02
Well, you know, the one thing I’ve decided I was going to avoid up to now is been the seltzer craze. I looked at it really hard a couple of years ago, and it was obvious this was going to be a big part of the market. And everybody else saw the same thing. And if you ask any liquor store owner or any distributor today, they probably get pitched 50 New seltzers any given week, you know seriously there are so many new ones out there. And it was a whole new thing. I don’t carbonate anything. So I would have to get a co2 tank that was enormous. Learn about carbonation and how to prepare those and how to buy a canning line and the whole thing and it was just gonna be enormous. So I just decided I just wasn’t going to do seltzers while it seemed like there was an opportunity and everybody in their brother have gotten into it and and there’s going to be some shakeout, obviously but while that was going on, I had a local restaurant group, yellow rocket concepts come to me and say, hey, you know, we use a lot of triple sec and our margaritas. And could you make a triple set because cuz we’re not real happy with the service that we’re getting. And they’re having a hard time getting it because of the pandemic and blah, blah, blah. And we really need a good triple sec, because we believe it’s really important in a good Margarita to have a great triple set. So I was like, Well, I don’t know, let me try you know, so I went back, I’ve got a room in the back that’s kind of my lab. It’s not really a lab but it’s just a room. It’s more

Nate Disarro 26:05
fun to call it all right, it’s the laboy

Phil Brandon 26:07
Tori and I went to work with different oranges in different you know, ingredients to come up with a triple sack and I finally landed on one and I thought it was pretty similar to what they were doing but a little bit better, a little bit less sugar. But uh, you know, delicious triple sack, I thought and they agreed. And now we have the triple sec in all their restaurants, which is awesome. But it also showed me that there was an opportunity in the market between the really high end quatro gram on yeas and they’re really low end to Cuypers and other triple sects that are out there for a handcrafted triple sec to be kind of in the middle there price wise and but you know, super high quality and so I decided to also do a ginger liqueur and then an elderflower liqueur. And then we just came out with our creme de cacao. And I’ve got a couple of more on the drawing board and so it’s just kind of like seeing where the opportunity is and you know there’s a little gap in the market there that I think we’re filling really nicely and they’re just playing delicious. So you know for the elderflower we went and harvested Arkansas elderflowers, we use a vacuum distillation technique to extract the flavor of the elderflower. So you know, we’re doing some pretty cool stuff beyond just, you know, buying some flavors and pouring them into a tank, you know,

Nate Disarro 28:00
which essentially is the the definition of a craft distillery, right? I mean, you kind of get to have Yeah, your right lab and you go in and kind of play with things and you’re not just following a recipe day in and day out. You’re constantly figuring out what does the market need? What are the customers need? What is you know, what’s going to make a better product than what exists? Right?

Phil Brandon 28:20
Yeah, absolutely.

Nate Disarro 28:22
I love that. Well, for anybody that’s unaware of who yellow rocket is probably your favorite restaurant is on the list of restaurants they own heights taco Tamale and local lime specifically, right? Known for their margaritas, absolutely phenomenal margaritas. So go, go hit him up, get a margarita and, and then go by your local liquor store and grab a bottle Rocktown and make your own. So shifting gears a little bit, talking about sort of the business as a whole, you know, we’re storytellers at heart. That’s what my company does. And that’s what I’m passionate about. And to me, business is about how good is your story? That’s what people are buying, you know, you got to have a good product that’s a given. Yeah, but ultimately, they’re, they’re choosing your product over something else because of the story behind it. And maybe that story is it’s a maid with better ingredients that’s going to make my tastebuds feel better. But to you what, what part does storytelling play in your business? And how do you use that to kind of move your business forward?

Phil Brandon 29:28
Wow, okay, that’s a tough one. You know, marketing is storytelling and having a great story and we tell the story at every tour that we give about how I was in corporate America got laid off, said screw corporate America, I’m gonna do my own thing and I wanted to start a distillery and you know, wanted it to be in my hometown and be all about Arkansas. And so that’s kind of our initial story, our origin story. And that’s kind of the story that we tell. Once you kind of get out of Arkansas, you kind of just tell the story about handcrafted dedication to quality, that our passion is our spirit. That’s our slogan. And tell the story about how we’ve been able to continue to grow and continue to win major international awards for our products that are handcrafted right here. And, you know, Little Rock, Arkansas. So

Nate Disarro 30:38
I love it. And it’s a story that, you know, I got drawn to and connected to 10 years ago, and the story hasn’t changed. But the brand certainly has developed because of the story. I’m graphing in

Phil Brandon 30:48
that Yeah, absolutely.

Nate Disarro 30:50
I love that. You know, there I go. Add another shot to the counter. When you look at, at the industry, we talked about this a little bit before we started the interview, it’s something people are drawn to visually, it’s very intriguing. You know, every bar you go to has some different display of the bottles, and a lot of them, backlight them so that the colors really stand out, you know, the bottles are beautiful, the color of the the spirits is really attractive to look at. But it’s an industry that a lot of people don’t know the guts of. So what’s something that you feel like is unique to this industry that a lot of people don’t know what’s kind of one of those secrets of the industry that would surprise people?

Phil Brandon 31:37
Well, I think people today are a lot more curious about where things are come from and how they’re made than they’ve ever been before. And we’re really big about telling you know, how we make everything, and telling the story of the products from the corn that we buy from Arkansas farmers. And that sort of thing. I don’t know that people really realize about spirits, how incredibly regulated, it really is. I mean, Bourbon is arguably the most regulated consumer product on the planet. And then we’ve got the federal government, you know, watching everything we do, every label we put on a bottle is submitted to the federal government, every formula for anything we make goes to the federal government, we send five reports a month, to the federal government for what we do. The fill tolerance on each bottle is within a tolerance that’s given to us by the federal government, the amount of alcohol or the proof is regulated. And we have highly sensitive, very expensive instruments to measure that so that we are within that tolerance. We pay federal excise tax on every drop that leaves the building. All those things that people, you know, really don’t realize it’s not making widgets and trying to get them in Walmart. Every state has different permits. So for me to sell in the other states that I sell in, I have to be permitted in that state. Some of the states require us to pay excise taxes directly to that state, if the product leaves Arkansas and goes to that state. It’s just a quagmire spiderweb, whatever you want to look at regulations throughout the state. Throughout the United States, it’s actually easier for me to sell my product in the United Kingdom than it is to sell it in Georgia. It’s it’s crazy and became very evident during the pandemic, when people were ordering online for things to come to their house and realized I can’t order a bottle of vodka to come to my house. Why not? And there’s a lot of regulations, why not? And more and more of that starting to open up in some states, but it’s, you know, regulations that were written in 1932 at the end of prohibition that are still being used today. And there’s some modernization that needs to happen, but I don’t think people really realize that so.

Nate Disarro 34:39
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, you still hear in Arkansas about counties that just became white counties and

Phil Brandon 34:45
right, we’ve got, you know, almost 50% of our counties are still dry.

Nate Disarro 34:51
It’s crazy. Yeah. Well, here we are. Speaking of, you know, nobody grows a business without running into challenges and and having to overcome failures. And what’s something that stands out to you going from day one when you had a bottle Jana bottle of vodka and aging barrel of bourbon that you couldn’t sell yet? To where you’re at today? What’s what’s one of the biggest challenges you’ve overcome?

Phil Brandon 35:17
So many, so many challenges. Pick a good one, right? Um, you know, initially, our products when they came out weren’t any good. And that was a huge challenge that I had to overcome and took took several years. And there’s still people today that judges by the first batch we ever made. But we’ve won over more than we’ve not. And, you know, I’m very happy to say that today we make some of the best stuff there is. One of the challenges midway through was, we were in that building over on East Sixth Street. And we had outgrown it. And we needed to move, or we needed to stay and remodel that building. And it was a big decision point. Do we stay or do we find somewhere else? And initially, we were gonna stay and then this building ran now. I had a real estate friend, and he happened to send it to me, just he didn’t know I was in this decision point or anything, just an email, Hey, this is a building that’s come available, thought it might be good for something like what you do. Now initially, I said no thanks. You know, we’re gonna stay where we are. And then a week later, I was like, Well, wait a minute, let me let me go take a look at it. And yeah, four years ago, June, we’ve been in here for years. Now we move to Main Street here. And this building’s 26,000 square feet versus 15,000 square feet. So we had a lot more space, I had gotten the law passed, to allow us to sell drinks. So buy the drink, and have a bar. And so I created the bar and open the bar. And that’s been a big, you know, success for us. So that was a real kind of inflection point decision point. That we were very lucky to find this building and lucky enough to then buy the building and not rent. So yeah, those were two really important challenges that we’ve faced and overcome.

Nate Disarro 37:42
Yeah, what always pays to have good friends that, that you never know, when something’s gonna pop up. And more people, you know, the more relationships you have, right, the more luck comes your way?

Phil Brandon 37:54
Absolutely.

Nate Disarro 37:55
I love that. I like to talk a lot, you know, podcasts, obviously called titans of industry, who are the titans in your life, who the people in your life that you kind of look up to or respect as leaders or industry innovators that you’re kind of constantly paying attention to?

Phil Brandon 38:12
I look up to all the other fellow craft distillers other distilleries that are out there, I follow the industry very closely. One of the my mentors is a guy named Nick Pierce, who invested in the distillery and you know, kind of helped me shape shepherd the distillery from where we were, I guess, it’s been a year ago, maybe two years now. I bought all the investors out. So now we’re 100% family owned by the brand and family, which is basically me and my wife. So, but we still talk, Nick and I do on the phone quite a bit. And he owns a large liquor store. And so he’s able to, you know, have some visibility into what’s going on in the market. And so it’s, it’s been great to have him as a as a mentor.

Nate Disarro 39:23
I love it. I like this question next, because every business has its own unique answers to this question. But in my mind, every business has to have ideas, culture, and execution to stay afloat. So how would you rank those in order of importance, ideas, culture execution, and everybody’s answers a little different? So there’s no right answer here. I’m just curious.

Phil Brandon 39:52
Wow, yeah. Culture, I think is one of the most important and having a great culture. We’re People can work with you. And Excel. And I worked really hard to try to be a leader that people can follow and have a great culture. I mean, you can’t have execution without an idea to execute. But I think I execute really well. Our just in time manufacturing system that we work through supply chain management, all that execution stuff. But if we didn’t have an idea for a product that was selling, and we didn’t brand it, well, it wouldn’t sell. So those are, you know, tied for second and third, I think together. So that’d be how I would rank it. Yeah.

Nate Disarro 40:56
Yeah, that’s, like I said, there’s no right answer.

Phil Brandon 41:00
No, come on, what’s the right answer?

Nate Disarro 41:02
But well, you know, I could give you my version, but nobody cares about that. I don’t know, from a personal level outside of business, even though as an entrepreneur, there really is no outside of business hours. But what do you do to keep yourself sane and kind of, you know, is there anything you do on the on the outside world that influences how you are as a business owner.

Phil Brandon 41:25
So I’ve got some fairly unusual hobbies. Since I was in the sixth grade, I’ve been a flutist. And two and a half years ago, wasn’t a pandemic decision, I’d already decided it pre pandemic. But I decided my wife’s a church organist, and music director. And once a year, I would play the flute in church. And that Christmas of 2019, I played the flute in church and I decided I wanted to try to get good at the flute again, and I started taking online flute lessons. And then I went to a flute store in New York City, and bought a, a professional quality flute, which I had always wanted. And since then, I’ve been working very hard at classical flute. And I play every day and take a lesson every other week. And really enjoying that I used to be a really big tennis player and got really good at not really, I got pretty good at tennis. And there’s so many parallels between being a musician and being being a athlete, you get the same sort of, if you practice, you get better, you get the same sort of understanding of the levels of skill. As soon as you think, well, if I just get to be this good, and then you get to be that good. And you go, Wait a minute, there’s so much more to learn. And you get that good new like way oh, you know, so and that, you know, levels of ability between somebody that’s at the peak of the game like a Roger Federer versus somebody in Little Rock, Arkansas, playing four or five, tennis, you realize that gap between somebody that’s playing in the Berlin Philharmonic and, and you know, somebody that’s, like me, so it’s, it’s intriguing and interesting. And you’re always able to learn something different. You’re always improving. And so that’s exciting to me. So I, I play the flute.

Nate Disarro 43:50
Well, unique hobbies but but very interesting. A million years ago, I worked in the snow sports industry in Colorado, and got to work with a lot of professional skiers and people in that realm. And totally understand what you’re saying about you know, when you, when you get good at something, and you think you’re good, and then you see somebody at that expert level, you realize, like, I mean, I may be able to ski fast downhill on a straight slope. But when I see a professional skier come in, and ski twice as fast and cut twice as hard and do it with a margin of error. Very small, right? It’s a whole different world, you know, and I think that about a lot of the Olympic sports because they’re not the quote unquote, normal big sports, you know, you see these guys go out and compete at Olympic level, and you’re just like, oh, my gosh, there’s

Phil Brandon 44:36
a level of skill. And the dedication that it takes to get to that level of skill is just phenomenal. People don’t really realize it unless you’re in that specific skill to understand that somebody that’s at the elite level is elite, because they can do things that most of us can. Yeah, no.

Nate Disarro 44:58
Well, you mentioned a minute ago out this whole thing that hopefully we’re pretty much through now the pandemic, you started your business in the great recession. And then we’re on the backside here of this global two year pandemic. What did that do for your business? Some people, it hurt incredibly, some people, it actually did really good thing. So obviously, I spent plenty of time at the liquor store. But I can only imagine what it did for your business.

Phil Brandon 45:27
Well, it was incredible. I mean, we were well positioned in a lot of liquor stores, and we’re able to continue to sell through liquor stores. So our I didn’t take a day off from March 2020. Till, you know, December, we were working nonstop. Not only were we making our normal products and shipping those out the back door to our you know, distributors and stores and that sort of thing. But we also shifted the retail part of the business to hand sanitizer, and we sold hand sanitizer to the public, but we also donated a ton of it to hospitals and schools and homeless shelters and that sort of thing. So we were extremely busy and very fortunate that it was really a very busy time for us and all our all my employees were able to stay on and are still here today. And we were able to be stewards to the community as well as our customers. So it was for us. I won’t lie, it was a good thing.

Nate Disarro 46:55
Well, I’d love to run into a few quick hit questions. This has been a really fun conversation. I could probably go all day but for the sake of everybody, we’ll start to wrap things up. You mentioned a lot of audio books. Do you have a best favorite book or what’s the latest book you’ve listened to?

Phil Brandon 47:13
I’m listening to pappy land right now, which is about pappy Van Winkle and all of that. You know, Mark? benioff’s, Trailblazer, radical candor. You know, Jeff Bezos is biography. And this one was pretty cool. Every boy every good boy does fine. Which is a an acronym btw. Yeah. Yeah. For for the for the musicals. Yeah. And it’s a it’s a classical pianist talking about his development from a child to be in a classical pianist. And so it was interesting to listen to him tell his own story. He narrates the book about going to the conservatory for for music school and that sort of thing. So it’s pretty interesting.

Nate Disarro 48:13
Very cool. Radical candor is great as well that yeah, that whole concept I think everybody should

Phil Brandon 48:19
care personally, but challenged directly I use that a lot.

Nate Disarro 48:23
Yeah, absolutely. What’s a part of your daily routine that you cannot skip?

Phil Brandon 48:31
I don’t skip breakfast. I I grew up on cereal. So I eat cereal every morning.

Nate Disarro 48:40
Are you more of a Netflix or news guy?

Phil Brandon 48:43
today? I don’t watch as much news. Just because it’s all so bad. But yeah, I do watch a ton of Netflix and the other streaming services for sure. Love it.

Nate Disarro 48:57
What about favorite podcasts? Is there one that your is your go to you don’t miss an episode.

Phil Brandon 49:03
You know that? There’s whiskey cast, which is one about whiskey which was is the OG for for whiskey podcasts the the new one on the block, which isn’t so new anymore. Now it’s called bourbon pursuit. And then there’s a few marketing ones. Jay bears. There’s a couple of fully ones I listened to. But yeah, yeah, no, I always. I used to always listen to rock and roll in the car and more and more. It’s podcasts.

Nate Disarro 49:39
Love it. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever given or received?

Phil Brandon 49:47
I mean, when I was starting a company I got told by several people don’t do it. And that ignored it went ahead anyway. It was more like motivation. So it kind of was a reverse Staying. So that would probably be right.

Nate Disarro 50:05
Do you have any newly formed habits a lot of people got into new habits, whether good or bad through the pandemic or you know, just shifting of, of culture, you know?

Phil Brandon 50:17
Yeah, I guess I did get a peloton, and and do ride that several times a week. I like to rode bike on a real bike and but I don’t get to do it as much as I’d like to wear the peloton, I can, you know, this morning at 610. I got up and did 30 minutes. And you know, I feel a lot better during the day because I do that. So been working really hard on that.

Nate Disarro 50:51
You ever kind of tag team that and the flute practice at the same time? No, absolutely not. No way. All right. So if you could write a book, what would the title be?

Phil Brandon 51:04
Don’t do it.

Nate Disarro 51:07
Hey, I mean, listen, I think so many businesses start the same way. You got this idea. You feel confident in it. And everybody out there says no. Right. And I think there was

Phil Brandon 51:17
one person that said yes, and it was my wife. And and, you know, God bless her. She has stood by me all the way through, but she believed I could do it. When you know, people in the industry that not in distilling, but in Little Rock that were very successful that I talked to about it, were like, Man, I wouldn’t do it. And I want to have so there you go.

Nate Disarro 51:44
Oh, I bet they’re drinking your your whiskey right now. So the peloton, obviously a great great purchase, but fairly pricey for all standards. What’s the best thing you’ve bought in the last year for under $100?

Phil Brandon 52:01
I’d say it was a bottle of compost box spice tree. I like it. It’s a blended whiskey from Scotland from a craft blender. And it is delicious. So

Nate Disarro 52:21
very cool. All right, as a musician, yourself, who’s your favorite artist or musician?

Phil Brandon 52:28
Oh, that’s tough. That is very tough. He goes through so many different, you know, time periods in your life, who you like, you know, I, I’ve always kind of been. Like, if I’m learning a piece, I’m listening to that piece and listening to somebody play that. So I’m not always listening to the same thing over you know, same person. Sure. There’s great flute players, you know, that I admire. I’ve always, you know, I was a YouTube guy. I know, that’s kind of, you know, generic, in a sense, but I’ve been to more YouTube concerts than any other concert probably. I really liked the police in staying as a kid. So you know, I really, like, you know, that type of music, so. Oh,

Nate Disarro 53:30
all right. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask, What’s your favorite cocktail?

Phil Brandon 53:35
Favorite cocktail is a sazzle rack. So we make of a off menu version of it here called the Phils rack. And it’s it’s my little, my little riff on it. So that would be what I would order

Nate Disarro 53:52
to we’re gonna get to know the secret.

Phil Brandon 53:55
Well, the secret is, you know, for a SAS Iraqi would wash the glass with the herb St. So that means you pour it in, and then you pour it out and the residue in the glass provide some flavor and I leave the Arab saint in. So gives it a little bit more licorice flavor. And I really liked licorice. So that’s at Phil’s.

Nate Disarro 54:23
I love it. I didn’t know that was your drink. And I was just in Kentucky with a client who ordered a Sazerac and told the bartender to leave it. Really? I think you’ll know who it is. I’ll tell you in a minute. But yeah, it was funny. So that’s, that’s funny. That’s good to know. Yeah. Well, Phil, thanks so much. This has been amazing. Love hearing your story and seeing the brand doing so well. If people want to check you out, where can they find the product? Where can they find you online?

Phil Brandon 54:56
Just go to Rocktown distillery.com and Go to the word of bisection. And you can click on your state and or your zip code and figure out where to get it. So thank you very much, Nate. I was been great visiting with you. And thank you so much for having me.

Nate Disarro 55:12
Absolutely. If you like this episode of titans of industry, head to content titan.co/podcast For more episodes, or subscribe on your favorite podcasting app, and if you know of an industry Titan that’s doing amazing things. Let us know on social media or through our website so we can tell their story. Thanks for listening

Absolutely. If you like this episode of titans of industry, head to content titan.co/podcast For more episodes, or subscribe on your favorite podcasting app, and if you know of an industry Titan that’s doing amazing things. Let us know on social media or through our website so we can tell their story. Thanks for listening