Whiskey and a beer anyone?  

Or rather, cold distilled whiskey and a non-alcoholic beer?

It's become blatantly obvious over the past few years that retail choices are changing in the liquor, wine and beer aisles.  Hard seltzers now take up as much as 25% of the shelf space that beer once inhabited.  Canned wine is a thing.  RTD (ready to drink) cocktails are booming. Even zero proof spirits are finding an audience.  So this begs the question: What does this mean for the future of alcoholic beverages?  

As it turns out, not much.  The appetite for spirits is as big as it's ever been and growing, but the appetite for low-calorie/no alcohol options is growing as well.  Part of this might simply be perception from marketing pushes, but it's also true that demand is sometimes created in this way.  Big beer brands like Heineken and Budweiser, are now producing and promoting their non-alcoholic beer options.  Heavily.  There's a clear and growing trend towards these options for consumers.  

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a link to an episode of Dragon's Den, the original British version of Shark Tank, that got me thinking... These British entrepeneurs were trying to raise 1 million quid to purchase a "dealkylyzer," or in other words, a vacuum distillation apparatus, in order to produce non-alcoholic craft beers.  Eureka!  I realized that the liquid we had been dumping down the drain as a waste stream for whiskey distillations could in fact be a profit center. So, I tried it out on a few small distillations of beers.  And you know what?  It works.  It works perfectly.  And not only do I get a brilliant whiskey out of it, but a brilliant non-alcoholic beer!  

Skeptic is positioned to become a leading innovator in the non-alcoholic beer space owing to the use of our existing technology.  It's just one of many exciting developments we plan to implement in the coming years.  We hope you'll join us in our journey.

There are a lot of companies vying to earn your hard-earned investment dollars in the liquor space.  Here are 3 reasons why Skeptic Distillery stands apart from the rest:

1) Unique Technology - our application of cold vacuum (i.e. low pressure) distilling technology to spirits allows us to achieve fresh, bright and smooth flavor.  Cold distilling is also far more efficient, using less heat and energy than atmospheric distillation, with a lower overall carbon footprint.  Think fresh cold brewed coffee versus burnt gas station coffee, or fresh squeezed orange juice versus heat pasteurized juice.  The difference is night and day!

2) Award-Winning Results - Our spirits have consistently earned accolades and awards from industry competitions as well as from the public.  Skeptic Gin was ranked in the Top 100 spirits in the world in 2019 by Wine Enthusiast.  Skeptic Vodka and Gin earned Vodka and Gin of the Year respectively in their first year of production, and GinQuila recently earned a Double Gold at the consumer focused SIP Awards this year.

3) Growth Trajectory - Since our inception in June 2018, we have expanded into several new states and grown sales significantly YOY, even during the ongoing pandemic!  But we are merely at the beginning of achieving significant gains and success.  With the recent launch of an on-premise focused, liter bottle, premium well vodka and gin program, we are positioned to make major inroads on cocktail menus in restaurants and bars locally and regionally.  With the anticipated opening of our tasting room/stillpub cocktail bar in late Q1 2022, we expect to generate a lot of enthusiasm, excitement and direct sales of spirits.  Further, the pending launch of Tamarico, our unique flavor entry into the shooter and mixer liqueur space, as well as our craft beer and other whiskeys with the completion of our low-pressure whiskey still, will further juice our growth.  And with your investment, we expect to be capitalized sufficiently to enable us to accomplish all of this and more, and quickly.  

So please join us on the ground floor of being the leading innovators in liquor production, with the potential to completely disrupt how spirits are made for decades to come! 

[The following is an automated notice from the StartEngine team].

Hello!

As you might know, Skeptic Distillery has exceeded its minimum funding goal. When a company reaches its minimum on StartEngine, it's about to begin withdrawing funds. If you invested in Skeptic Distillery be on the lookout for an email that describes more about the disbursement process.

This campaign will continue to accept investments until its indicated closing date.

Thanks for funding the future.

-StartEngine

Please enjoy this short time lapse video showing the final pouring of the epoxy flooring for the Skeptic Distillery tasting room/bar.  We are targeting March 15 to open to the public, though that timeline is still fluid and will depend on a number of factors.  We still need to purchase and install the lighting, finish the bartop and underbar, complete the bathrooms, complete the backbar and shelving, and purchase tables and chairs.  However, we are about 75% of the way finished!

In other news, we are securing local commitments to supply our vodka and gin in well placements at a number of restaurants/bars around Chicagoland, and we will be announcing a partnership with a restaurant customer of ours to supply a bespoke whiskey for their use, which locks in around 200 cases per year in whiskey sales.  This is an important step to proving the quality of our small batch produced whiskeys and the ROI on the production whiskey still, which we intend to build with proceeds of this equity crowdfunding campaign.

As always, please feel free to reach out to me directly with any questions or comments!

Cheers,

Karl Loepke, Founder

We'd love to show you some of the progress on the tasting room that was made possible with the first tranche of investment, of which we disbursed approx. $10,000.00 to fund the epoxy preparation and bar build-out.  As goal #1a, the front bar/tasting room is enormously important to really building our community of followers and supporters locally, and as a means of generating revenue at higher margins than distribution.  

The below photographs show the progress over the last 2 weeks.  We started out by framing out the bartop, which we then poured as countertop cement.  This will be polished and sealed after the floors are done, which is being completed by tomorrow.  The next pictures show the progress on the floor up to now.  Today the metallic powders and main color and leveling epoxy will be poured, then tomorrow the final polyurethane coat with slip resistance will be added to complete it.  

We're going to put together a cool time lapse of the metallics being poured and post as a short film in the next couple of days.  

We are targeting March 1, 2022 to open the tasting room/bar.  Once we have a firm date, we'll notify everyone and invite all investors who are in the area, or may be at the time, to a private opening party.  And we're very excited to check this one off the list and get started on the next, even more exciting project... goal #1b: the production cold vacuum whiskey still.  We will need as much financial support as we can earn to pull this off, so we really appreciate your support and partnership with us as we go along on this awesome journey together!!  Please feel free to reach out directly to me, Karl Loepke, at 773-910-1339 or kloepke@skepticdistillery.com if you have any questions.

 

Even though it's the holiday season and there are all kinds of uncertainty surrounding the economy and the supply chain issues, etc., we wanted to give you a few updates to show how Skeptic continues to progress!  

We have elected to take a small disbursement from the initial investments in order to accomplish a few things to get us closer to opening the tasting room/stillpub.  Not just a tasting room, we will be able to serve actual cocktails here as well as beer and wine, if so desired.  The space is coming along well and we will be pouring a concrete bartop this week (keeping that industrial feel), and the floors will be finished next week, thanks to the funds we are receiving from the initial investments.  So, THANK YOU for helping bring this to fruition!

After this is poured and sealed, we will have the floors repaired and epoxied next week.  After that, we'll begin completing the look of the bar, at least on the underneath side of it facing outwards.  We intend to make it look like recovered metal paneling from NASA rockets, and it should look pretty neat when all is said and done.  

In other news, we have been advertising GinQuila on social media with the video below, made for just $1,000.00 with help from an Instagram account (food_for_art) and Fiverr (great site if you've never used it!).  Our GinQuila skull character, who we've dubbed Ringo (because I've been watching Get Back on Netflix, and it's amazing), explains what GinQuila is and what makes it special.  

Lastly, I wanted to update you all on a new product we've been developing that we think could become really, REALLY big.  It's called Tamarico, and it's a tamarind, chili and chamoy liqueur that is designed to compete in the shooter category with the likes of Fireball, Skrewball and Jagermeister.  Currently, other than tequila, there are no shooter products marketed to the Latino market.  Tamarico will change this up and we believe that it could become a really, really big thing.  We are also in talks with a major Mexican spice brand for a co-marketing strategy in our launch that would bring a lot of caché and credibility to the product.  Here's a look at the label design, which is designed to be reflective of the tamarind chili candies popular in Mexico.  

[The following is an automated notice from the StartEngine team].

Hello!

As you might know, Skeptic Distillery has exceeded its minimum funding goal. When a company reaches its minimum on StartEngine, it's about to begin withdrawing funds. If you invested in Skeptic Distillery be on the lookout for an email that describes more about the disbursement process.

This campaign will continue to accept investments until its indicated closing date.

Thanks for funding the future.

-StartEngine

Hello everybody!  

Please take a couple minutes to watch this video where I do a walk-through of the distillery facility and discuss in some depth the vision for the tasting room space, the progress we've made, and our plans for the capital raised in this crowdfunding campaign.  I actually did this video a few weeks ago and we have made some further progress since then, which you can see in the images below the video.  

As you can see from the video, there's still a lot of work to be done, though not much as you might think.  Primarily completing and outfitting the bar, paint and floor resurfacing, then it's just adding in tables, chairs, etc.  Because it was an old office space earlier, there was a ton of stripping down to bare bones and demolition required to get to this point.  The heavy lifting is done though, now it's time to paint, build and finish it up.  The warehouse is completely done aside from cleaning and sealing the concrete, and the distillery is now 95% complete but for some paint touchup and reorganization.  We're distilling vodka this week and gin next week so we had to pause finishing up to make some product.  I'll post about our production process to give you a behind-the-scenes at what makes us so unique in a future update.

I recently revamped and relaunched the Skeptic merchandise online store with the arrival of some new GinQuila shirt designs.  These are available in aqua blue and sunset orange.  You can also preorder the Skeptic astronaut rocker shirts there as well.  If you have already invested and are owed a unique promo code perk, please reach out directly to me at kloepke@skepticdistillery.com or text me at (773) 910-1339 if you would like to order something as I have not set those codes up yet for each individual.  To celebrate the launch of the store, anyone can use the code GINQUILA10 to get 10% off anything in the store (albeit limited selection at the moment).

We're also offering 10% off at the Skeptic Spirits Store with the code SKEPTIC10, if you would like to order some spirits in time for the holidays.  We'll be running a Cyber Monday deal over there as well as a holiday promotion for gifts.  Please follow us on social media to stay in the loop on what's coming up!

I would like to discuss in a bit more detail what really separates Skeptic Distillery from the crowded spirits category, and why what we're doing here has enormous investment potential.  In a series of articles I began posting on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago (the first two of which are in the links below), I go into some depth about the process and elaborate on what we plan to do with the options it opens up for us in the future.  

(7) Vacuum Distillation and Spirits | LinkedIn

(7) Vacuum Distillation Feedstocks - Mash or Beer? | LinkedIn 

These articles are intended to be more or less educational, and I will continue writing them, but I want to discuss here what this all means in terms of the investment potential of Skeptic Distillery.  

Cold vacuum distillation allows us to distill at room temperature or below, which means we can preserve the complexity and character of what we're distilling into the spirit.  Traditional distillation temperatures and methods destroy most of that and only the most potent flavors and aromas come through.  This means that we can introduce complexity up front, rather than rely on the barrel to develop it over time.  This is revolutionary in the industry, when you think about it.  

What it also means is that extended aging and such are not necessary.  In fact, that would crush much of the complexity of the starting spirit and turn it into something more like a traditional whiskey over time.  So what we're talking about doing is creating white spirits right out of the still that are already complex and tasty, essentially creating entirely new categories of spirits that haven't really existed before.  And then, we can also age these to introduce character either from a barrel or wood spirals or chips from different types of wood to give even more unique character.  The possibilities are practically limitless.

Being one of the first to market leveraging this kind of technology in a practical way, we plan to become the leading distillery in the world producing spirits in this way.  One of the first whiskeys we plan to produce with the cold vacuum whiskey still will be based on a Toasted Coconut Porter recipe that we have experimented with extensively on the pilot still.  The flavors and aromas are complex out of the still, with notes of chocolate, caramel, raisin/prune and toasted coconut, which is then aged on oak chips or in a barrel, picking up the oak character, vanilla and some cinnamon notes as well.  And it's remarkably smooth as well.  

So please take a look at the articles to gain a better understanding of our unique process and how we're applying it to spirit distillation, and why it makes for a superior product with limitless possibilities.  And if you decide to invest with Skeptic Distillery, thank you as well!  Your investment will allow us to bring these products to market faster and to achieve our goals on a much quicker timeline.