Get to know Stephen Shellenberger of the Bostonapothecary blog by checking out his Rumcast interview.
Project Introduction
The Boston Apothecary team is seeking investors for a new distillery project in Philadelphia.
The goal is to create a boundary pushing distillery operation around two main concepts. The first is an on premise tasting room that operates as a sophisticated cocktail bar and is capable of doing approximately $1,000,000 in on premise sales. The second is a yeast driven rum production that focuses on Schizosaccharomyces Pombe yeasts as well as reviving the teachings of mid century scientist, Rafael Arroyo. The distillery will aim to produce a true grand arôme rum featuring simultaneous cultures of Pombe yeast and bacteria.
The team has extensive restaurant hospitality experience to execute an industry leading tasting room. We also possesses the fabrication skills to elaborate an entire range of products to create a rich tasting room environment. Additionally, Pennsylvania has unique laws that allow a tasting room to serve mass market products alongside house made products making it an easier state to conduct business. Pennsylvania also allows satellite retail operations and we hope to leverage our hospitality experience to build teams capable of maximizing our potential under PA law.
The rum production is based on ten years of extensive paper research that created the largest body of collected texts on the subject of beverage distillation with a focus on rum. Many texts were translated from Spanish, French, German, and Dutch. Extensive relationships were created by sharing the texts with beverage professionals around the world. The Boston Apothecary blog has become one of the most important resources in the industry.
Our current research stage is in sharpening analysis skills such as titration and employing the birectifier for yeast evaluation and characterization. Extensive collaboration with a microbiologist has also isolated many high value organisms that are beginning trials in model ferments. We hope to show investors proven processes that only need to be scaled up. We have currently isolated 15 of our own Pombe yeasts which we are beginning to evaluate against experience gained from a historic library of Pombe yeasts we were given unique access to.
Rum production is the primary focus but the team is adept at gin, aromatized spirits, amaro and liqueur production which are quicker to bring to market. Our lab is also among the few in the country capable of botanical assay for essential oil yield to standardize gin production. We also employ novel prototyping techniques based on the birectifier method that allow us to concept products faster and with less expense. Our team has helped concept and fabricate successful products on the market for other distilleries and has pioneered skill sets relevant to other spirit and liqueur categories.
A goal of producing a high value grand arôme rum is the ability to enter the bulk spirits market for extremely fine rums. Possibly only ten of these rums exist in the world and are attracting great attention. The market for grand arôme rums is growing as small new American producers learn that they are a requisite for boosting the quality of blends as well as improving the character of liqueurs. A goal is to produce such a high value product that we can leverage relationships and trade our new make spirit for aged spirits across categories among America’s most exemplary distilleries. This will diversify our holdings and add the capability of becoming a cult bottler. We may age and bottle cult Bourbon we acquire by unique access (hosting / access model). We have the tasting skills and chemical analysis skills to identify the finest barrels. Maintaining a trade balance from a successful bulk business will allow inventory to be diverse and from spirits with an established market value immediately strengthening our balance sheet. We aim to generate significant cash flow while other new distillers would be waiting for their spirits to age to take on any value. The nature of our chosen product specialty allows our business model to be more robust and cash flow friendly than other products.
We are seeking investors interested in using their capital and business skill to push the boundaries of the field. We aim to create a distillery that is simultaneously a trophy, accumulating achievements, as well as financially sound and independent.
This is merely an introduction to our project and we would be happy to elaborate any ideas.
