We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jess Lebow. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jess below.

Alright, Jess thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

We wanted something that would be easy for people to remember and share with others. So it couldn’t be too long or too difficult to pronounce. We started playing with some simple combinations, and tinkered with several ideas before we encountered a story about the significance of cats to the distilling industry. Back in the day (and to a lesser degree today as well) most distillers malted their own grain–which meant they had large silos of grain around. Large silos of grain means there are rodents. Enter the cats. Distilleries have for hundreds of years kept cats to keep their grain safe from these rodents. In fact, the Guinness Book of World Records recognizes a distillery cat as being the world record holder for best “mouser.” They credit this feminine feline with something in the neighborhood of 28,000+ kills over her lifetime. We loved this story, so we started working with the “cat” as an element. Eventually we settled on Copper Cat, since copper is an essential part of the distilling process, and so too are cats–thus, we became Copper Cat.

Jess, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We are a husband and wife team. Our real goal is not to become the next big spirits brand, but to build a community around our product and our tasting room for those like-minded people who want to share their passion for good spirits. The distillery is currently our “side hustle” but we are working toward it someday being our main gig. In the meantime, we try to bring people together over cocktails and conversation. And by all accounts it seems to be working. The last two years in a row we have won the honor of Best in the PNW–a people’s choice award voted on by our customers and community.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

Yes. We manufacture all of our own spirits onsite. I was originally fermenting beer and the like in my garage before we started Copper Cat. In my hubris, I thought, it won’t be much different. It will just be “more.” I couldn’t have been more wrong. It doesn’t quite scale as easily as one might think–particularly when it comes to cooling large batches of boiling liquid. Cooling 5 gallons is a lot easier than cooling 750 gallons. I managed to destroy several batches of product before finally getting my feet under me. There was a period of time, right after we got our liquor license where I honestly thought I couldn’t do this. That our venture was doomed before it got started. But we stuck with it, and now, five years later, we’re still in business. Always darkest before the dawn I guess.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Initially we had a very different understanding of the craft distilling industry than we have now. The process of making spirits can scale up to very large quantities quite easily–if you have A LOT of money. At a craft/nano level the game is very different. You don’t necessarily want to put your product into every bar and liquor store that you can reach out to. I think at first we just thought–step 1: make a good product step 2: get it out to EVERYONE. What we have come to learn is that you can’t make everyone happy. So you need to find your audience, focus on what they want, and don’t worry about everyone else. To that end, we revised the way we attacked our go-to-market plan. Instead of focusing on trying to scale up and get into distribution, we focused on the advantages that we have as a small producer–mainly that we can change our lineup very quickly. So now we focus on single barrel products, things that are unique and rare. And we spend more time focused on our club members and customers and we don’t worry so much about the broader market.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://coppercatdistillery.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coppercatcraftdistillery/

Image Credits

All images by Bing Wu and Jess Lebow (owners, Copper Cat Distillery)