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Walking into my local liquor store on a recent Saturday, I wasn’t expecting to meet the President of Big Stick Bourbon Mike Ryan, but there he was, sample in hand and with no need for any arm twisting I was in the throes of trying his whiskey and an engaging conversation about all thing’s bourbon. That fortuitous meeting led to setting up time to hold an interview for this blog post, and as I chatted with Mike this past weekend, I noted I’d be including Big Stick in a blind bourbon tasting at my garage bar Speakeasy that night. It was the hands down favorite of a few folks who were bellied up to the bar, and upon the reveal at the end of the night, beat out pours from my top shelf like Four Roses Small Batch Limited Edition. One thing is certain, this bourbon is unique compared to everything else sitting on my shelves, and I was excited to dig in with Mike to understand more about the brand.
Obviously, I’m a bourbon guy…I like scotch too, but bourbon is my favorite. When our kids were younger, we moved into a house in a family friendly area. The lady we bought the house from had an amazing bar setup. She was downsizing and asked my wife if she could leave their bottles behind. I got to sample a lot of different bourbons that were a part of that collection, they were all good, they were all ok, but they were just variations on a theme. They tasted ok, but they weren’t anything special. It got me thinking, why can’t bourbon age like wine? You can buy a $20 bottle of wine and next year it’s maybe worth $50, because it gets better over time. Once you bottle bourbon however it is what it is, and this got me thinking why can’t we put a charred oak stick in the bottle. So, I got a patent on that and started talking to my friend Joe who’s a retired Marine Corps JAG officer and he was like let’s do this, I want in. Let’s face it, nothing hurts about having free legal advice!
I realized that if you want to make it in this business you have to differentiate yourself. We’re not billionaires so we can’t compete with the big boys, so we have to have something that’s truly unique. The patent is that for us, Big Stick as a brand is pretty simple right, there’s a big stick in the bottle. The bottle design is unique, there’s all kinds of symbolism in the bottle and the label. But the real uniqueness is the fact that we’ve got this patent, and it really works. You put the stick in and a month later it’s four or five shades darker, completely changes the flavor profile.
As for the bourbon, we tried experiments; I literally bought chemistry sets off Amazon, bought bottles and did some R&D and researched everyone else’s mashbill and we came up with our own little secret recipe, and it worked great. Although the mashbill we landed on is a secret, but it almost doesn’t matter as the before and after with the stick is so different. What surprised me was that this bourbon we came up with was smooth, it was so smooth it was unbelievable. That was a shock. We researched different proof levels and personal choice, but we happened to like 95. That proof of 95 ended up being great karma because 95 and 5, we give 5 percent back to veteran’s charities.
The core values are my values – honesty, integrity and respect. Keep it simple – we’re a first-class company and everything we do has to be first class. We’re always polite – yes sir, no sir, yes ma’am, no ma’am, and our values align with our military, and we care about our veterans. Our product honors our military. A lot of people say “Big Stick, that’s Teddy Roosevelt”…yes, that is true, but our product is about honoring our military and if I had a choice, I’d rather honor our military than honor a politician.
Legalities, the legal system is stacked against the small guy. It’s all for the big guys and the big distributors, so if I could change the law I’d focus on direct to consumer as the one thing I’d change because any small distillery faces an uphill battle with the large established distributors. The rules need to change if they want craft distilleries to survive. The tiered system is killing small family distilleries which are going out of business left and right – especially with covid which was a bad deal and now the economy. After covid there was certainly a bump, but now everyone is worried about the economy and so bourbon sales are down. For us, we must be on the higher end of pricing as each stick is literally handmade; we’re not just buying someone else’s bourbon and slapping a label on it. Given this, we can’t just scale from one to a million units, we’re a craft distillery so we have a slightly higher price to cover overhead. Shipping costs since covid have nearly tripled – it’s only just recently that they’ve started to come down, but they’re still high, and certainly not where they used to be. Price structures have continued to increase overall; that has been a challenge for us and is going to be an ongoing challenge. We sell our bourbon for a reasonable price; we make a reasonable profit – and we’re trying to build a business off of that.
We get a lot of new people as new customers which is different. These folks have never seen bourbon with a charred oak stick in it before and say, “this is so cool” or “how come nobody has ever thought of this before.” Sure, certainly some of the folks out there are traditionalists, yeah, but I remind them that some of the name brands put staves in barrels and with all due respect and without naming names, they artificially flavor those staves. I don’t care what you say, those are not naturally flavored. Mine is 100 percent natural, we don’t add any caramel coloring or flavoring to it – it’s a piece of wood, we cut down to size, we trim it up and we fire it, so it’s got that char. It’s literally brand-new white oak wood that we get from a furniture mill in Houston. It’s fresh wood, with fresh resin and that’s why it tastes so good.
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