Hello Odin!

First of all – Happy New Year to you, Veronika and the entire iStill family. I must apologize for the radio silence over the past months – we had the mis/fortune of being overrun by our first year of operations, and what a year it was. I apologize because these are the times when we should have been sharing our wins and losses with the iStill family, but instead we found ourselves clinging on for dear life as the business pulled us in every direction, leaving zero time for Jenn and I. We launched the tasting room and cocktail lounge at the beginning of 2022 with massive support from the local community and it has been a big success – despite little to no promotion, we are being sought out by people from all over the city. It seems that there was a big demand for an elevated cocktail experience in our brewery district (we have 8 craft breweries within a 2 block radius of us) – and Jenn’s amazing lounge design certainly has made an impression on locals and travellers alike.

Our Gin No. 005 has been very well received indeed – I’m curious where you heard of it – we’re always interested to know how and to where word travels. Winning at the Spirits Masters in London was amazing (considering we entered to get tasting notes primarily) and then just last month, at the PR%F Awards in Las Vegas we managed to land two double golds as well. Seems we are on to something. Most importantly, our customers love it. We’ve started a bit of gin revolution in Vancouver – people now realize that the commercially available gins leave a lot to be desired. Actually, I think has a lot to do with the style of gin that we made No. 005 – it is a very versatile spirit that doesn’t dwell overly on the Juniper and lends itself well to most cocktails for that reason – and it makes a mean Negroni, which is what we set out after as we found most gins really blew up Negroni cocktails because of their excessive citrus notes. We’ve got a number of new gins in the works that promise to be very unique, and uniquely BC – which is something important because it lends itself well to a taste of place – important for the story and experience.

The iStills have been running great and have allowed us consistent results that other distillers can probably only dream of. We have only scratched the surface of their capabilities since we have been mostly focused on running our daily business operations – the lounge operates 6 days a week and seats about 60 people. We have struggled from the beginning with staff issues – first it was impossible to find any, and then it grew so quickly we start to struggle with management and HR issues – it was all-consuming and unbelievably stressful. We had to close for the past two weeks just to catch our breath which works well since most people around here take a bit of break from our industry immediately after New Year’s festivities.

We are looking forward to what the new year will bring – we’ve got a lot of great ideas for spirit production, and now we’ve got to see if we can leverage the award wins a bit and get Copperpenny out in front of more people who haven’t heard about us yet.

Talk very soon,

Jan Stenc | Co-Founder | Copperpenny Distilling Limited | C +1.604.307.2983

Copperpenny Distillery’s second double gold award in just the first year …

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