CRESCENT Places: Dark Corner Distillery — Bringing Moonshine to the Sunshine (Part 3)
ESTIMATING THE COST OF STARTING A BUSINESS
The total cost is higher to date. The cost to manufacture is higher than we thought. Everything else is in line. We were pretty close. I’d say we were 90% on with our guess. One of our worst places we didn’t really expect to spend the money we did was the upfit on the building. Being in downtown really… it’s going to cost you a lot more capital because you’re dealing with so many…the permits and things like that. You’ve got a 1925 building that has original hardwood, original tin, so you just can’t come in here and throw things on the walls and throw things in the floor.
It’s a nice building and that was part of our deal. We could have gone out to West Greenville, got a 10,000 foot warehouse for half the price we’re paying on this. Upfitting for the building was our biggest unknown. We are engineers, not necessarily contractors who do contact projects so you get an estimate on it and you’re like “Wow, that’s twice as high as what we thought.” And when they’re done with the project, by the time you hit all the hiccups from doing it in an old building, you’re 50% over what they came up with. So that was the most, I guess, scary thing…watching the final bill come down the line for upfitting the building.
PACKAGING AND BRANDING DARK CORNER
I was doing a presentation a couple of weeks ago for an Upcountry Friends meeting and there is a pastor that’s in the group. When I got on the stage to present, he asked me the same question. I said “It’s kind of divine.” And it’s funny, he said, “It can’t be divine, you’re talking about moonshine and the word ‘divine.’” I said, “That’s the way it feels for me because a lot of things have just fallen into place.” I hate to use the word “passion” because it is so overused today, but when you’re passionate about something and your heart is truly in it, things sort of just come together. And that’s how a lot of this has been. It’s been sort of waking up one morning and having an idea “Oh, wow, if we did a Dark Corner Distillery, that would be a big hit.” One thing leads to another. Honestly, a lot of it for me is more like a dream than anything. I’ve got an idea when I wake up out of bed and I put it on paper and you see it out there in the store. It seems to be working pretty well.
One of the things, I knew I wanted it to be local, so I had to touch the hearts or the mouths of local people, some how. I wanted to be downtown because that’s easier to access the people. Wanted that foot traffic. I couldn’t necessarily compete with, say Mast (General Store). A lot of people say “How do you compete with Mast?” We don’t want to compete with Mast. We don’t have to.
NOT COMPETING WITH OTHER BUSINESSES
It’s local, everything in here is local. Nothing in here is from North Carolina. Everything we source from the arts to crafts to food panty goods, it’s all within pretty much a 20 mile radius. So it is all Upcountry goods and I guess we had a vision.
Growing up in the Dark Corner and going to Clemson, coming back to Greenville, I realized what my dad and I left in the Dark Corner, which would be our home and land, he sold it, we got rid of the best thing that’s ever happened to me – the Dark Corner. I visited it regularly for years. I’ve been out of Clemson now for 5 years. Every weekend, my wife and I ride up to Caesar’s Head, Saluda reservoir, Poinsett Bridge, Campbell’s Covered Bridge. We ride to these beautiful places and you just feel the history there. You have this magical cohesion to where my heart was in it and so, every today, I still today while we’re sitting here talking, I’m sitting here thinking “How can I make it better? How can I make it more authentic and truer to its depiction?”
The bottle label? I designed the bottle label. I could have source a local graphics company or artist to do it, but I had my heart in it and I went with it and ran with it and I feel like it sort of exemplifies our product.
The web site? I’m probably going to have a third job doing web site design because we get more compliments on the web site than we do on a lot of the other things we’re doing. I never did web sites before. I’m not a designer, but again, my heart is in it and it’s hard to mess up something if your heart is in it because you work hard enough and diligent enough to the point where it is perfect in your eyes. Hopefully, anyone that comes to visit us will see the flyers, which I designed, the bottle label, the web site. You’ll get a sense of the Dark Corner.
The logo? If you visit the Dark Corner, you listen to stories and you come into our store and you hear us tell stories. I hope you leave and feel like you’ve never left the Dark Corner. It’s all the same place. That’s kind of how all this has come together. Every day, we’re thinking of ways to make it more enjoyable because this is a fun experience.
Keep in mind that when we did the Dark Corner Distillery, the first week the idea was conceived, I went to Dean Campbell, squire of the Dark Corner. His family settled there in the 1700s. He still lives there and I went to him and told him what I wanted to do. I pretty much said, “We want an authentic feel. We don’t want to offend people. We don’t want to bother the churches.” There were just a number of things that we knew we could not do. Because the last thing you want to open a business where people are banging down your door with picket lines and things like that.
You might say, “Well, it’s just a business, Joe. It doesn’t seem like it would be that big of a deal.” Well, it is a big deal because the Dark Corner has been a secret for 100 years. And by secret, I mean that 9 out of 10 people in Greenville have no idea that it is a real place. They think it is some idea we came up with. It was a secret for 100 years because the politicians in Greenville did a really good job of wiping it out of our minds and mouths then. It was sort of like a bad word back in the day to say the words “Dark Corner”. Mom would slap you on the hand and she’d say “Don’t say that.” It was like a bad word. A lot of bad vibes in the Dark Corner because of the whiskey, the misuse of the whiskey. There was a lot of bloodshed. A lot of Revenuers got hurt, a lot of mayhem, gunslinging and like that. So there is a dark heritage there. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not called the Dark Corner because of its moonshine and its dark heritage, though. But it does have a dark heritage to it.
WHAT PEOPLE MAY NOT REALIZE ABOUT DARK CORNER DISTILLERY
We can’t serve food, by law, at a microdistillery. It can’t be served with the whiskey. Contrary to bars, bars have to have food to serve if customers request it.
The thing we have not mentioned is about flavors. We want to give the customer flavor, but we would rather do it through our own way as opposed to what some of the guys in the hills are doing – adding peach schnapps to the moonshine and calling it peach moonshine. I had a moonshiner come in about an hour before you got here and he said “Man, I finally got my peach moonshine the way I want it. It’s perfect. It tastes just like the best stuff I’ve had.” And I said “What are you putting in it?” He wouldn’t say. “I couldn’t tell you that. I’d have to kill you.” That’s typical answer you get. Me, personally, a recipe is nothing but the amount of ingredients that you put into a batch of moonshine. When people say Grandpa’s recipe, that doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. I don’t necessarily use Grandpa’s recipe because recipes …you’re looking at it on the board (as he points to the dry erase board with the distillery’s recipe written on it), you’re looking it at in the making. It’s just the amount of grain. One day we do 55, the next day we’re doing 66. It’s just an amount of grain, it’s no secret recipe. So when the guy held back his peach recipe from me, it didn’t both me at all, because I knew what he was doing. So after he said he couldn’t tell me, he’d have to kill me, I began to tell him how he makes his peach moonshine and then he left. He left because I told him he was soaking peaches in moonshine and putting about a fourth peach schnapps in it. He walked out.
Stay Tuned for Part 4 Next Week. For Part 1, Click HERE. For Part 2, Click HERE.
