New Riff: Celebrating a Decade

New Riff: Celebrating a Decade

Raising a glass to New Riff Distilling on 10 years in the whiskey business

Distillery Focus | 24 Jul 2024 | Issue 30 | By Maggie Kimberl

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In 2010, Ken Lewis owned the Party Source, one of the largest liquor stores in the United States. It was located in Northern Kentucky, not even a mile from Cincinnati. He’d been in the business more than four decades at that point, and as the spirits buyer for the store, he started to notice a marked uptick in bourbon sales. As an entrepreneurial person, he came up with the then-crazy idea to start the New Riff Distillery, and take his decades of experience in the spirits business in the direction of production.

 

“It was clear that with the boom going on in Lexington and Louisville, here’s Greater Cincinnati, two and a half times the metro area of Louisville, and not one single distillery,” Lewis recalls. “There’s opportunity there. I didn’t realize at the time how involved it was going to be and how large a project it would be.”

 

The first order of business was to sell the Party Source to his employees, as industry regulations prevent people from owning more than one tier of the three-tier system: production, distribution, and sales. Lewis was excited at the prospect of creating something new to add to his legacy. He didn’t start the distillery with the intention of selling it and moving on.

 

“It’s our mission statement to become one of the great small distilleries of the world, which clearly is a multi-decade or longer project,” he says. “Tradition within innovation within tradition, a new riff on this wonderful old tradition that we are now a part of. And that was always our mission, and that remains our mission today.”

Early on, Lewis and his team were keen to innovate within the American whiskey landscape. They were early to the use of pedigreed grains from the Ohio River Valley region, including Balboa rye, and they were early to the use of a malted rye, an old category that has nearly been forgotten.

 

“We’ve come out this year with an eight- to nine-year-old American single malt whiskey,” Lewis says. “Obviously, in order to do that, that meant that eight or nine years ago, we had begun a very large project of creating six single malt whiskey mash bills. And those things, along with other projects, are all about creating a portfolio of truly interesting, great, a little bit cutting-edge, but not-too-crazy whiskeys.”

Photos © New Riff

Co-founder and global brand ambassador Jay Erisman often talks about discovering Balboa rye. A local farmer who was growing corn was also growing Balboa rye, but was tilling it under before maturation, a common use of rye in the Ohio River Valley. Erisman asked him to grow it to harvest, bought all of it, distilled it, and created one of New Riff’s most popular products from it: New Riff Balboa Rye Whiskey. He’s also found corn varietals native to the area by working with local farmers on a quest to bring new flavors into whiskey.

 

Erisman knew that he wanted New Riff to have an emphasis on rye, as he and the team loved the spicy note it could bring to their whiskey. New Riff’s bourbon mash bill is high in rye, and they make both a 95/5 rye whiskey mash bill as well as a 100 per cent malted rye mash bill. Charles Fogg in Greensburg, Indiana is the farmer that the distillery predominantly works with to source grains, and he was trained by Seagram’s scientists to produce the best and cleanest grains for whiskey production.

 

New Riff has also experimented with wheat, releasing a wheated bourbon made from Red Turkey wheat in 2021 and a Bohemian Wheat Bourbon made with multiple varietals of malted and unmalted wheat in 2023.

Even the brand’s sour mash single malts make use of pedigreed barleys and barley malts with different roasts and other flavor characteristics. The team has experimented with at least five single malt recipes: SMP1 was made from Maris Otter malt; SMP2 with Golden Promise malt; SMP3 was a barley wine-style malt whiskey; SMP4 was a dark, heavy Belgian quadrupel single malt; and SMP5 was made with Scottish peated malt. These have gone into various casks including new, used, recharred, uncharred and toasted, and various wine barrels. These widely varied styles of American single malt have been blended in different ways to come up with each new American single malt and blended malt product, with more to come.

 

Over the last decade, New Riff has expanded production as much as its footprint will allow. The distillery started off with four fermenters and, after the first year, a contract distillation client lent the money to add two more. Then, in 2022, an addition was built to accommodate three more. At the same time, the third-floor event space, which once held weddings, was renovated into a whiskey library and cocktail bar open to the public during normal business hours.

 

“In Kentucky, we have a bit of an arms race, which is fantastic in terms of visitor experiences,” Lewis explains. “It’s wonderful for the industry and for the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, which I’m very involved with. We went through a $3 million rebuild in both the visitor center and the Aquifer Bar. We took out the event center, which had become a wedding destination primarily. We’ve put in a really beautiful upscale tasting room, not trying to be a bar and compete with our on-premise customers, we close at 7 or 8pm at night.”

Lewis announced his retirement last year and has been busy transitioning the business to its new leadership, which includes his daughter Mollie Lewis, the company’s president, and Hannah Lowen, CEO.

“I feel really great about what has been accomplished by a wonderful team of people here at New Riff,” Lewis says. “I have tremendous confidence in our leadership team. I’m very pleased with the quality of the whiskey that’s coming out, its reception, and how well we’re doing with all our direct-to-consumer aspects. There’s actually very few at our size that are going to be able to remain independent of the pressures of the marketplace. I am concerned about the market in general, but I like New Riff’s positioning for what is an increasingly competitive environment out there.”

 

New Riff’s official 10th anniversary is on June 24, but between July 11 and 21, there will be ‘anniversary week’ celebrations each day at the distillery and in the Aquifer Bar. Most of the special events and releases will be announced the day before, or the day of, via New Riff’s social media channels. There will be 10th anniversary-branded merchandise available in the gift shop and a special 10th anniversary logo, as well as surprise food and beverage partners in the Aquifer Bar.

 

The celebrations will also see the launch of an annual release called Headliner, which will be a different product each year. Each release will feature a unique screen-printed label, along with a screen-printed poster, and a portion of the proceeds from sales will go to local charities. This year’s Headliner will be a blend of three different whiskeys: a 10-year-old bourbon, a nine-year-old rye, and an eight-year-old malt whiskey. Fewer than 1,000 bottles will be available through a lottery system that opens on June 24 and will cost $5 per entry with lottery proceeds going to this year’s three charitable partners: Brighton Center, Horizon Community Fund, and Green Umbrella.

 

After a decade of innovation and a general new riff on whiskey, where does Ken Lewis hope to see New Riff Distillery in a decade from now?

 

“My dream would be that we are sticking to our guns, sticking to our mission statement,” he says. “The most wonderful thing is that we have always kept 25 to 35 per cent of everything we make back to get older, which is an economic challenge, but we’ve always done it because we believe what our future is all about is our reputation. It’s going to be mostly about our older products and our very interesting specialties, which enumerated a couple of them. Watching those come to fruition over the next 10 years will tell the tale. And I think it’s going to be a really nice story of family-owned, independent distilleries sticking to their guns here in Kentucky — not taking in outside money and not selling itself, just being absolutely determined to make the best possible whiskey and market it successfully and let things happen in an organic manner.”

Be sure to follow New Riff on social media for announcements about anniversary week in July, which will include a number of distillery-only events and product releases.  

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