Female distillers savoring a whiskey boom
It’s been quite a decade for American whiskey — just ask Andrea Wilson and Nicole Austin.
Ten years ago, Wilson was working for Diageo, the spirits giant, overseeing its North American distillation program. And Austin had just jumped from a consulting job in waste management to Kings County Distillery, a tiny startup working out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City.
Both of them loved whiskey, but at the time, the industry was still getting on its feet. Kings County, which opened just months before Austin arrived, was initially funded “with credit card debt, because you couldn’t get investment, you couldn’t get a business loan,” she said.
Austin’s career, like the whiskey industry, soon took off. While working in 2018 at the Tullamore Distillery in Ireland, she was offered the role of distillery manager at Cascade Hollow — a sprawling distillery south of Nashville, Tenn., that’s owned by Diageo and is best known for producing George Dickel Tennessee Whisky.
By then Wilson was long gone from Diageo, having moved in 2014 to help run Michter’s, another startup distillery that is now among the best-known new whiskey makers in America. Wilson is its chief operating officer and “master of maturation.”
Today Wilson, 56, and Austin, 38, are leaders in a booming industry: American whiskey sales have almost doubled in the last 10 years, up to 356 million bottles a year, according to the trade group Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.
Numbers like that mean immense change for Wilson and Austin: opportunities to expand into new styles and markets, but also the challenges of building bigger teams while keeping their culture intact.
The two recently discussed the ongoing bourbon boom and how it has affected them, not just as leaders, but as women in an industry that is only now beginning to open up to them.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Q: Was future fuzzy when you started?
Austin: I think it’s so easy to forget how tiny and nascent the craft spirits industry was at that time.
Wilson: I can actually remember being in college and having friends leave this state and come and call me and say, “There’s no Kentucky bourbon here.” It just wasn’t a thing outside of Kentucky.
Austin: It went from being a passion project to, almost overnight, having graduated to playing with the big boys.
Q: Are things easier?
Wilson: I remember when I first started here, I was in a leadership meeting with a bunch of people I didn’t know. And they were talking about what was great about the company and they’re like, “Oh, we make decisions so fast.” And I was looking
around thinking, “Am I in the right meeting?”
Austin: I would say I had a similar trajectory as you, Andrea, but I just came at it from the opposite direction. It wasn’t until I got to Diageo that I really felt respected and treated as a professional, and I valued that. When I was 26, I wasn’t exactly making supereducated choices, and I didn’t really understand and appreciate how important that piece was.
Q: And now, in 2022, both of you are in positions to shape those cultures.
Wilson: As our organization gets bigger, you have the family at the center, you have their vision, you have their passion, what they’re trying to achieve.
Q: How do you model dealing with failure?
Austin: First of all, we’re all going to have a job tomorrow. None of this is that serious as long as we’re being legal and ethical. Just because an idea didn’t pan out doesn’t mean it failed.
Wilson: I always try to remember that just because it didn’t turn out the way that you desired it to be, that doesn’t mean you didn’t learn something..
Q: Is gender still an issue?
Austin: I don’t think one industry in particular is rising above, or immune.
Wilson: Sometimes it’s not always super comfortable for me to be as visible as I am. But it’s something I think is important to do.