Watershed Distillery

“If you build it, they will come.” This is both the famous line from the 1989 film, Field of Dreams, and a common misconception among many who get into the spirits industry, especially early on in the craft spirits movement. Craft spirits are often compared to craft beer and it is easy to understand why, but the truth of the matter is that for a variety of reasons, they are very different. Starting a distillery requires a massive investment up front, both in terms of time and money. It requires a ton of paperwork, legal challenges and meticulous planning of not only what you are going to do next, but what you will want to do years down the line. More often than not, it also requires the fortitude to survive in the face of adversity when things don’t go according to that plan. Make or break decisions in which you don’t know which side of the coin you will land on. Creating and producing a craft spirits brand, specifically whiskey from scratch, is a lot more than just putting a name on a building and a label on a bottle. It takes hustle and drive, and the  countless watershed moments along the way that form who you are and where you are going. That is certainly the story of a craft distillery out in Columbus, Ohio, appropriately named Watershed Distillery. 

Photo: Rolf Jenni, Aarguer Zeitung

Greg Lehman grew up in Columbus, Ohio and even attended The Ohio State University for his undergraduate degree. Ohio State is famous for its football team, but Greg played volleyball instead. He showed off his skills enough at school that after graduating in 2001 he was recruited to play professionally in Switzerland. He played overseas for two years and was enamored with the local culture. During his second season, after being traded to the Appenzell Bears (Appenzeller Bäron) the club put him up in an apartment above a bakery. Either out of the kindness of her heart, or confusion on the terms of the arrangement, the woman who owned the bakery would feed Greg free coffee and pastries every day. Across the street was a bar owned by the president of the team’s fan club. Greg would hang out there every night, drinking locally made beer and spirits and playing a dangerous but fun game called hammerschlagen. After two years of playing volleyball and swinging hammers at nails, Greg’s body was pretty beat up so he was looking to retire. A couple friends came out to visit him and told him about an opportunity for him to work at a small manufacturing company in North Carolina called Prima Tech that specialized in making syringes for the pig industry. Greg moved back to the states and started working there where he got a crash course in running a small business. He worked directly for the owner and was involved in all aspects of the company from sales, marketing, operations and cash flow to managing people and witnessing some of the big decisions that had to be made. That job led to his next one, working for a pharmaceutical company many of us have grown more familiar with over the last several months called Pfizer. There he was able to hone his skills as a salesman, selling drugs and vaccines to pig farmers. 

Greg enjoyed working in the pig industry, but he missed his hometown and wanted to do something that would allow him to be more involved in the Columbus community. He wasn’t alone, either. Greg’s longtime friend, Dave Rigo was also looking to leave his sales job and return home, so they started kicking around a couple ideas with each other. They both loved restaurants but were cautious of how many of them fail. Big fans of beer and brewing, they briefly considered getting into craft beer, but they felt like that market was already oversaturated. They went back and forth a lot, but Greg kept coming back to his time in Switzerland. Greg would ask himself the question, what do they do locally there that people don’t do here. He was on a drive to a pig farm one day when he started thinking about a spirit that was made locally in Appenzell called Alpenbitter. He called Dave while on the drive.

“I said, ‘what if we made spirits here in Columbus? Gin, vodka or bourbon or all three?’ I’ve always been the idea guy and Dave shoots down the ideas. He was like, ‘it’s illegal.’ I said, ‘I know it’s illegal to distill at home, but let’s live in a world where we can do it legally … I mean, is it terrible?’ And that’s when he was like, ‘no, I don’t think it is.’” - Greg Lehman, Co-Founder/CEO Watershed Distillery

They tried to see if they could come up with any locally made spirits, but every brand or label they could come up with was made by a big company. That night they both went into serious research mode and saw that small craft distilleries were starting to pop up all over the country and were encouraged by the idea that other people were doing this. Greg and Dave both signed up for a distillation course that was being taught at Koval Distillery in Chicago in 2009. In the middle of the course they decided to go for it full on. They started writing a business plan, and even though they didn’t have any money raised, they put in an order for a still. They returned home and started practicing their pitch on people that they admired in the business world. They had been laughed out of all the banks when trying to get a business loan, so they asked these people to listen to the pitch and ask them questions to help them get better at selling the idea. Fortunately, they found a lot of local support among their family and friends who were impressed by the business plan, but just as happy to invest in the two of them as people rather than just words and pictures on a page. 

Greg and Dave returned to Koval to do some runs on their stills to get some more hands-on experience. The owner of Koval, Robert Birnecker is also the only licensed retailer for German Kothe stills in the US, so back when they were there for the distilling course and put in the order for their own still they went with a Kothe pot/column hybrid still. However, they were surprised when, on the last day of the course, the local manufacturing rep informed them that their still would be arriving in only two months. They thought they had more time than that. That is when they found out that there was another craft distillery also opening up in Columbus called Middle West Distillery. The still the rep was referencing was for Middle West. When Greg and Dave had done their research, there were only two local distilleries in Ohio at the time. 

“There was a small distillery in Cincinnati, a small distillery in Cleveland, and then these guys [Middle West] were starting in Columbus, so both of us in Columbus started in 2010. But to give you perspective … the guy in Cinci did it out of his garage and he would put away like a barrel of whiskey a year. The guy in Cleveland did it out of his barn and he did a little bit more, but if you looked around there wasn’t anything on the shelf. When we both started in 2010 we were both trying to get on the shelf and make it a full time business, and so we really were the first ones to hit the market. The magic of having two [Distilleries] hit the market at one time in Columbus … every media outlet said it was a trend and it was a movement, and everyone wrote about it and we got tons and tons of press, way more than we would have gotten if it was just one. At first we were a little bit annoyed that we weren’t going to be the sole ones doing it, but then it was pretty exciting because there was all this buzz.”

The labels, which were designed by Greg’s brother in law were made to stand out from across the bar. The bottles are a bit shorter and wider than other bottles and the labels are brightly colored and vibrant to try and catch the eye. The word “watershed” has a dual meaning. A watershed is an area of land where rivers and flow through that feed into a larger body of water. Communities were built around watersheds, which created a symbiotic relationship. Everything the community does impacts the water quality and the rivers. The water quality and rivers, in turn, impact the communities. This endeavor was born out of a desire to be more involved in their local community and to create a similar relationship with their hometown. On top of that, watershed moments are moments of significant impact that represent turning points or pivotal moments in one's life. Making the decision to open a distillery and order that still was a watershed moment for Greg and Dave, and they wanted to honor both meanings of this word by naming their distillery and brand Watershed. And the community would quickly play a large role in getting them started. 

Greg and Dave both loved whiskey and specifically bourbon, but they realized very quickly that they needed to have some unaged spirits to keep the lights on. While they put bourbon away to age, they launched with their vodka and gin and went around to local institutions to sell their products. One of the first restaurants they went to was a place called Lindey’s, a neighborhood landmark since 1981. They spoke with the owner, the late Sue Doody. who met them with immense generosity and kindness. She was one of the first places to bring in their products and to this day, Lindey’s remains one of their biggest customers. Greg encountered similar success around Ohio. When he would walk into a place and tell people that it was locally made, everyone wanted to try it and everyone wanted to buy it, but after that the bottle just sat on the back bar. They quickly learned that it wasn’t enough to just make the sale. You had to educate people about it and figure out how to encourage them to pour it or put it in a cocktail on the menu. Because of this they were going to have to cast a much wider net than some of the local breweries of similar size. Those breweries could survive with just the local supply and demand, but Watershed would need to expand their footprint. 

Feeling good about the success that had experienced selling the product locally, Greg and Dave set up some meetings with a couple distributors in Chicago. They walked in perhaps a bit overconfident, having done little research and found themselves scrambling to offer incomplete answers to the distributors’ questions. After being booted within the first few minutes of both meetings, they returned to Columbus defeated. Greg remembers a lot of moments like this through the years. Moments where he and Dave would need to split the $5 pizza special from Little Caesars for lunch every day before returning home to his wife to put on a brave face and say that everything was going great. These are the defining moments after all, the watershed moments. Greg and Dave hunkered down, did their research and returned to Chicago within a year and landed a distributor.

While they hustled to expand their reach into other states, they also had to jump through hoops to help grow the brand at home. When they first started, there was a special stipulation when applying for a distillery license in Ohio that for every county with over 700,000 inhabitants (like Columbus) there could only be one distillery that was allowed to sell bottles out of a bottle shop. Since Middle West Distillery just barely beat them to the punch, that meant that they were not going to be able to sell bottles on site. Additionally, they also could not taste anyone on the product unless they had the tasting filed with the state. To get around this, Greg and Dave printed hundreds of forms and filed a tasting with the state for every single day to make sure they were covered if someone came in and wanted to try something. In 2012, the state did away with the legislation that limited on premise bottle sales and along with it disappeared the requirement to file tastings with the state, but there were still a lot of limitations on craft distillers that needed to be addressed. Rather than tackle these issues alone, Greg teamed up with Ryan Lang of Middle West and Tom Herbruck of Tom’s Foolery to form the Ohio Distillers Guild. (Greg currently serves as the guild’s president.) With the help of some lobbyists the guild has succeeded in helping to pass and adjust legislation and promote craft distilling in the state. In 2016, a new law was passed that allowed distilleries to include a restaurant component and serve cocktails, so Greg and Dave were finally able to open a restaurant like they had always dreamed. 

“Make sure you can sell it. Make sure you understand that it’s going to take a whole bunch of effort to sell it. You have to know how to position it. You have to know where it goes otherwise you’re going to struggle because there’s a whole bunch of people in the industry that make great stuff but they don’t know how to talk about it or put it out there.”

For Watershed, their approach to selling their gin and their bourbon is different. Their 4 Peel Gin is a citrus forward gin, and their approach to that is all about sunshine and refreshment. For their whiskey it is all about time, story and process. It’s about the grit and determination that has gone into the spirit and how it has changed and evolved over the years. They launched the bourbon in 2012 at two years old. It was a 5 grain mash bill made up of corn, rye, wheat, barley and spelt. The early batches were young, but the bills needed to be paid. They did set aside some barrels at the very beginning that they intended to age for longer to use for something special, but to maintain cash flow they wound up having to pull them into the standard blend. 

Consistency was the main issue at the very beginning. Managing 5 different grains in one mash is a tall order, especially when deliveries of said grains were not always on time. Some mashes would have different percentages of each grain depending on what was available when it came time to do the cook. As unfortunate as this was as far as producing a consistent product, it did give them the opportunity to evaluate a lot of different variations to see what they liked best. 

Watershed included spelt in their mash bill because Ohio grows more spelt than any other state in the country. It was a nod to their local provenance and they liked the nuttiness that it brought out in the flavor. They used to mill all the grains themselves, mostly because the farmer who supplied their spelt did not have a mill of their own, but these machines can be extremely dangerous to work around with dust build up. They can be an explosion waiting to happen, a risk their insurance company did not welcome. On top of the risk, their mill also wasn’t grinding the grains fine enough. Watershed ferments and distills on the grain. In addition to the 66 gallon German Kothe pot/column hybrid that they purchased while in Chicago back in 2009 they also brought in a 250 gallon pot/column hybrid still from Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Kentucky. They use the pot still for their gin and half of their apple brandy, and defer to the column to make all their vodka, bourbon and the rest of their apple brandy. As they scaled up they turned in the original Kothe for a new 660 gallon Kothe still and traded out the Vendome column for a bigger column designed by a company called Headframe Stills in Butte, Montana. The Headframe still does not have a pot. The mash flows into the top of the first column at a rate of 2 gallons per minute. The mill was leaving the grains too large, which caused problems with this new column still, so Watershed made two major adjustments to their process in 2016. They got rid of their mill and decided to purchase pre-milled grains instead. They had also been flirting with a simpler three grain mash bill (corn, rye and barley) that they felt had a superior flavor to it. No longer able to mill the whole grain spelt they were getting from the local farm, they dropped the spelt and the wheat from the mash bill and moved forward with the simpler recipe. A big decision and another big moment for a craft distillery already over half a decade into its existence. It was a risk, but one they felt confident in making. Not only did they feel the flavor was improved, but it made the operation safer, simpler and more consistent for the future. 

Their mash tun is a third of the size of their fermenters so they will do three cooks in one day to fill a fermenter up. They pitch their yeast around 90 degrees and within three days it has converted most of the sugars into alcohol. They have closed top fermenters, but for the bourbon they leave the manway doors open on top. Their yeast is so active and the fermentation is so fast that, with enough  carbon dioxide coming off of them, they don’t worry about anything getting in. The Headframe is made up of four columns. Watershed opted to use a column still for their bourbon for both speed and consistency. They are able to get the job done in one run, rather than doing a separate stripping run and spirit run like you have to with pot stills. 

“As a distiller and an artisan, there is something great about walking out and using a pot still where you start the run and you taste the heads cut coming off and you make the heads cut. You taste the hearts and then you turn up the steam and you turn up the cooling water and you have this balance and you're tasting the hearts. Then you’re getting closer to the tails so you crank the steam a little more and you crank the cooling water a little more and you push the still to the limit to get more and more of the hearts until you can’t hold it anymore and then you make the tails cut. Then you turn the cooling water down and all the tails come out. It’s this great story of process. And as an artisan craftsman I go over to the continuous column still and I set it up in the beginning and I dial it in really tight. I’ve got the bottoms going off the bottom of the still and I’ve got the hearts coming off at just the right proof, and I’ve dialed up so I’m getting the heads to go off and separating that out and it tastes amazing. In thirty minutes it’s set and I’m not doing anything else the rest of the day.”

As a business owner who has struggled through a lot of twists and turns along the way, isn’t on the floor managing the still everyday anymore, and has people at different levels of training on the production team, the column still gives Greg peace of mind that they are making a strong, consistent product everyday. They use two out of the four columns to make their bourbon. The hearts come off between 130 and 140 proof to maintain a lot of texture and flavor and they go into the barrel at 115 proof to access more of the water soluble sugars in the oak. 

Another big pivot Watershed made around the same time they changed their mash bill was changing cooperages. They had previously gotten their barrels from Independent Stave Company in Missouri, but now they work with a local cooperage called Speyside Cooperage, a Scotland based company with a factory in Jackson, Ohio. Watershed was using a char 4 barrel from ISC, but they had gotten some good advice from Dave Pickerell relatively early on to always take a flashlight and inspect the inside of new barrels when they received them to make sure the char was what they asked for. When they got their first char 4 barrels from Speyside they found the char was not as intense as they were used to, so they asked for something a bit deeper. Watershed uses what they call a char 5 barrel from Speyside now. 

In the last couple of years, Watershed has made a few more big changes. In 2018, Greg bought Dave out of the company. The two still work together with Dave running another business venture of theirs, a pork company called Saddleberk. In 2019, they brought in a woman named Anne Dimmick. Anne had previously worked for Wild Turkey and is a jack of all trades at Watershed, mostly overseeing sales and marketing. She brought with her a considerable amount of enthusiasm for their whiskey and has breathed a lot of life into some of the specialty releases they have come out with lately, like their 6 year old bourbons aged in used apple brandy barrels and used nocino barrels (Nocino is a liqueur they make from black walnuts locally sourced by people in their community). Just this year they brought in a new distiller named Aaron Harris who previously worked as a Distillery Supervisor for both Lux Row Distillers and Barton down in Kentucky. With these new additions and a distillate that is more consistent and getting more refined and polished every year, their bourbon is certainly something to keep an eye on in the coming years. 

“I would have told you two years ago that we were a gin maker that produces whiskey … and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but it feels like we’re becoming a bourbon company that makes gin. I think we do both really really well and it’s exciting to see just how far whiskey’s come. I think we’re still a gin company but we’re way more a little bit of both, and there’s some exciting stuff coming this year that if you ask me the same question a year from now I might be more in the camp of a whiskey company.”

Running a successful craft distillery is not easy. It requires hustle, grit, and flexibility to survive. The whiskey industry is a business in which you need to invest a lot of money into something you won’t be able to sell for several years. The faster you grow, the more money you need to pour into those future investments. Sometimes that’s going to mean changing the plan. Sometimes that’s going to mean failing and learning from mistakes. Sometimes that’s going to mean eating cheap pizza and putting on a brave face. Watershed is a great example of the tenacity required to build up a company from scratch and evolve through the hardships to become something greater than was originally imagined. And at the heart of the business all along is this wonderful and growing community. Similar to the relationship between the local watershed and the people around it, Watershed Distillery is here not only because Greg and Dave believed in their community there in Columbus, Ohio, but also because Columbus believed in them. And as the community has helped them grow, they have helped Columbus in return by forming the Ohio Distillers Guild, getting involved in a number of nonprofits, and making hand sanitizer during the recent pandemic. On the back of each bottle of Watershed bourbon is what looks like a hand written note to the consumer. It ends with, “P.S. our copper still is running more often than not. If you’re in the neighborhood stop in & say hello.” An invitation for you to join their community and enjoy the fruits of all the hard work, effort and perseverance that goes into the glass. 

Tasting Notes

Bourbon (45% ABV)

Nose: Lemon, Honey, Brown Sugar, Recently Finished Wood Furniture, Buttermilk Pancakes and Maple Syrup

Palate: The mouthfeel is thin but also very soft and silky with opening flavors of citrus (orange, lemon). The middle palate remains sweet with notes of shortbread crust and light wood. The finish is long and complex with lingering flavors of cane sugar and leather. 

This bourbon is delightfully sweet from front to back with lots of other interesting flavors weaved in along the way. It is also exceptionally clean and a real testament to column distilled craft whiskey. The back of the tongue is very much activated, with an effervescent quality that almost reminds you of drinking a carbonated drink like soda. 

Old Fashioned (34.6% ABV)

Nose: Sugar, Cherry juice, Magic Marker, Orange Zest, Licorice, Similar Wood Furniture Note from Bourbon

Palate: The mouthfeel is more syrupy with vanilla and sugar up front. The cherry juice dominates the midpalate before the bitters cut in at the end with some licorice and some lingering vanilla on the finish. 

The notes on the nose and palate are not surprising considering that they are, for the most part, the ingredients used in an Old Fashioned. The thing that stands out the most is how well balanced this cocktail is for being a bottled cocktail. There is good harmony between sweet and bitter and the alcohol is present without being overpowering.