When Garrett Vandenberg and Brian Lynch started their own bottling company in 2014, it was on a very small scale.
“We had one small machine in the corner of Good Spirits Distilling in Olathe,” Garrett said. “We wheeled it in and out on weekends.”
Garrett and Brian are now the co-owners of their own company, AI Bottling, with a total 40,000 square-feet of production and storage space in four buildings.
AI stands for Advanced Innovative, which they have had to be, to navigate their company through the economic shoals of Covid. They started out as contract manufacturers for other companies, Garrett said, but when the pandemic hit, a lot of the entrepreneurs who had created flavored alcoholic drinks dropped out of the market, he said.
So Garrett and Brian decided to create their own brand of spirits, and now have three lines— Truman Reserve Bourbon, Honey Creek Hollow Rum —silver, gold, and spiced— and Crave Cocktails, ready-to-drink cocktails in nine flavors, including pina colada, mojito, strawberry daiquiri and sangria.
“My big thing is making flavored drinks,” Garrett said.
Originally from Kansas City, Garrett served in the Air Force, then earned a chemistry degree from Washburn University in Topeka. He has 23 years experience in product development, he said, 12 of those years at McCormick Distilling Company in Weston, Mo., His mentor at McCormick was Jim Graf, he said, and it was the golden age of product development, Garrett said.
Contract manufacturing flavored drinks is seasonal, Garrett said, so creating and selling their own brands helped carry them through what is known in business circles as “OND,” October, November and December.
Garrett now lives with his family in Clinton, and is the company’s product development director. He’d rather be in his lab in Clinton, he said, but usually spends only three days a week in town and the rest of the week on the road. Last week, he was headed to a Whiskey Walk in Excelsior Springs and to Lucas Oil Speedway to conduct product tastings.
“When people ask me what one of our products tastes like, I tell them, ‘I want to know what it tastes like to you,’” he said.
AI buys barrels of alcohol aged in oak barrels from MGP in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, Garrett said. The “mash bill” (recipe) for Truman Reserve Bourbon is 75 percent corn, 21 percent rye and 4 percent malted barley.
At the Clinton plant, the alcohol is put into tanks and finished. In 2022, Truman Reserve took a platinum award at the Las Vegas Global Spirits Awards, and a gold at an International Spirits Competition in Denver. Both were blind taste tests, Garrett said.
Garrett said he and Brian met when they both worked for the Sharkbite Cocktails brand in Olathe. Wanting to start their own business, they looked all over the state for a place to establish it, Garrett said. At the time, Garrett was working in Springfield at a Purina feed mill for Land O’ Lakes, which owns Purina, and Brian was living in Kansas City.
“Mark Dawson called us “Project Halfway,” Garrett said, after they bought the building in Clinton.
Garrett built a porch on the building, gutted the interior and put a drain line down the middle. He also installed a water line to the building.
“You’re looking at the chemist, the plumber and the electrician,” he said. “To start up a business, if you can’t do it yourself, you have to have deep pockets.
“It’s not everyone who can say they built their own break room.”
Before the pandemic, they employed 26 people, Garrett said. But those first five years, they had no products on the shelves locally, he said —everything was shipped out to Maine, Massachusetts, Florida and all around the country.
Dawson, the economic development director for Clinton, was instrumental in keeping the company in Clinton, Garrett said. Mayor Carla Moberly sold them their second property, formerly a transportation building, when AI was expanding, before the contract manufacturing market dropped.
Now, that market is coming back, Garrett said, and he is fielding deals, including one to produce vodka for the Napoli Culinary Academy, which runs a cafe that combines cooking classes and dining in Sacramento, California.
“A rabbi is coming down tomorrow from Kansas City to certify that it is kosher,” Garrett said of the vodka.
In the Clinton area, AI products are on the shelves at Powell’s, the Liquor Studio, Price Cutter, Buck Stop and Primitive Olde Crow & Winery, among others. Garrett said he considers the owners of those stores as business partners.
Their goal now is to have distributors for their line of spirits in all 50 states. Once a brand takes off, there is the possibility it will be picked up by a larger company, Garrett said.
Brian, who lives in Blairstown, is the sales side of the team, so is mostly on the road. He’s now in Oklahoma, finalizing a state-wide distribution deal, Garrett said. Their business is three-tiered, he explained, composed of manufacturers, distributors and retail outlets.
“We have to sell our products three times, to the distributor, retailer and the end user,” he said.
AI now employs two people, other than the owners, including one who dips the tops of the Truman Reserve bottles in wax. Crave cocktails are packaged in plastic pouches by an automated, vertical form-fill-and-seal machine, Garrett said, the pouches making the drinks easy to take places you don’t want to take glass. Cocktails come in boxes of 12, making the cost about $1 a piece, he said.
The first product with bourbon that AI contracted to make was FI (Fisher Island) Lemonade, Garrett said. The owner owned one of the oldest bars in the country, Pequot, on Fisher Island in New York.
The bar was accessed by ferry from Connecticut, Garrett said, but he never visited the island. He was in a bar in Boston, on the harbor, where he was inspired to make one of AI’s ready-to-drink cocktails, a “Frosé,” after hearing young women in the bar order Rosés. It’s not a big seller in the Midwest, he said, but is a good drink for people looking for a low-carb alternative.
Since Garrett and Brian started AI in 2014, the business has had its highs and lows, but keeps evolving.
“We had to re-evaluate our business plan every year,” he said. “It you don’t morph and move with the market, you will be in trouble.”
Asked why he started his own business, Garrett responds jokingly, “I wanted to work 100 hours a week instead of 40 hours a week.” It’s like a game, he said, but he loves what he does and is passionate about it, and has turned down lucrative-paying jobs.
“It’s what we do,” he said. “It’s our life.”
They don’t hold tastings or sell products at the plant, he said. But he does enjoy introducing people to Truman Reserve Bourbon, Honey Creek Hollow Rum and Crave cocktails at tastings, and turning tasters into fans and buyers.
“That’s the rewarding piece of it,” he said. #
For more information, go to aibottling.net.
