distilling

Master this…

/ Robin Robinson, LLC / Leave a comment
LaborerBecause it has now reached epidemic stages, I feel its important to re-iterate a truth: if someone became interested in whiskey in the 2000s and started a distillery as a result, they are NOT a master distiller. It doesn’t matter what type of success or failure they have, who their distributor is or how many markets they’re in, they are not a master…of anything.
To infer, or just as wrongly, let other infer on their behalf, that they’ve mastered this craft after only a few years in, is a slap in the face and a profound insult to those that actually have achieved mastery.
The test is simple: stand in the same room with Jimmy Russell, Jim McEwan, David Stewart, Maureen Robinson, Shinji Fukuyo or Richard Patterson and refer to oneself as a “master” in their presence. It would be cringe-inducing to watch and what’s more, these very same personages wouldn’t refer to themselves as such. These, and others like them, have spent the better part of their lives in the pursuit of their craft in an industry that has seen severe downturns during their tenure. We tend to anoint them now with rock-star like plaudits, but even if the whiskey industry hadn’t taken a moon-shot in the last 15 years, they would still be regarded as masters.  They put in the time and they’ve lived through the pain.

True mastery is conferred on you by your peers and the industry you’re in, not self-annointed, or worse, bestowed upon you by a publicist or a blogger or a hack writer from Thrillist.

  • Mastery is the result of thousands of hours laboring in every part of an industry, coming from under the tutelage of others greater than you
  • Mastery is the great humility of learning over time what your mistakes are and understanding the thousands of permutations in the production of an end result
  • Mastery is understanding how to not just teach, but to guide those who come to you for direction and knowledge, a conveyance of not just facts and information, but true wisdom as a result of a deep understanding
  • Mastery is having the scars of failure and succeeding as a result of them
  • Mastery is an outward recognition that you stand above others in a pursuit of acknowledged excellence and have achieved it through your labors
  • Mastery is conferred upon a few.  It is not a Participation Award.
There are those in this industry who after a rocket-glide to success in a few short years attach the “master” label to themselves.  At the beginning of this wave, it was easy to dismiss it as youthful exuberance, but no more. It is undeserved and by stealing this honorific they rob themselves of the richness of their own process and experience.  What they may be is talented, skillful and resourceful, all achievements in and of themselves. They may be lucky or someone who knew the right people at the right time; someone gifted with the time and money to pursue a task or discipline at one’s leisure without the burden of monthly bills. All of these are fine, there’s nothing wrong with them, everyone has different paths to success. 
But the hyper-titling we are experiencing is not the result of any of these.  It’s a combination of a number of things that are troubling in our larger culture:
  • The hyper-need for instant self-gratification, driven through the prism of social media
  • The confusion of facts with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom as a result of the hyper-reality of the internet
  • A service economy vs. a production economy where there are few examples of long-term effort
  • The commodification of titles (Manager, Director, VP, CEO, etc.) as a result of “entrepreneurial glorification”, a syndrome where anyone who starts something new on their own is considered a prodigy, a genius or brilliant simply by the act of starting, not on what they’ve achieved
  • Outside investment money with no historical investment in the industry, seeing a distillery or a brand as just another commodity and titles as a marketing edge over the competition

This sense of entitlement is enabled by the wholesale showering of diluted “awards” from the huge number of competitions that have sprung up as a cottage industry, many of them coming from the organizations that purport to help grow and guide these young craftsmen into industry leaders.

One cannot demand transparency if one is not going to live it. If the craft movement is going to grow up to fulfill the destiny that is waiting for it, the capacity to re-arrange how hard spirits are made, marketed and consumed for a generation, it needs to start by looking inward at its practitioners and demanding a truthful accountability of their capabilities: not just to create, but to lead and guide, to pass their wisdom onto a new generation.  Right now, I’m not seeing that happening enough to make me hopeful that it can.