We run tours on wednesdays

Touring is not our business. Making whiskey is our business. Tours are a thing we do because the county wants the tourism and because a person who has stood next to a working still buys differently in the gift shop than a person who has not.

So the tour has always been run on the margins. One of the warehouse guys who is good with people, wednesdays and saturdays, ninety minutes, and thirty whisper receivers in a charging cabinet by the door that somebody has to plug in every night and wipe down between groups and count back in and reorder when four of them walk off in a season.

Thirty. That number set our entire visitor operation and I dont think anyone ever said it out loud. Bus comes in with fourty two people, we split it into two groups and run it twice, which costs us a guide's whole afternoon. Or we turn away twelve people, which is what usually happened. A tour operator calls in march wanting to put us on a regular coach itinerary, and the honest answer was we can take thirty at a time, and thats the end of that conversation.

Now the receiver is whatever phone they walked in with. Bus of fourty two is a group of fourty two. Ninety minutes, one guide, one pass through the rickhouse. We did not buy anything and we did not add a person.

Two things came out of that which I did not put in the business case because I did not know to. The first is the language one. We are two hours from a city with a lot of international visitors and we would get a group where six people spoke Japanese and there was nothing to be done about it except the tour guide talking slower, which helps nobody. Now they pick the language when they scan the code at the start. I watched a guide do the whole barrel-char explanation and watched three Japanese visitors laugh at the joke in it at the right moment, and our guide — who is a warehouse guy, not a performer — got visibly emotional about that.

The second is that the coach operator conversation went differently the next time it happened. We can take the bus now. We take three a week in season. Gift shop is up substantially and it is not complicated why, its just more people through the door on the same wednesday with the same one guide. The tour did not get better exactly. The ceiling came off it.