Category: Our Company

We want this place to feel different. We want working here to be different than working at other jobs. We want all of us to create a new kind of worked environment based on trust, open communication and mutual respect. We want you to feel good working here. That doesn’t mean we want your job to be easy, or to feel like I’m your best friend so do whatever you want. We want you to think of everyone else in this room as your teammates on the best professional team whose goal is to win.

We could make more profit here. We could do nothing but contract bottling, because that is profitable and we are good at it. But we made a decision that profit is not our only goal. You only have one chance at life, and at the end of it I want to look we want to look back and say, we really did something special there. And what we did there spread out into our community, and changed the way other employers think about their companies.

Profit then is simply a means to an end – not the end itself. If we make profit, we can use that capital to invest in other things and other people. We can grow our team. Both in quantity of people and in training opportunities, exciting field trips, and other benefits. No sane man wants money just for money’s sake. Money is just the way we’ve decided as a culture to keep score of the value of an activity or thing.

We hope the following outline for our vision for Cardinal Spirits in 2021 will help you understand the direction we’re trying to steer this ship.

Distribution

• Overview
  • Sales: Our sales organization will be top-tier — a leader among our cohorts in the industry. We’ll have exceptional relationships with our accounts and distributors. Our program planning and execution will be unmatched among craft spirits suppliers, and comparable to the best alcohol suppliers in the industry. Our sales team will be sincerely engaged and committed to their goals and our larger vision.
  • Markets: Our distribution footprint will be larger and deeper, encompassing the majority of the Midwest and the Northeast, plus key states elsewhere, including Florida and California. In Indiana, our presence and products will flow . Consumers will know our brands well, and when someone asks them to name a craft distillery in Indiana, Cardinal Spirits is the first one they enthusiastically think of.
  • Products: Our canned cocktails will equal in revenue to our spirits, totaling over $2M in annual sales and over 60,000 cases. When it comes to spirits, we’ll move an impressive 20,000 cases per year, with half of those sales coming from Indiana.

Production

• Overview
  • We will shift the bulk of our distilling, bottling, and operations to a larger primary production facility somewhere nearby with top-of-the-line furnishings/equipment.
  • Our original building at 922 S. Morton St. will continue to be a craft spirits destination with a cocktail bar and restaurant, where our guests can get an intimate look at how we produce some of our specialty and seasonal products.
  • Our barrel rickhouse will have room for 2,000 barrels.

Cardinal Copacking

• Overview
  • We will operate a blending and packaging facility called Cardinal Copacking, where we give entrepreneurs the ability to easily produce their own spirit brands. We’ll excel at servicing the needs of suppliers, retailers and distributors — using a combination of industry best practices and our proprietary methods.
  • Cardinal Copacking will become an excellent profit center for Cardinal Spirits, creating $7.5M/year in revenue and $4.5M in gross profit.
  • Cardinal Copacking will be known for exceptional customer service, turn times, and quality.

Birdhouse

• Overview
  • The Birdhouse, our craft cocktail bar and restaurant, will become a Midwest destination — a place you’ll unquestionably go out of your way for, or perhaps plan an entire trip around.
  • Guests will be wowed with a 7-star experience: one that is memorable for years.
  • The distillery experience is amplified inside the restaurant with barrels or a window into production, driving home the fact that we’re distillery

Marketing

• Overview
  • Our core brands will be separately and confidently messaged (Birdhouse, Spirit/RTD Brands, and Copacking) but share a common thread.
  • We’ll lead the craft spirits industry with inviting content on social media platforms, creative campaigns and posts.
  • We will partner with influencers and enthusiasts to create meaningful, creative campaigns that will both enrich our brand and drive sales.
  • The media will count on our leadership team as trusted sources, and our company will earn national press at least quarterly.

Community

• Overview
  • We will partner with organizations that do meaningful work.
  • We will re-shape industries and regulations that are broken.
  • We will build communities large and small, in the real world and online.
  • We will focus on entrepreneurship for our team and in the community.

Team

• Overview
  • Talent: We will attract the best people from the Midwest and beyond to be a part of our organization.
  • Culture: Our team will recognize that working here feels different than working at other jobs. We will be committed to creating a supportive, humane, and welcoming place to work, where communication is open, honest, and transparent. People will feel good working here. We’ll teach and apply the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and expect employees to live by Habit One: Be Proactive.
  • Leadership: Leadership track candidates will receive ongoing training, coaching, and mentorship. We will give candidates a clear understanding of where to start: with our curated library of books and training courses that we facilitate, along with an ongoing book club.
  • Education: All team members will understand a financial statement, and they will know how they relate to the business as a whole. We’ll prioritize and incentivize self-improvement and continuing education by providing stipends for courses, books, conferences, and seminars.

Finances

• Revenue Growth
  • $4.5M in 2019
  • $7.5M in 2020
  • $11M in 2021
• Healthy bottom line
  • Net $400k in 2019
  • Net $1.2M in 2020
  • Net $2.5M in 2021

Operations

• Overview
  • Systems: We will be a Demand Driven Adaptive Enterprise (DDAE).
  • Culture: We will demonstrate a culture of support of one another, which includes putting your coworker ahead of yourself.
  • Space: Management/leadership will work in a well-designed work environment in close proximity to our production facilities, with space for collaboration, private work, conversations, and phone calls.

Adam notes:

Our customers often came after dinner-hours for a post-meal nightcap. We starting snagging the dinner crowd and brunch crowds when we paired up with food trucks that could provide more gut-filling meals than our snack menu.

This came with a cache of challenges though — one, we couldn’t control the service experience customers had with the food trucks. The disposable oil-soaked plates and plastic-wrapped cutlery didn’t match our aesthetic, the food didn’t match the spirit of our cocktails, our production, or our branding. And while the food trucks brought customers during mealtimes, we didn’t catch any profit from the food sales and our average sales per table fell. People often saw us less like a unique dining experience in town and more like a concession shelter with an outdoor patio. We knew we had to open a kitchen and do things our way.

We tore down the wall that divided the kitchen from an office room. It was still a tiny space–more than three cooks in the kitchen is too many cooks in the kitchen. But we made up for this with top-of-the-line, dream appliances. Just like our first bartenders, we hired a strong chef and gave him creative reign. Same rule: our spirits are made from scratch, our cocktails are made from scratch, and so should our food. We had seen a hole in Bloomington’s cocktail scene and a chance to fill it with something unique, and we knew we could do this food.

Every dish is made to share, they cascade out over service, never disrupting conversation with an overwhelming amount of plates hitting the table at once. Rather than a giant entree stacked with a giant side, every dish is a delicious study of an ingredient — they are elegant, fresh, and unexpected.

Our kitchen elevates our customers’ experience at Cardinal without distracting from our bread & butter (alcohol, that is.) When our servers aren’t dropping off a bowl of house-made, hand-pulled seasoned mozzarella cheese, or a seasonal cocktail, they’re coming round with tastes of our spirits.

To say that we weren’t a little surprised that our tasting room was busy during our opening month would not be entirely accurate. It was dreary February and we only offered Vodka cocktails and a few pickled snacks. What we did know was that we were doing something new and unique in Bloomington, and enough people were also hungry for this. We were the first and only distillery in Bloomington. Around this time there were only two bars in town with a focus on cocktails. One beloved establishment, The Rail, closed suddenly a few months before we opened. The other is a cocktail-mixer bar with plastic cups that won’t break when dropped on the blacklight-lit dance floor. Although we were a distillery first and foremost, we had a beautiful bar and delicious vodka–we knew we could offer what was missing in Bloomington.

We hired strong bartenders and gave them creative reign behind the bar. We gave them one rule: everything was to made from scratch, just like the vodka itself. Our bartenders made original cocktails and played off classic builds to stretch what most people believed vodka should be used for. They infused our vodka with toasted oak chips to make a cocktail akin to a manhattan (The Prelude), they modeled a very complex elixir after Campari so we could serve a knock-out, sans gin Negroni. Everything was elegant, fresh, and unexpected. Almost before we knew it, we weren’t just a tasting room, we were a proper cocktail bar–just without all the other spirits.

It wasn’t just vodka for long though. Our production geared up and filled our rails with new spirits; coffee liqueur, two types of gin, flora liqueur, white rum. What had once been a constraint for a bartenders became a new kind of challenge–they were constantly generating cocktails to highlight our new signature spirits. The bartop filled with house-made syrups, purees, and tinctures. They had to scale back and create new constraints for themselves to keep drink times and prep shifts under control.

Stella Snyder, one of our distinguished bartender alumni who went on to head the cocktail program at Finches Brassiere, said she has never made so many cocktails in a single shift than at Cardinal. It’s a work out.

Fun – If it’s not fun, we do it differently, or we do something else entirely. If we love how we do things around here, people will love to drink here, shop here, and work here.

Understanding – The most vital infrastructure of a business is a strong system of communication. Seek to understand, then seek to be understood.

Creativity – We are inspired by solutions and innovations that are unique to us. Honeyschnapps? You bet. Beehive on the roof for honey? Why not. Use yeast collected off our bees for fermentation? We love it.

Kindness – Recognize every teammates’ strengths and unique vantage points, then dignify where they are what they have to bring. (In short, be nice and be generous.)

Straightforward – We stand for honest production and clear communication. What happens when we cut acetone out during distillation? No nasty headache. What happens when we leave passive-aggressive tones out of conflict-resolution? That’s right, no nasty headache.

Boiled down, our mission statement looks something like this:

• To make money, now and in the future.
• To provide a secure, satisfying, and nurturing work environment for our employees, now and in the future.
• To satisfy the market and our community, now and in the future.

For us, specifically–we’re in the business of making connections. Our mission is twofold:

One, to make exceptional, conversation-sparking spirits. As an intentional distillery, we use artisan techniques, natural ingredients, and honest work to make spirits that make you feel good, and good about drinking.

and…

Two, to value people as much as profits. We believe people are the most important part of any company – not the products, services, or even ideas–and so we prioritize education, development, and the advancement of our teammates.

1. In A Nutshell

Just like craft breweries in the early 1980’s, there is a movement of craft distilleries opening in America, and a desire for locally produced food and drink in general.

Cardinal Spirits brought the production of high quality spirits to downtown Bloomington, where we create great jobs and support our community.

The founders of Cardinal Spirits started the company because of a shared passion for distilled spirits and American manufacturing. They also wanted to create meaningful employment for themselves and others – a place that values entrepreneurial thinking and encourages creativity at every level.

We distill premium spirits using the highest quality ingredients and we source local ingredients whenever possible. All parts of the distilling process — from fermentation to mashing to aging to bottling — happen on-site. 

At the time of publishing, our spirits are distributed in eleven states and our nation’s capital: Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Jersey and D.C.

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2. What’s in a name?

The Cardinal is our state bird, but also the state bird of seven other states.
We like it because it’s a hardass. It sticks around all winter, when all the other songbirds fly south.

The triangle in our labels represents the crest of the cardinal.
The logo itself is a silhouette of the wooden cardinal statue sitting on a back bar shelf in the tasting room – a wood carving from the 1940s.

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3. Timeline

BCE – 2010

Adam Quirk is a teenager in Indiana making bootleg wine in his attic. He studies sociology at Ball State University and leaves to work in the early world of web design and video. He moves to New York and starts a small company that helps big companies cultivate a web presence.

Jeff Wuslich is a teenager in Indiana campaigning for student government. He studies sociology in college and then begins working for his alma mater Indiana University. He starts a small company fundraising for nonprofits and political candidates.

Jeff Wuslich judges for the first time at the American Distillers Institute Craft Spirits Judging. Meanwhile, Adam is living in New York City when Breukelen Distilling and Six-Point Beer open in Brooklyn. Adam dreams of leaving his web-job to start a Bierschnapps distillery.

Adam moves to Bloomington and meets Jeff. They realize they share a dream of opening a craft distillery. They begin marrying their individual visions into one. Cardinal Spirits is born.

2013

The Indiana legislature passes an amendment allowing artisan distilleries to open tasting rooms and sell carry-out bottles. The new law opens up new possibilities for Cardinal Spirits and decidedly focuses our early development. If not for this piece of legislation, we would not have the amazing bar program, service staff, and full kitchen we have today. Who knows if Tiki Rum would have been thought of!

Adam, Jason, Jeff, and Rick write and pitch their business plan to private investors and banks (seven banks said no, the 8th said yes.) They also raise $850,000 through an online crowdfunding marketplace—one of the first uses ever of equity crowdfunding for private companies. A finance reporter from CNBC wrote about it in a Food & Beverage article “Forget happy hour: How to own your own distillery. ”

We acquire our building, 922 S Morton Street, and begin its initial renovation. The building had previously operated as an office and storehouse for a church ministry that sold furniture to international students – and before that was a metal roofing factory.

2014

Cardinal Spirits undergoes major construction projects. We design and build out the space. We choose and install all of our equipment. We also develop our brand, recipe list, and product offerings.

On December 5th, Repeal Day, we operate our still for the first time. Batch 1 is memorialized in a mini barrel displayed on the bar wall.

2015

We’re in business! We begin distributing in Indiana via Carrol Wine & Spirits. Big Red orders 275 cases of our vodka.

In February we host our Grand Opening. We offer vodka cocktails, pickled veggies and eggs, charcuterie and cheese boards, and spiked sweets from BluBoy and the Chocolate Moose.

We begin adding spirits to our lineup in rapid-fire succession—Spring: American Gin releases in April and our Songbird Coffee Liqueur premiers with the opening of our outdoor patio in May. Summer: Standard Dry Gin and Flora release a week apart in June, Pride label Vodka and Tiki Rum premier in July, and Bramble bursts forth in August. Fall/Winter: Nocino rounds out the year in November.

Our Vodka gets recognition at the 2015 MicroLiquors Spirits Awards, winning Triple Gold – Best in Show.

2016

This year brings another big change from the Indiana Legislature. Thanks to the lobbying and bill-writing efforts of Jeff Wuslich, Indiana allows Sunday carryout liquor sales from artisan distilleries. Sunday liquor sales had been outlawed in Indiana for nearly a century. The first bottle of hard alcohol sold on a Sunday since prohibition was here.

We begin distribution in Kentucky, kicking off with a launch party in Louisville with Good Folks Coffee Roasters. Good Folks provides the coffee beans for our Kentucky-distributed Songbird Coffee Liqueur blend.

The flock welcomes Robyn Wirkerman as our new general manager!

On a crisp Friday in October, we release Bloomington’s first bourbon, our single barrel bourbon! We sell out of carryout bottles in two hours. The bar’s stock depletes by the end of the weekend.

We release four more spirits this year—Lake House Spiced Rum, a custom Spiced Pineapple Tiki Rum for C3 Bar, Black Bear Bierschnaps, and Terra Gin. The development of Terra was a collaboration with Lior Lev Sercarz, a master spice blender in New York City.

2017

In March, Lior Sev Sercarz visits Cardinal Spirits to lead spice blending workshops with members of our Bloomington culinary community. The event, named Spicecamp, inaugurates our annual visitor series of influential makers from the worlds of food, drink, and distilling.

Terra Gin garners heaps of national attention this year, most notably from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

In March, Lior Sev Sercarz visits us to lead a spice blending workshop with members of our Bloomington culinary community. The event, named Spicecamp, inaugurates our annual visitor series of influential makers from the worlds of food, drink, and distilling.

Cardinal Spirits also spreads its wings and flies into the Chicago, Michigan, Tennessee, and New York markets. Our Terra Gin is included in a feature cocktail at the Three Michelin Star rated restaurant Le Bernardin in New York.

2018

In 2018 we completed a massive bottling run for Big Red Liquors. We worked around the clock and to distill and bottle more booze in a just few weeks than we had previously completed in several months. This was the beginning of our contract bottling business, which has continued to grow significantly throughout 2018.

We were very excited to begin distributing through RNDC after parting ways with Carrol Wine and Spirits in February.

We entered six new states and our nation’s capital—Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Wisconsin and D.C.!

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4. Exciting Firsts

[Bulleted by award emojis–trophy, star, or medal]

? Bloomington’s first distillery

? Bloomington’s first Bourbon

? Indiana’s first bottle of hard alcohol sold on a Sunday

? Local culinary community’s first visitor series, with Lior Sev Sercarz’s Spice Camp

? Indiana’s first bottle of Pride Vodka dedicated to raising awareness and financial support for local LGBTQ+ rights

Welcome to Cardinal Spirits! We’re glad you’re here. Many of us have been working together since 2013 building this thing, and now you’re a part of it. We thought it would be nice to lay out a sort of roadmap for how we work together here. Before long you’ll start fitting in and figuring things out, and won’t miss out on any inside jokes. Just know that if Jeff says something with a smile and then pauses, it was probably a joke and you should feel free to laugh.

Thanks for joining our little flock.

Adam & Jeff