How to Drink New Riff with Mollie Lewis, President

In music most of us are attracted to a song’s continually repeated musical rhythm  “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones or “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, but once those were new to us. Our guest today is here to remind us of the pleasure we get when discovering a new riff.

Sponsored by Visit Cincy, I am thrilled to introduce you to Mollie Lewis, the President of New Riff Distilling, which took Kentucky’s leitmotif of bourbon and sprinkled in a few eighth-note surprises to create a liquid that is winning awards not only at home but around the world. Her story proves there’s always room for a new tune in town.

Not only am I excited to introduce Mollie to you, but also the whole Cincy Region — where North meets South and Ohio meets Kentucky. Just a bridge apart, Cincinnati’s German heritage and urban energy connect with Northern Kentucky’s Southern charm.

While you are there you can sip bourbon, sample craft beer, and savor award-winning cuisine. There’s tons of vibrant street art, historic landmarks, and stunning architecture to explore — all along a riverfront that’s buzzing with festivals year-round.

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Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Mollie. Just remember that I own the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of Lush Life podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as my right of publicity. So if you want to use any of this, please email me!

This transcript is sponsored by:

Susan: It’s really great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me. I can’t wait to hear your story.

Mollie: Thank you for having me.

Susan: Absolutely. I’ve already given you an intro, but why don’t you introduce yourself again.

Mollie: Absolutely. Well, my name is Mollie Lewis and my current title is President of New Riff Distilling. New Riff Distilling is actually my family business. We’re located here in Northern Kentucky in a pretty small town called Newport. It runs right along the river of Cincinnati. We have Ohio to the north and we consider ourselves the top of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail or the beginning of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail here in Newport.

Susan: I love Newport. It’s such a fun town, and if people have listened to my first episode about Northern Kentucky, we talked about Newport being the Las Vegas of its day. So how exciting you’re right in there with the Prohibition stuff.

Mollie: Yes, there’s a lot of storied history here in Newport. It has a pretty checkered but interesting past, and we’re pretty proud to be a part of that too.

Susan: Let’s get into it. New Riff. Tell me the beginnings. I believe your dad started it, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about how he even thought to create a bourbon company.

Mollie: Yes, absolutely. So I grew up here in Kentucky as did my father actually.  My grandfather came to Kentucky from New York after immigrating from Northern Europe.

Susan: Is there a reason why he decided to leave New York and come to Kentucky?

Mollie: He was an engineer and he was a businessman as well. He was trying to find his way. He was a young man and I believe the story is that a friend told him that things would be easier in the south and that he would have more opportunity to do all the things that he wanted to do and there was less opportunity in crowded New York.

He was in Rochester when he took a leap of faith. I believe he met friends who moved down to Kentucky and then he met my grandmother and they planted roots. I never remember him having a Kentucky accent and therefore, I don’t think a lot of us in the family had this strong Kentucky accent, but we’re certainly Kentuckians at this point.

The story is my grandfather started a consolidated store. They were selling a lot of army surplus and things, and there was a small liquor section in the store. His brother, my father’s uncle, was running that store and the family story is that he was a gambler and that he was drinking all the profits.

My grandfather kicked him out and asked my father, who was in early twenties and just finished college, to help him run the store. It wasn’t really what my father wanted to do, but he said, sure, I’ll help you out. Family obligations.

Then he found out that he really had a knack for it and was really good at putting the store together and was really interested in the product.  He never went back. He was studying to be a teacher and he was a teacher by osmosis with all of his life teaching, teaching me and teaching so many people that have worked with and for him.

He never went back formally to the classroom and just continued to build stores and create a beverage, alcohol chain here in Kentucky.  Then the last one that he built, which is the largest one, is a store, called the Party Source. It’s actually, still to date. the largest independent beverage alcohol store in the United States which is really neat.

He built the store in the early 1990’s. It’s right on the border with Ohio. Ohio has state laws that control the pricing of spirits. It was a success. Folks would travel over the border and shop and he had his finger on the pulse of what was happening in Kentucky and the bourbon scene.

He has amazing stories about in the 90’s being offered full barrels of you name it, Pappy 10, 15-year-old, Four Roses nd all the Buffalo Trace items that are special. He just saw the boom starting to happen. He remembers when Blanton’s was on the shelf and you had to dust it off ,nobody wanted to buy it.

He fell in love with bourbon and fell in love with the fact that it was America’s native spirit. America’s only Native Spirit and that the really good stuff comes from Kentucky.

Susan: Yes.

Mollie:  This is a long-winded way of saying that he fell in love with bourbon and then took a look around here in Northern Kentucky and realized that since Prohibition, there really hadn’t been anything of significance in the distilling world.

There were a couple small operations –  pot still operations, a barrel a week, but nothing really of significance putting Northern Kentucky on the map as far as being a bourbon destination in the state of Kentucky. His second chapter, if you will, was to try to change that.

Susan: Alright, before we get to the second chapter, let’s go back to the first chapter

for a second. I, as a Pennsylvanian, have heard of the party Source. It is huge. It must have been really interesting for him in the 90;s being in Kentucky, because that was of course the time when vodka was king.  When you say that he could have all these barrels. I mean, they just probably didn’t know what to do with them.

Mollie: They were probably giving them away to an extent. I mean it was an interesting time and as we’ve been told, bourbon is really a cyclical market item.  Certainly in the 80’s,  particularly in early 90’s, there was a real slump, right? I mean, some of the heritage distilleries were still making some production, but it was a hard item to sell. It didn’t have certainly anything near the cachet that it started to accumulate as it got more in more recent times.

Susan:  I guess being a Kentuckian, he had bourbon in his veins. Was this something that he drank at home?

Mollie: It was around, it was something that he was aware of and he drank socially and he learned about. I don’t remember him drinking a lot of bourbon at home growing up. I remember he smoked a pipe and would drink cocktails and things. I don’t remember bourbon being particularly the most meaningful thing that he drank until I was in high school and a little bit later.

I remember the interest growing and I remember there was an interest in rye whiskey as well. The stories are back in the early 90’s, there were one, two, maybe three selections on the shelf. Now in the Party Source there’s a whole wall of rye. I remember when he talked about rye being a growing category too. He was in it every day. He saw what was coming in the door. He saw that there was going to be a boom. He envisioned this trajectory that ended up really happening.

Susan: And you by osmosis must have just been, not even realizing, but soaking it all in.

Mollie: Yes, it was a really exciting time. I learned a lot about a lot of different spirits. I was allowed to drink wine at the table when I was 18. We were a family that really embraced drinking being part of the table. I like to think we were a little Italian or European in that regard. It was a part of our family life in a way that maybe it wasn’t for a lot of Americans at the time growing up.

Susan: Through my research, I know that you were an artist. Although you were drinking at the table, you then got to drink in other places, in other countries. Before we get to the second chapter, tell me about how your first chapter before you got involved with New Riff.

Mollie: Yes. Well, thank you. I’m the first born and there was always a lot of pressure that at some point I would come into the family business, right? There was an expectation that just lived in the ethos, but I was really encouraged to figure out what my passion was and what I was good at.

I gravitated to the arts at a young age, painting visual arts was really my thing. I had the privilege of going to a magnet art high school, which was unusual, especially in Kentucky, that that thing was even offered. I went to a pretty interesting magnet high school where we had some fascinating teachers, who really encouraged personal development.

I was also encouraged to go to art school. I felt like that was really my calling. We looked at a number of different schools. I was awarded a couple of scholarships. I’m proud to share, and I ended up going to Parson School of Design in New York. Parsons is known for fashion in all transparency, but they actually have a very interesting art program.

One of the strengths of Parsons is that it’s located in New York City. So you’re soaking up all the culture and the arts and the multiculturalism just by being in that city. So that’s where I went and I’m so glad that I did.

Susan: And then I know that you took that passion for wine and ended up in Italy.

Mollie: Yes, I did.  Absolutely. Well, I dabbled in the arts. I did a five year degree program at Parsons. Loved living in New York, but it’s hard to make money in the arts. Right?  I remember in my early 20’s having a conversation with my father, I call him Ken at work.

I remember talking with him and he was like, well, you drink enough wine, why don’t you learn something about it?  I think the impetus was always to have me learn something about wine and then come back to the family business, which was still retail at the time.

Susan: You made me laugh. It sounds so much like my dad too.

Mollie: Is that right?

Susan: Yes.

Mollie: I got a job in the tasting room at Beringer, I poured some white Zinfandel when I was 24 years old. It was really a great learning experience to learn about wine, to see the kinds of questions people were asking. I mean. it was a great starting point. It was a great experience and I’m fortunate to have had that opportunity.  I worked in a number of different wine positions through distribution. I worked in restaurants and then had the opportunity to go to Italy in 2007, which was very exciting.

I will say I followed a guy to Italy. who I’m no longer with but ended up being the best thing that I ever did for myself, and I ended up staying there for five years.

Susan: What do you feel that you, I know you’re no longer in wine, but I’m sure you still love it and love Italy, but what do you feel that you brought back with you from Italy?

Mollie: Absolutely. No, that’s a great question. I don’t know if I’ve ever been asked that question so directly and I love it.  I think there’s such a wonderful culture around food and beverage coming out of Italy.

It’s in people’s veins just sitting at the table. wine or even, spirit, cocktail being a part of the table. That’s how I think too. So, it was a really exciting time. I absorbed a lot, I learned a lot about authenticity and a sense of place, terroir, and I really was excited to come back to Kentucky when, and we will get back to it, I think about how we decided to move forward with New Riff.

There were a lot of parallels. We’re talking about America’s native spirit, we’re talking about bourbon and although you can make bourbon in any state in the entire 50 states. There’s a theory that all the best stuff, all the best bourbon comes from Kentucky . The idea of being in a family business representing a sense of place was a great  parallel to what I was learning and what I was doing in Italy.

I do think that I brought some of my hospitality that I learned over in Italy back to what we do here at New Riff.  I don’t want to skip too far ahead, but we decided early on that we were going to be champions in our single barrel program.

Susan: Wait, before we do get to that, let’s go to the second chapter and let’s talk about New Riff and why your dad from the Party Source decided to bite off a huge thing – to create a distillery.

Mollie: It was huge thing. Yes. He wasn’t young. I mean, I’ll give you that. He had had his career in retail. He’d been a retailer for over 40 years. Right. I will be completely transparent, the Party Source at this point was a debt-free business. I mean a lot of folks in his shoes might have just moved to Tahiti.

Sometimes he probably wishes, why didn’t I do that? But he had a real passion. He’s an entrepreneur. He doesn’t sit still. He doesn’t like it when things get too comfortable. I’m not necessarily like that, but he likes to push the limit and the envelope and the edge.

He got it into his head that he wanted to create a real bourbon destination here in Northern Kentucky and put Northern Kentucky on the map as being one of the meccas, one of the focal points in Kentucky for bourbon and bourbon tourism. We say that New Riff was created in 2009, 2010, around the dinner table.

I think a little bit of it had to do with Ken visiting me in Italy and experiencing some of the family wineries that we spent time in. I think that definitely fueled the interest. He started really putting the layers into practice and, and making it happen.

What I always love to point out is that the Party Source, which we actually share a parking lot with, believe it or not. In 2014, one of the best days and most memorable days of my life was when he told the employees at the Party Source, and there are about a hundred employees in that store, a hundred different families, and when he, sold the store to the employee.

So I love to point that out because I do feel that that gives an image of the value system and the ethos that New Riff was built on. But he could have made so much more money selling to a Total Wine or one of these larger chains, or who knows, who might have been interested, but he wanted to take care of his people and he wanted to take care of his employees. He made them all owners of the store. Being an ESOP is a profit sharing opportunity for the employees of the store. So to this date, you walk into that store, which is still the largest independent retail store in the country and its employee owned, which is pretty great.

Susan: I love that. It is a generosity of spirit.

Mollie: It’s taking care of people. He, of course, wants to live well, of course he wants to make money. I mean, who doesn’t? But he also believes in sharing and I think that’s a really important value system that we have now adapted or always had to, as the second generation of leadership here at New Riff.

I don’t want to get too far ahead from that. So that enabled us financially to build New Riff from the ground up. We got the money. The Party Source was being run by the employees, and we started to build this building that I’m currently in right now from the ground up.  We finished construction in 2014 and had our first distillation in May of 2014.

Susan: . What had you planned? Did you have then the mash bill? Did you have a bottle design? Did you have the name?

Mollie: Yes. None of us had done this before. Ken certainly hadn’t. I certainly hadn’t. We had an awesome team who mostly are still here. We had an eight team, an eight member team. Hannah Lowen, who’s our current CEO, and Brian Sprance, who’s our Master Distiller. We’re all already on board, already part of the team.

The naming of the distillery, it’s really hard to do. It’s like naming a child. There’s a lot of responsibility there. We had a lot of other names. We kept thinking about, do we call it the North of the South or do we talk about Kentucky? None of that really resonated with us because we felt that we weren’t being authentic.

We don’t have Grandpa’s recipe under the bed. We don’t have hundreds of years of distillation culture in our family or an original DSP here in the state. So we felt that those names were a little inauthentic. We kept coming back to being a new riff on Ken’s life. Here he was older than midlife, making a complete career change, starting a whole new business.

We kept going back to it being a new riff on Ken’s life, and then we started thinking about the product that we envisioned making and that we were planning to make, and that although it was based in tradition, it was based on the sour mash regimen, which is what we consider the Kentucky regimen.

It’s how whiskey is made here in Kentucky. We were honoring that, but our plans were to really innovate and to create something new something special, something a little different.  We started talking about, Hey, wait a second. We’re a new riff on an old tradition. Right? New Riff. So it just fell into place in a nice way and felt real and authentic.

Then same thing with the bottle. When we had decided on the name, we wanted to have a bottle that was a nod to traditional. Right.  The shape of the bottle is actually a relatively known bottle shape. You might have seen it in the market. There are a number of important brands, whiskey brands, that did do use this bottle shape.

We modernized it or we put our riff on it, or a spin on it by this ombre which really hadn’t been done before in the industry. So we think that that was really neat. There were lots of evolutions.

At first, the ombre was on the bottom and it graduated to the top, and then we switched it.  We had a lot of fun designing this bottle. But we took a risk with this modern take on a traditional bottle. Now you see it a little bit more in the industry, but at the time it was really one of the first.

Susan: And the recipe. How do you even start? How many different trial and errors did you have or did you just come up with it in the first iteration?

Mollie: It’s an interesting story in and of itself. Ken had not been in the distilling business. None of us had, right?  We consider ourselves almost like corporate refugees. It’s a term we used early on for a lot of our employees here at New Riff. Our Master Distiller, Brian Sprance actually, and people find this hard to believe, but he had actually never distilled a thing in his life. When we hired him.

Susan: Wait, Wait, I have to stop you there. So he answered an ad for a master distiller?

Mollie: Well he had experience, he had worked for Sam Adams for over 15 years, so he was a master fermenter.

Susan: Which by the way, everyone, Sam Adams is in Kentucky. It is not in Boston.

Mollie: Absolutely it is. It’s big industry here and it’s important. Brian worked there. He was a Master Fermenter. I mean, a title doesn’t really exist, but he really knew fermentation backwards and forwards. The vision that Ken felt very strongly about was, I don’t want to hire an Assistant Master Distiller from Maker’s Mark, or from Woodford, bring them up here and have Makers North or Woodford North.

I want to have something unique, something representative of Northern Kentucky. That was why strategically we went out and found Brian because he had the base down. I mean, being an expert, you have to keep everything so clean. Fermentation is really, really, really a skill to master. Then we had a clean slate.  He was interested, he was excited and he dug right in.  We did have a consulting Master Distiller who really took Brian under his wing and trained Brian and help us put together our distillery down to what fermenters to build and what pipes to put in.

His name was Larry Ebersold and folks might have heard of him. He is a world renowned Master Distiller, that had worked for Seagram’s, the former Seagram’s plant, for over 30 years. Rye was really his area of expertise. That’s where he particularly shined. So we were his full first consulting project and he came in and Brian likes to say that Larry taught him everything he knows about distillation.

Susan: Yes, see it’s a new riff on his career as well.

Mollie: New riff on a lot of things. In the  industry, and you’ve probably heard this too, when we first started there was there was a word on the street that the fermentation wasn’t as important. That the beer, the distiller’s beer wasn’t super important and we approached it from a very different angle. From the get-go, we said this is extremely important. We need to have the absolute best distiller’s beer we could possibly make to be the foundation of our whiskey. No one better to bring in than someone who really knew fermentation.

Susan: Absolutely. About how long did it take from starting it to your liquid? Or having the right recipe?

Mollie: We were committed to doing things, what we call the right way. Our interpretation was to be as transparent as possible which was also rarer at the time. Now you’re seeing things like mash bills put on bottles, but that wasn’t the case when we first started.

When we first came out of the gate, we said, we’re going to wait at least four years until our whiskey tells us that it’s ready. It sounds silly, but really that was what we were saying back then. We want to release it at four years, but if it’s not ready, we’ll wait.

That was the commitment to the quality.  We also wanted our entry level spirit to be bottled in bond, which you’re seeing a lot more of in the industry now. There’s been a resurgence in bottled in bond products, but we were one of the first to actually, and I think we were the first distillery that I know of, make our first entry level product also bottled in bond.

To be bottled in bond, it has to be at least four years old. It has to be a hundred proof ,come from the same season, followed by the same distilling team its entire life.  We were that committed to quality. In fact, we embossed it on the bottle. We didn’t release anything until. 2018. We hurried up, we distilled, and then we waited.

Susan:  Were you making any gin or anything else?

Mollie: We did. One of the things that we said was we were only going to is make things that we like to drink. Gin was something that we made right out of the gate. We love gin. We still make it. We do we call a Kentucky Wild Gin, and then we also make a bourbon barrel aged gin which is really exciting and fun.

We sold a little bit of that along the way. We did some contract distilling for some larger clients to keep the lights on, and we waited until 2018 and then we released bourbon and rye here in the Kentucky market and it was worth the wait. I’m so glad we did.

Susan: It must have been so exciting.

Mollie: It was such an exciting time. It’s like creating anything, right?  It can almost be across the board in any industry. When you’re releasing a product to the world for the first time, you don’t know what folks are going to say. You don’t know how people are going to respond. It’s a very nerve wracking moment.

The one thing we were sure about was we knew what was in the bottle was good. We knew the flavor was there. We priced things fairly. We priced our bottles, not what the market could have born at that time, but that was Ken’s retailer background.

He wanted to be fair. We wanted the whiskey to be your favorite thing to drink on a Tuesday night and also what you wanted to drink on Saturday too. It’s scary. It’s unnerving. You never know what folks are going to say.  Luckily the response was wonderful. We’ve been riding the wave ever since. I have to pinch myself sometimes that it’s only been 12 years because we’ve come a long way.

Susan: Now right off the bat, were you thinking, okay, I know we’re going to do bourbon first, and then we’re going to have a rye and maybe single malt later, or were these ideas, after you wanted to see how the bourbon went?

Mollie: While our bourbon is a high rye bourbon, right, so the mash bill, that’s something else we do. We put it on the back of the bottle.

Susan: We didn’t talk about that.

Mollie: Our bourbon is 65% corn. 30% rye, which is pretty high when you think of rye percentages and 5% malted barley. Out of the gate we knew we were going to make a rye. Larry, from his former Seagram years, had shared what we sometimes refer to as the original Bulleit Rye recipe at 95 rye, 5% malted barley.  We made that out of the gate too. But we put a riff on it, we put our spin on it.

We made 95% rye, 5% malted rye. That was a product we made out of the gate.  We also made a little bit of a 100% malted rye pretty early on too. Brian asked Larry his favorite thing that he ever made at Seagram’s, and Larry said, well, I made this thing. I made this mash bill one time, it was so good, but the higher ups wouldn’t let me make it because it was too expensive, so I never made it again.

Brian said, well, what was it?  he said, “Well, it was this a 100% malted rye,” which is still a very unusual mash bill so we started making that early on.

Susan: So what is that like?

Mollie: Oh, it’s so good. Susan, I’ll have to get you a bottle. It’s part of our core line. It’s not everywhere like our bourbon and rye. I mean, none of our products is everywhere, but it’s not as easy to find. But it is exceptional. We learned a lot too. We expected it to be just like a rye on steroids – big and bold and spicy.  It’s not when you malt the grain. It actually gives a softer, more elegant flavor. It’s a real fun whiskey to try.

I would love anyone listening to try to pick up a bottle if you can find one. It’s hard to know where to put it on the shelf. I think that’s the issue because calling it a malt whiskey doesn’t really do it justice. It’s not really a rye because the flavors are so different because of the malting. So it’s kind of this unknown category, but t’s just another nod to our innovation and experimenting. One of the things that Ken was really good at was getting out of people’s way and saying, Brian I trust your palate. I trust what you’re learning. Let’s make some great whiskey.

Susan: Yes.

Mollie:  You mentioned our single malt program which we just disclosed to the public, three years ago now. It was something that we started producing early on. Actually there was a love for scotch whiskey and a love for international whiskeys here from the get-go.

Brian and some of his teammates traveled to Scotland to learn about how scotch was made and single malt particularly.  He came back and started dabbling a little bit. It’s still about 2% of our overall production. It’s pretty small, but it is delicious and it’s the commitment to quality and the commitment to what ends up going into the bottle. I mean, there’s so much work there. It’s pretty special.

Susan: How old is it? Is also four years, or is it older?

Mollie: We released our first single malt at seven years, so it’s aged at least seven years, and we’ve released a new offering of it every year. We make just a little bit, and then the following year we’ll make a little bit, but it’s seven years old, older generally. It’s a 100% malted barley. It’s our nod to Scotland.

Susan:  I also know that people can come and visit you.

Mollie: Yes, Northern Kentucky is the most underrated place to visit in Kentucky, and it shouldn’t be that way. It’s such a great place to visit. I will say we planted our roots here and now we actually have nine distilleries in the Northern Kentucky area, so there’s been a lot of growth.

Because of that growth, we have some  mazing restaurants. We have some amazing bars with giant bourbon and whiskey selections. We actually also have the international airport. We have CVG, Cincinnati Airport, but it’s in Kentucky, about 20 minutes from here, and we have a direct flight to London every day on British Airways from this airport.

Susan: Yes, yes. It wasn’t around when I came, and I can vouch. I love Covington and I love Newport. I think they’re great, but I meant they can actually visit your distillery and have a drink there.

Mollie: 100% yes! Everyone should come. They should come on the international flight or drive in.  We have a tasting room bar on the third floor of our distillery that we’re very proud of. We renovated it about two years ago, and we call it the Aquifer. One of the things about New Riff that’s really special, sometimes we refer to it as our secret weapon, is that the entire distillery is run on an alluvial aquifer that runs right underground, right under the distillery.

It’s very, very hard water, very mineral rich. It’s limestone, calcium rich water, and It fuels everything we do here at the distillery so we named our tasting room after it. Come visit us at the Aquifer. You can have world class cocktails. beer, wine, and most importantly, you can try everything we’ve ever made. We’ve held back bottles so you can try all of our whiskey club offerings as well as our core stuff.

Susan: Did Ken know when he was building the Party Source that there was an aquifer below it or just it happened?

Mollie: He didn’t know. It’d be a great story if he did. We didn’t even know it when we were building the foundation for this building in all transparency.

Susan: I think it’s a better story that you didn’t know. It just happened  and it was meant to !

Mollie: Ha, ha. The plan was to use municipal city water, Newport Water’s not the best.

I’ll tell you. It’s certainly not the best in Kentucky. It’s fine. It’s filtered. It’s kind of empty water. It’s water you drink, but when the foundation was being laid and the plans were being built for the distillery, we realized a hundred feet underground was this alluvial aquifer, which is really amazing.

You think about serendipity and those kinds of things. It’s hard not to believe in them when a well is running right under our distillery. We test it all the time, year after year, to make sure it’s good quality and it hasn’t changed. It stays the same temperature all year long. It provides a tremendous green energy savings for us.  It’s great water for our whiskey.

Susan: It was meant to be.

Mollie: It was kismet, it was meant to be.

Susan: One last thing I wanted to ask you was, as an artist hopefully you get a fulfillment from creating something, it may not be visual, but it’s definitely pleasing people, that’s for sure.

Mollie: Yes. Well, thank you for saying that. There’s so many interests. There’s so many things to do in life, right?  I think it’s really fun to draw parallels and have the opportunity to experiment.  I don’t make art anymore. I’m a little bit of an all or nothing kind of person, so I don’t paint anymore, at least I don’t right now.

I definitely believe that whiskey is an art.  I really believe that. I think that what Brian and his team do is artistic every day. It’s a little bit of magic, a little bit of science, and a little bit of art all mixed together. That is so exciting and creating something and delivering it to the public, and I get to talk about it every day.

I love what we do, so I don’t miss painting because I get to be creative in other ways.  We have this beautiful  architectural building here. It was really fun being involved in the team to design the tasting room. So I certainly have my creative outlet that I’m able to use and it all makes us who we are. I wouldn’t be the same person that I am if I didn’t go to art school and didn’t have that ability.

Susan: And how lovely it is that you are the next generation to take over. I assume that’s the goal is to keep it a family business.

Mollie: It is the goal to keep a family business wholeheartedly. My father retired two years ago. We have an unbelievable leadership team. He wore a bunch of hats. We all wore lots of hats in the early days. As we’ve grown our business, we have now 62 full-time employees and over 90 part-time when you include like bottling staff and whatnot.

So we’ve grown tremendously. We’ve taken Ken’s responsibilities and we’ve divided them into a number of different people. I am proud to be the President of the company. We have another female, CEO, her name is Hannah. I might have mentioned to her.

We have a lot of women in leadership here at New Riff and that’s always something that I love to talk about because, it’s an upward battle here in the bourbon industry. It’s changing. There are a lot more women in the industry than even 10 years ago when I first came and got involved.

We particularly have a lot of women on staff and that wasn’t intentional, I’ll be honest. We put the right people in the right seats – our Director of Hospitality, our Chief Sales Officer. We looked around and we said, oh my gosh, two thirds of this company is female. This is amazing. That’s something that we’re proud of.

Susan: Fantastic. So what is the future? Are you going to be making something like a big splash with something new? Are you going to continue doing what you do? What’s a little bit of the future?

Mollie:  As we all know, probably everybody listening to this podcast, the industry, the landscape’s changing dramatically right now. Our main goal is to remain independent. It’s harder and harder to do that. To be family owned and independent is capital intensive.  We’re holding on tight. That’s our goal.

We believe that makes our whiskey taste better, so I wouldn’t say that we have a lot of growth plans. We do plan to expand more within Europe and internationally. That’s certainly not been our focus for the first 10 years. Now that’s something on our horizon as the category of American whiskey is growing internationally.

We’re also trying to figure out what the apex of our aging is. As a young distillery, last year we released an 8-year-old bourbon. That’s part of our core offerings at this point.  For our whiskey club, we released some 10-year-old whiskey, but we still don’t know how far whiskey’s going to go.

We think it’s delicious now and still really vivacious and young. So we’re going to taste it at 12 years. We’re going to taste it at 15. That’s going to be an exciting point on the horizon when we feel like we’ve hit its best point. We still don’t know when it will be yet. We just continue really focusing on the culture here internally and makes people feel taken care of, and be seen and heard, and continue to want to come to work here every day in a great place.

Susan: Well, it sounds like it is. Everyone out there in the UK, you definitely can get it here which is exciting.

Mollie: Yes, I would be remiss not to point out that the Whisky Exchange voted our bottled and bond bourbon as the Whisky of the Year 2025. I  had to put a plug in there.

Susan: Yes. Congratulations on that. That’s really great.  They will find links to it on at the Whisky Exchange and then everywhere else.  thank you so much for going through the history and having a chat here.

Mollie: A real pleasure. Please come back. Come see us, Susan, here in Newport again, and I hope to be able to come over and enjoy a dram with you in London at some point soon.

Susan: Yes, definitely. We can’t wait to have you here. So thanks again.

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