Tiff:
When you think of New Zealand, you probably think of extensive green hills and forests full of lush vegetation, but Mark Simmonds, one of the three founders of Broken Shed would also like you to think about the purity that can be achieved in a distilled vodka.
Launched in 2009, Broken Shed has brought the future to vodka drinkers around the globe and shown that with a little New Zealand ingenuity, an amazing liquid can be created from only three ingredients, two of which are water.
We talked to Simmonds about purity of water, whether whey really is the way and how difficult it has been for a New Zealand brand on the global spirit stage.
Thank you for joining us, Mark.

Mark Simmonds:
Pleasure. Thank you.

Tiff:
Now, how did two Americans end up drinking in a rustic shed near Lake Wanaka?

Mark Simmonds:
New Zealand is a pretty common destination for people to holiday in and the two guys, they'd known to each other, but independently, they traveled to New Zealand on sabbaticals with their families, and pretty much fell in love with the pace and ended up moving here. Then obviously, moving to Wanaka and in a small town, they got to know each other and basically, they were there and they had to reinvent themselves. They were in the place they wanted to live and they needed to reinvent themselves and they thought about what they could do on their next stage of their journey.

Tiff:
The important question I think would be what were they drinking?

Mark Simmonds:
Well, they were Americans, I think vodka was right up there. It really was about that. They did look at what they could do. They thought New Zealand was a great land and they could do something with New Zealand. They looked at many different products. But basically, I met them sitting around apres-ski and drinking vodka, and then it was like, "Well, why are we drinking imported vodka?" From that very, very small beginning, that was the burgeoning of the whole idea.

Tiff:
I was about to ask, how did you get involved?

Mark Simmonds:
I had met them a little bit socially and they had the idea. After that discussion and meeting, they thinking about vodka and I a background in the industry. They did a bit of research, a bit of background, started developing ideas and thoughts. Then basically they tapped me on the shoulder and said this is what they're thinking and would I be interested. That's where it came from. Crazy idea, but they had thought about it. They had formed some good ideas and also, they had a very clear idea that they wanted to take a good product back to the US, and that's what got my attention because New Zealand's very small. You won't make a lot of money selling a product like that just in New Zealand solely. But they had the eye on the US market and it seemed like too good of an opportunity to miss.

Tiff:
Now, you have 30 years in the industry. Had either of them been in the spirits or hospitality industry before?

Mark Simmonds:
No, they haven't. They both had successful careers in different areas. They knew mechanics of business and what it was about and they knew how to get things right to run an operation like that. But, yes, I was the only one that had beverage experience. It's a good blend in some ways, because I often do think that a good space to come from with a new product, having the naivety and drive to make something work, as opposed to sometimes in an industry, in a certain narrow form of an industry, you can get a little bit blind to opportunity. You can just think, well, this is how you do it and you follow the same old, same old. The coming together was actually a good creative base because we just approached things with that naivety and it's like, "Why not? Why can't you do this?" We challenged a few things.

Tiff:
What was it about vodka that made them decide to go with that particular spirit? Because they could have done whiskey, they could have done gin. What was it about vodka?

Mark Simmonds:
You do have to say that part of the attraction is the fact that there's no ageing, it's a product that has a reasonably quick time from start of production into the market. But on top of that was just the whole driver that the US is the big market for vodka. No matter what other spirits grow and become popular over time, behind it all, vodka does that continual seven to 8% growth every year, year on year, and the fact that there was enough point of difference because they'd never heard of a New Zealand vodka and they saw the strength in that. It seemed to give them enough space, even though it's a crowded market, it seemed to have enough point of difference.

Tiff:
You've talked about the product going into the US. How has the response in the US actually been to it?

Mark Simmonds:
It's been great. Look, it's a crazy market to get into. I mean, from a Kiwi's point of view, one of the first times I went over there which was basically to sell, it was exciting when I would go into a bar and in a matter of two hours of nice, busy bar and just watching how much vodka was being consumed and the size of the bottles behind the bar and how it was being poured, and I got ecstatic. It was like, "Wow, this high consumption spirit here. This is great."
Then on the flip side, you go to a off premise store and you look at the row upon row up on row of imported and other vodkas on the market and you go, "Wow, this is hugely crowded. This is going to be really hard to break through." But we did have a good point of difference and we had spent the time to craft a good product. We sold basically by cranking the bottle open and letting people taste and we sold and got established simply by getting people to taste and blind taste against their other vodkas of choice, and that's how we won people over.

Tiff:
Now, the US is renowned for having different liquor laws for every state and different hoops that you need to jump through. How difficult has it been to get across the nation, so to speak?

Mark Simmonds:
Look, it is a challenge, and I think from us, we just didn't even really think about country wide. It's just take a targeted state and focus on it and do it properly and establish yourselves and then take the next step. The two partners, they were both based on the East Coast. Connecticut was a home market that we knew, and that's where we went first. Basically, you had the three principles of the business, pounding the streets with vodka in their satchels, walking into every bar and every off premise and just introducing the product and getting people to taste the of product and selling. We did that for quite a few months.
But over that time we started getting a little bit of a following, getting people to drink it, getting people to like it, getting the bartender to select and say, "Right, I'll take some bottles down," and then we had two or three of those in an area and we'd go to a near off premise and say, "Look, we've got people drinking it in your local bars," give them a taste, sell to them, and we worked through a good distributor and import company that worked closely with us and allowed us just sell on that. That's how we got our foot in the door.

Tiff:
Let's talk little bit about the vodka itself. I believe you spent a year in development. Tell us about that.

Mark Simmonds:
Well, I did have years in different beverage from cider, fruit juices, water and wine, but never a spirit. I was new to it. Part of my rider of getting on board and having this idea is that having the undertaking that they would support me to spend the time to develop a premium product. Any product from New Zealand has to be premium. It has to really punch above its weight because we're a small country, we're geographically removed from the rest of the world. If we're going to spend the time and effort to take a product to the rest of the world, it's really got to be a good product.
Mark Simmonds:
I needed that time to look at products to work it all out. Look, it was quite a fun year, but very quickly, I realised there was two things, is that I could make a product, which probably a large percentage of the vodka market would do, which is to make a pretty good product but used an additive of some sort, a softener or a glycerol or something in it, just a little bit, to help smooth the product. Very quickly, tasting a lot of products, I realised that was done in a lot vodkas. There was that route.
Then there was the other route is to persevere and try and produce a product that didn't have any additives in it, and therein was the challenge. Vodka's in a lot of ways, a very simple product, but that's the challenge and because it's so simple is that you can impart not a nice flavour or taste or note to it very, very easily. If you talk people in the industry a lot, one of the hardest products to bottle is water because you can get it wrong very easily. You can impart a flavour or a note to it very easily. Vodka's a bit like that. To do it naturally, when you've got so few components to work through, is actually a bit of a challenge. For a simple product, it actually took me a year to work out a way to do it.

Tiff:
And what ended up being the solution?

Mark Simmonds:
I mean, we played with all sorts of different bases and sources. Obviously you can make vodka from grain, you can make it from sugar cane, which is Australasia and that's fairly big, the islands, molasses. Lots of different bases, lots of different base spirits. We looked at everything and we decided, well, we need a product people like. We're going to base this decision not on us, but on blind tasting. What I would do is prepare a lot of different spirits from our own creations to using bases from other people and just mixing and blending and filtering and trying different charcoals and all sorts of things, and then we would have these Friday sessions where we'd have people in and they'd come round to the shed and it would be very social.
But first thing I'd do, I'd put a piece of paper in their hand and we'd go, "First thing you've got to do is you've got to run down this table of no more than eight products for that week," and we'll ask them specific questions and give me comments. From there, it would just become a social evening. But Monday morning, I'd be sitting down looking at them and I'd go, right, it'd be pointing me in a direction, it'd be pointing out things, there'd be things that I'd think I was tasting and not sure, and then I'd either get evaluations saying, yes, I'm on the right direction, or no, that's not working. That's how I developed it, playing with different things and that's when I started realising that what I was doing with water was having a huge effect and also, every time I changed a component, I had to change the filtration and I'd have to change what I'm doing, but I just started narrowing it down on that basis.

Tiff:
Talk to us about the water. Now, you're using water from two different sites, locations. What is it about those two particular water sources that makes them stand out?

Mark Simmonds:
Again, if you go back to industry norm, if you came up through the industry, you use a base, you're going to blend it back with water and you're probably going to strip that water back so it doesn't have any off flavours, so it doesn't have any complications to the product. But what I thought is, well, what if I leave products in that water? Now, we have some amazing water sources in New Zealand that are old, and so, they're picking up elements out of the ground that they're running through, which give them different attributes.
Now, the problem with that is that you need a product to be shelf stable between sitting in your freezer at minus 20 and sitting on the dashboard of your car at plus 40, C I'm talking here. If you have too many compounds, you have stability issues. But if you manage to control those compounds in your water, if you can balance them, then they impart a flavour, they impart a mouth feel and they impart substance to your product, that's what I found. Then through our tasting process, we found that people loved the distillate that I was using coming from a whey source. It was like, wow, people like that, they find it clean, they like it. Then I started finding that I could craft behind that a background of using different minerals in the water that I could back that distillate in it, it would give it a smoothness with no other fillers.
Then it just became a matter of fine tuning that and then using a little bit of science in university just to check stability and what was happening and trying to evaluate exactly what I was taping and substantiate that with a bit of scientific understanding. Then that's when I realised I was onto something and we were down the path. Using the two sources is about introducing a very specific mineral content that is carefully managed and blending that with another water which has less that supplements it and gives it a nice [inaudible] on the tongue that backs into the whey distillate very nicely.

Tiff:
Going back to 2009 when you were doing this, whey wouldn't have been a common base for vodka at that point. What made you think to move away from grain and experiment with whey?

Mark Simmonds:
I think vodka is historically probably made from the available start source in the country of manufacturers, obviously potatoes, grain, whatever you have. New Zealand has a lot of dairy. New Zealand had been pioneers of developing a whey base. It was always there as an option, and then as I say, through just our blind tastings, it was very strong that people just picked up, they loved the cleanliness of it. We thought, well, what a great source, and it's very New Zealand, it's very different, it's unique. It is a very, very clean source because there are very few other compounds in it. You end up with a very clean product. It made good sense.
Having said that, when we went to the US, we didn't really focus on it as far as our speak when we were talking about the product and basically, going to a bar, talking to people behind the bar and then they would be looking at the bottle, talking about New Zealand and how they'd been or they'd love to go, and then they'd say, "What do you make it from?" I'd go, "Well, we make it from whey." They'd be, "What? Whey? Wow, that's amazing. That's so cool." It was very quickly we just got that response all the time. Pretty much two weeks later, jumped on a plane, came back to New Zealand, rewrote and reprinted all our marketing material and then we're back over again and made whey something out there and foremost in our marketing. It's like, let's speak to it, let's talk about it because they're embracing it. I love that about the American market is that they're a lot more educated on their spirits than the New Zealand market and it was a great country to be able to sell to. Just loved the way that they were open to it and embraced it.

Tiff:
Where does the whey actually come from? Are you collaborating with local dairy farmers?

Mark Simmonds:
Yeah, it's part of a cooperative. Obviously a lot of dairy in New Zealand and as a byproduct of milk production and cheese production, you have whey. This is where New Zealand helped pioneer the development to find a whey and a yeast that will actually ferment that lactose, that milk sugar. What we do now is we utilise that cooperative of farmers and they make it to spec and it's growing in usage all the time.

Tiff:
Tell us a little bit about the distillation. Is it harder or easier to distill with whey than it is with grain maybe?

Mark Simmonds:
A little bit harder as far as the actual fermentation, because it doesn't use a normal yeast. It has a very specific yeast to be able to ferment the lactose and create the ethanol for a start. As far as the distillation goes, the beauty of it is because it is so clean, because it has a high degree of purity as a raw product, that it's actually quite easily to get a good, clean distillate. It's just a three step process and column batch distilled, and that leaves nuances. You don't have to strip out too much. It leaves nuances of the original product in the final product, which is what gives it that point of difference because of that profile.

Tiff:
If someone hasn't tasted a whey vodka before, you mentioned that it tastes very clean, but what else will they notice about the flavour?

Mark Simmonds:
It has a width to it, and it does have a couple of notes to it that are a little bit more specific. You do notice it on the nose a little bit. It's got that little bit of a butterscotch nose delivery, and that note comes through when you first get it on your tongue as well. From there with our product, the full comes through as you start picking up the minerals of the water. A lot of people talk about the Broken Shed being creamy, which is kind of interesting because sometimes I often think they say that because they know it's made out of whey, but that creaminess of that is coming from the whey that you get associated with that creaminess and that's actually a lot drawing on the minerals in the water.

Tiff:
Okay. Now, you are using the tagline, the vodka of tomorrow, which is a very cute pun on the time difference between New Zealand and America, but on a more serious note, do you think that the sustainability of whey vodkas are very much the future?

Mark Simmonds:
I do. To be completely honest, that might not have been a focus or a real thought 10 years ago when we started this journey. But now that obviously we're all thinking about the way that we can minimise our impact, yes, it is a point. I mean, we don't have to plant anything specific. We don't have to tie up land growing a product to produce the whey. We are using a product that otherwise has to be dealt with. We're taking a source that needs to be used, we're converting it into a product without any other environmental draws. What we're working on now is, as a business, as company, we are following that up with bringing more consciously sustainable decision points as far as packaging, as far as any input that we can have an option to able to and have a more sustainable footprint.

Tiff:
How important do you think that is for liquor brands at the moment ...

Mark Simmonds:
I think it's important for any brand.

Tiff:
... having that sustainable element?

Mark Simmonds:
I think it's important for any brand. I think we're all becoming conscious of it as consumers and I think that it's important just to be honest with where you are. I think people appreciate that different products have different challenges to be able to meet what people perceive as sustainability. But first and foremost, what people want to know is that, hand on heart, the people driving that business take it seriously and are doing their best to make changes because I think that's what the individuals are doing, we're all trying to do that, to make informed choices and the right movement and manufacturers have to do the same. I think it's part and parcel of mapping your future.

Tiff:
Now, talk to us a little bit about the filtration.

Mark Simmonds:
The filtration was developed in particular form around the product. I think every vodka manufacturer tends to have their own preferred method and some people make a point about the filtration. I don't think there's anything particularly tricky about it. It's just simply to come up with a methodology that suits your product to make sure you're stripping out anything that you need or what you want out of your product, depending on the makeup of it. There's no skill in it. Now, we just have a procedure to follow which does its job. The key part for us, apart from the distillate, is also the blending of the water, that's the trick for us and that's the part that you just need to keep on top of every batch that you produce.

Tiff:
Now, there's a lot of controversy over whether vodka does have flavour, but you've pointed out that Broken Shed very much does have a subtle flavour to it. Where do you think that comes from more, the water or the whey?

Mark Simmonds:
I actually believe it's very much the two working in conjunction. Whey, as I said, because it's such a clean product, the distillate has nuances of the original product in there, little flavour notes in it, and the water backs it up. It does have a taste profile of its own. I mean, I blend the two waters and taste the two waters before I even bring the distillate together with them and it's very detectable. They both work in conjunction. There are notes to do with the distillate and there are flavour nights that come through from the water. They're both just as important.

Tiff:
You mentioned earlier that a lot of people have mentioned a creaminess to the vodka. Considering that, what cocktails do you believe it works best in?

Mark Simmonds:
I think simple is better. Less is more, I think, when it comes to Broken Shed. You can taste it straight, you can taste it just over ice, you can taste the difference. Simple things that profile that taste profile are the preferred choice as far as I'm concerned. Just simple, nice dry martinis with maybe a twist in it and subtle infusions that just give it another little note of something different. Simple drinks like that are really, I think, where it stands alone.

Tiff:
Does the brand have a signature serve?

Mark Simmonds:
Probably the marketing team would say yes, and I should probably know that. But if somebody asked me, I would say dry martini with a flamed orange twist, that should be our signature serve. That showcases the product and just gives it a nice little flare on the end.

Tiff:
I imagine you've put the vodka in front of a fair number of bartenders over the years. What are some of the more unusual cocktails that they've been able to make with Broken Shed?

Mark Simmonds:
That's an interesting one. One that really caught me off in the early days and it got me on into doing a lot of infusions myself, he had done some infusions and made me a martini base with an infusion and was trying to get me to pick the flavour and I couldn't get it. It was smoked bacon and it was fantastic. A smoked bacon infusion made into a martini. That's what put me down the track of doing infusions and that's why I still love that side of it, more vivacious notes that you can add and have fun with and always changing and always thinking of something new.

Tiff:
Speaking of things that are new, what are you guys concentrating on at the moment?

Mark Simmonds:
Really the business is focused just on growth at this stage. We've got a fantastic team in the USA, and for me, it's just about trying to keep up with the production and grow the business as we get out to a wider and wider field. At the same time, looking at the steps forward and what we touched on before, it's just addressing the sustainability issues and steps that we can take as a business to make a more sustainable and informed choice. Some packaging developments that we're working on, but we do no other products. We're not interested in flavours. We're not interested in gins. We're just sticking to what we do and just keeping and getting it out there to an appreciative market.

Tiff:
Obviously the vodka is available across New Zealand. How far across the US have you managed to get?

Mark Simmonds:
We're in 26 states at the moment, which has really taken off probably in about the last four years. Five, six years ago, we were still in three states. Quite a big growth in the last four or five years. 26 states now and just moving into Florida at the moment. We have some distribution across in Australia and I did do some work in Southeast Asia and Singapore and other markets in the early days. We're just reconnecting with that market at the moment and looking to get back into that market as well. But US is our primary market and that certainly keeps us busy at this stage.

Tiff:
Are you available anywhere else? Europe?

Mark Simmonds:
No, not at the stage in Europe. We did have a little bit of a play in the market, but it was just keep focusing on the US, keeping plugging away at that market. But it is definitely on the agenda. At some stage we will look at getting back into Europe, because there's some interest certainly from Europe and from the UK. I would imagine in the next 18 months to two years we'll probably start entering those markets as well.

Tiff:
What is it that you want people to take from their experience with Broken Shed?

Mark Simmonds:
I think just the fact that it's a product that we've spent a lot of time and effort and that we're proud of. It's a product that I think is just pretty honest, what it is. It's a simple product, but it's good. We spend time and effort to put together to make sure that it's consistent and I think most people that becomes followers of Broken Shed appreciate that, that it comes from a sustainable, good, clean source and there's a business behind it that's just done the right thing as far as keeping it simple and just producing a top quality product hopefully at a approachable price that most people can enjoy.

Tiff:
Excellent. Now, obviously if people want more information on Broken Shed, they can go to your website which is brokenshed.com, or connect with the brand via your socials.

Mark Simmonds:
Absolutely. That's correct. On Instagram, we're available @brokenshed. Any queries, you can get ahold of us directly through there.

Tiff:
Excellent. Well, look, thank you, Mark for taking the time to speak to us today.

Mark Simmonds:
It's a pleasure. Thank you.