When does the romance of the pot still stop making financial sense? For Kris Bohm, who has spent his career designing, installing, and running both batch and continuous systems, the answer comes down to a number and the honesty to act on it.
On this episode of Distillery Nation, I sat down with Kris of Distillery Now Consulting to dig into a debate most of us argue with feeling instead of math. Kris brings both. He walked me through the technical differences making cuts by taste and temperature on a pot still versus flash-extracting ethanol through sieve trays in about two minutes on a column — and then got to the part that matters for anyone signing equipment checks: around 200 to 250 barrels a year, the economics flip. Above that line, an 18-inch column produces the same volume in a quarter of the time at less than half the utility cost.
What struck me most was a story from a tequila operation in Mexico. The batch product cost $20 a liter to make and tasted better. The column product cost $5 and outsold it anyway. The market doesn't always reward the harder road a lesson I've lived myself, having built my identity around a direct-fire pot still before the math pushed me toward contract distilling for volume while keeping special batch releases alive.
Kris was equally direct about sourcing: it isn't a shortcut or a sin. He sourced for three years before releasing his own distillate and told his customers exactly that. Transparency, not method, is what earns trust.
Whether you're sizing your first still or rethinking the one you have, this conversation is full of math worth doing and assumptions worth questioning.
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