AiR’s plan to become Ottawa’s biggest whisky maker

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Pierre Mantha is the proud owner of two new copper-pot stills that cost him around $400,000 a piece.

And he has plans to buy two more of the 6,000-litre behemoths, which were handmade in Chicago.

There appears to be no expense spared as he stands inside his massive new $10-million facility in Hawkesbury. Mantha says if executes his vision, the four stills will make Artist in Residence Distillerie, or AiR as he abbreviates it, the largest distillery in the Ottawa area, cranking out 4,000 barrels of whisky, each containing 200 litres, each year.

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At that point, in terms of output, the new facility will surpass AiR’s slightly smaller distillery in Gatineau, which has had gin-making at its core since AiR was founded in 2017, although the comparison is essentially whisky-versus-gin.

More immediately, however, Mantha hopes the Hawkesbury complex will help fulfill his long-held goal to break into Ontario’s liquor market.

He got AiR’s foot in the door in October when he delivered its inaugural cases of AiR’s Mantha-branded smoked maple whisky to about 50 LCBOs within an hour’s drive of Ottawa.

If he can hit sales targets over the next year, his newest product will be more than merely a local offering and hit shelves at more than 200 LCBOs across the province.

Preliminary sales figures have been encouraging, Mantha says. “We’re selling out at some LCBOs. I thought it was going to be tougher,” he says. He even has another three more products — a blueberry-flavoured vodka, a cucumber-flavoured gin and a coffee-flavoured whisky — that he hopes to launch in Ontario over the next year, pending the LCBO’s approval.

But even if Mantha is pleased to have reached his big milestone this fall, he is also candid that it’s been a rough slog, hampered by delays, rising costs and other pressures.

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“It’s been a shit show,” he says. “This is tough. If I had known, I would have waited.”

Other headwinds in the alcohol business at large challenge Mantha. Booze sales are down in general in Canada and,  indeed, sobriety in some circles is increasingly trendy. The latest Canadian guidelines for alcohol consumption, released in 2023, recommend a weekly maximum of just two drinks, sharply down from the 2011 recommendations of 10 drinks a week for women and 15 drinks for men.

But Mantha, who committed years ago to expanding into Hawkesbury, is undeterred.

“It’s going to be a tough business for the distilleries for the next five years,” he acknowledges.

“I make a lot of mistakes. I learn from it and I adjust and I move on.”

***

In his three decades as an entrepreneur, Mantha has never been afraid to think big.

Before spirits caught his fancy less than a decade ago, the 57-year-old Aylmer resident made his fortune as a trucking magnate.

The Gatineau-raised son of a mechanic has been in the trucking business since the early 1990s, eventually establishing the Hino Gatineau dealership group that specializes in the sales and service of commercial transport trucks. In 2013, he founded Mantha Corp., which includes a leasing company, a holding company, and three truck dealerships in Gatineau and Ottawa.

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In short, Mantha is a serial entrepreneur who got into distilling following previous successes. That’s a common story in Ottawa and beyond, not only for the likes of Ryan Reynolds (Aviation Gin) or Dan Aykroyd (Crystal Head Vodka). John Criswick, the founder and CEO of Top Shelf Distillers in Perth, made a fortune in the late 1990s from his tech startup. Before Omid McDonald founded Dairy Distilleries in Almonte (the maker of Vodkow), his previous startups ranged from medical devices to software for DJs.

For Mantha, Artist in Residence was going to be just a side hustle.

“It was supposed to be a little project,” he says, if you can say that of a business that Mantha launched with the help of $700,000 in combined loans from Investissement Quebec and the federal government’s Quebec Economic Development Program.

But Mantha’s ambitions grew. Now that he’s expanded into Ontario, he also wants to get into the booze business in the U.S.

“I like to build stuff. I like to create,” he says. “This is the rush. I live this 24 hours a day.”

Mantha says that launching AiR in Quebec went smoothly. But in recent months, he was “getting beat up” while he got up and running in Hawkesbury, a francophone town of not quite 11,000 people 100-km east of Ottawa.

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Mantha is several months behind the schedule he had set for himself, and several million dollars ahead in terms of the money he had expected to spend. While he has $3 million worth of shiny new equipment in his Tupper Road facility, “everything broke… we’re running it at 50 per cent because it’s missing parts,” he says.

However, Mantha looks past his setbacks. He imagines operations in Hawkesbury that involve distilling using local corn and water. He hopes to open a restaurant and a boutique liquor store on his property several years from now, to take advantage of Hawkesbury’s location midway between Ottawa and Montreal. “I want people to have experiences in three years,” he says.

Hawkesbury Mayor Robert Lefebvre has faith in Mantha, calling him “quite the entrepreneur and visionary.”

Lefebvre says he came away impressed after touring Mantha’s operations in Gatineau. “He has a proven track record. Someone of his calibre and of his enthusiasm coming into Hawkesbury is always welcome.”

Meanwhile in Quebec, sales of gin are down 30 per cent, says Mantha. While he once had 40 AiR products in Société des alcools du Québec stores (the Quebec equivalent to the LCBO), he now has only five.

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“That’s hurting me, says Mantha. “The hype for gin is over. If I would have known this, I would have put this on hold.”

Mantha’s dream is to make 4,000 barrels of whisky a year in Hawkesbury, although that will require him to buy two more pot stills, which would cost him another $800,000. It’s no small investment for someone who calls himself “cash-broke.”

“I gotta wait a couple of years to add the next two,” Mantha says. “These things cost a hell of a lot of money.”

The Hawkesbury facility will also need several more buildings, simply to store barrels. If sales pick up, Mantha says he might need a new warehouse each year.

Mantha’s high-volume dreams of making 4,000 barrels annually dwarf the whisky outputs of other established distilleries in the Ottawa area, which measure their outputs in the hundreds of barrels.

Dunrobin Distilleries in Vankleek Hill, which like AiR launched in 2017, has a 2,000-litre still and plans to add a second, larger still in the next year as it grows, says its CEO and co-founder Adrian Spitzer. It currently has about 600 whisky barrels in storage and will produce about 150 to 200 barrels in the next 12 months.

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Dunrobin also has a 100-litre still for “micro-production runs and recipe development,” and a “mini” still, also for recipe development, which can produce five-litre test samples, Spitzer says.

In Perth, Top Shelf Distillers produces about 500 barrels a year of its Rideau Whisky, which this year won a platinum award in its category in the U.S.-based SIP Awards. Top Shelf is aiming to produce 1,500 barrels per year by the end of 2025, says its founder Criswick.

Mantha is well aware that Canada’s health authorities frown more these days on alcohol. His reaction? “I don’t encourage people to drink,” he says. “There’s always going to be alcohol. I think it’s for relaxing Friday night. Enjoy it and don’t abuse it. That’s what I do.”

He also knows that alcohol sales are trending down, although he says that whisky sales are more stable than those of other spirits.

But he’s not kidding himself when it comes to the difficulty of what he wants to achieve. He even makes a dire prediction. Mantha thinks that a large number, perhaps 30 per cent or more, of the smaller distilleries in Ontario and Quebec are going to close in the next few years.

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“It’s tough. It’s not sustainable,” he says. “You can’t live on a small distillery. You got to be kind of big. You need volume.”

Could AiR collapse too? “It could be me,” Mantha says. “Maybe I’m in denial and I’m not going to survive.”

But he’s a long way from throwing in the towel.

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Smoked maple whisky is AiR’s first entry into the Ontario market for several reasons.

First of all, Ontario drinkers buy more whisky than gin, by a factor of seven to one, according to Statistics Canada.

(Gin is, relatively speaking, a quicker turnaround product for a distillery, while whisky takes at least three years to make. That explains why many distilleries, like AiR, start by making gin but have whisky-making in mind for later.)

Second, Mantha says AiR needed to offer something unique rather than go toe-to-toe immediately with the big brands of whisky-making.

“If I just do normal whisky, I’m not going to win. You gotta stand out,” he says. “A Jack Daniels guy is a Jack Daniels guy. You’re not going to change him.”

That said, Mantha has plans to make a regular whisky down the road, which will be branded Kilinger. That name, he says, is entirely made up and his hope was to evoke an “aggressive, old-school, renegade” association for a $35 bottle that would appeal to whisky enthusiasts.

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Mantha’s smoked maple whisky began selling this month at selected LCBO stores, priced at $35 for each of its distinctively ribbed, retro bottles.

Smoked maple whisky, made from a consultant’s recipe of whisky, maple syrup and a smoke extract, might not win over whisky purists, Mantha conceded. “But if you like maple, a little bit of sweet, a little bit of smoke, put it on ice. You’re going to love it,” he says.

Mantha also wants to diversify so that he’s not just selling bottles of spirits at liquor stores but also canned beverages in supermarkets, everything from energy drinks to mocktails to sodas.

It might seem like Mantha is trying to conquer the beverage world, but he sees having a multitude of products as a practical matter of having options to reach different groups of thirsty people.

“The reason why is you can’t have one customer. What if the LCBO goes on strike?” Mantha says.

Despite the setbacks during AiR’s Hawkesbury expansion, Mantha believes that in two or three years, he will break even, or even make money. When that happens, more ambitious developments will follow.

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Indeed, if the Hawkesbury distillery proves that his business model works, he would like to secure some investors to help power his dreams, he says.

“I see the potential of this business model to explode,” he says. Further down the road, Mantha plans to open a facility in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he has already bought land.

“When I make money, I put shovels (in the ground) in Pennsylvania,” he says.

His goal is to have his own distribution for his spirits, which might prove to be the easiest expansion of all: he already has the trucks.

Of course, he might hit snags. But then, Mantha says: ‘I’m a hustler. I’ll make it work.”

phum@postmedia.com

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