Well the fortunate aspect of that frustration is the opportunity it creates. My career began in agriculture (which is a big reason that articles like this get me all crabby) and I came about distilling as a value-add agricultural preservation process. Having demanding needs means that I can coordinate with farmers to bring them higher-quality products (over 250 heirloom cider varietals planted in one orchard that went on to establish their own cider brand from the trees; close to 400 in another orchard and entire fields changed over to heirloom varietal corn at three local farms). Because these crops are usually more disease susceptible and often require infrastructural investment (grain cleaners, dryers, gravity bins, etc) and I would otherwise pay market rate, I can pay them the market rate instead of their usual wholesale rate which translates into underwriting those infrastructure costs. They then become significantly more valuable in the local craft market. I can’t even buy those apples I grafted 15 years ago, now!
ETA: Oh, and we totally changed New York state beer in the process! Because of my history of advocacy and direct farmer coordination, I kind of became a public advocate of New York Distillery agricultural via Cornell Cooperative Extension and NOVO Foundation. A group of use were selected to form an industry advisory committee and were tasked with returning barley growing to the region that, at one time, was the US premier barley growing and malting region, but was non-existent as of ca. 2010. A few local farms agreed to pilot a series of malt varietals that would conform to brewer’s and distillers needs (and to a lesser degree bakers). By the time we had those varietals selected and seed grain available there were something like 12 new maltsters (those who convert barley into brewer’s malt) and dozens of farms turning land over to barley production. Now NY state is awash in locally-grown malt and there is a license class with special privileges specifically for brewers that use it.
