Cheers to Boyd and Blair: A Story of Love and Vodka

Eleven years ago, on a cold, dark night, Prentiss Orr was thinking. Orr, who in previous lives had owned Outlook, his own advertising agency, and through the Chamber of Commerce had helped market Pittsburgh, found himself in the middle of the burgeoning brew pub renaissance – at the time, there were some half-dozen in Pittsburgh alone. And he wondered: why aren't there similar liquor distilleries? Small-batch, high-quality, privately owned and operated. Producing something he liked himself. Something like vodka.

"It always puzzled me," Orr says today, in the offices of his Pennsylvania Pure Distilleries, in Glenshaw, north of town, "why just make beer?  And why have to make your margins selling burgers, fries, and fish sandwiches?"

Still thinking, Orr realized that "I was blessed with having launched many products into many markets. I decided that if I had one client, I'd want it to be one that I owned."

Then another cold, dark night in 2003 Barry Young called. A successful UPMC exec with a background in chemistry, Young wanted to do his own thing – some thing, any thing – rather than work for someone, or something, else. "I want to run a company," he told Orr.

"I've had this crazy idea," Orr answered.

Kismet!

It took a couple of years of hard work developing the business model, and finding just the right formula for the product, but by 2005 they were ready.  With a well honed business model, basic ingredients (potatoes, yeast, and water), and Spartan implements (cookers, bottlers, and a new German pot still), they incorporated. Then they found it "incredibly hard," Orr recalls, to raise the money. "Anxiety," he warns, "waiting for an answer, will eat you alive."

But Orr & Young's proverbial ace-in-the-hole was that their product is "sexy," Orr says. "Who doesn't like vodka?"

Family, friends, friends of friends bought in.  Even the Commonwealth, too, which kicked in a $165,000 grant from the First Industries Fund from the Department of Community and Economic Development for value-added agriculture production.  One great point, Orr recalls, is that "nobody ever said, 'are you guys idiots?' The huge obstacle that we feared we weren't seeing just wasn't there. Nobody ever did it before? I was stunned. It seemed so obvious. So right!"

Finally, with $650,000 in hand, they began. "Potatoes?" Orr asks. "They're plentiful here. Water, too. And no additives of any kind. No cheap fillers like rice. No extra flavors. We followed to the letter what we learned at alcohol school: 'quality in, quality out.'"

Staying exclusively with Pennsylvania spuds – the local product is endless, costs little to ship, and, in its dehydrated state, has a superb shelf life -- for natural sweetness and a smooth finish -- "our premise was that we could make a better vodka than what was on the shelf," Orr says.

Every taste test has confirmed it: Pennsylvania Pure beat all the competition.  Some have sworn off all other brands; others have simply given them away. "I could never serve my guests Gray Goose or Stoli after having Boyd & Blair," one savvy satisfied customer proclaimed. "It's the best available today."

Distill waters run deep
Named for Orr & Young's relatives, Boyd & Blair has seen sparkling sales in Pennsylvania -- and New York, Illinois, DC, Ohio, Rhode Island, with more to come. "Our sales are three times ahead of where we'd thought we be," Orr says proudly.

The process, writ small, is the taters are cooked in water, then put into fermentation tanks with yeast. "It's a common process," Orr says, "and natural. Sugar plus yeast equals alcohol, in this case about 12 percent."

They put about 1,000 liters of that stuff into their 1,200-liter pot still. The first distillation takes out the alcohol from the fermented soup. The second distillation creates three phases, beginning with the heads, which Orr likens to liquefied airplane glue. Like most distillers, they toss that. The middle phase, producing the hearts, gives them "alcohol that's pure, clear, and clean," Orr says, "the naturally sweet, good stuff that we keep."

The third phase, called the tails, is musky. They pitch that, too. "We bottle only the hearts," Orr says. "That's very rare. A lot of distillers try to squeeze more good from their tails." Then they do it all over again, for a third distillation, Young smelling and tasting at decisive intervals to control the separation of the heads from the hearts from the tails.

What they wind up with is 95 percent alcohol. That, your quick conversion table tells you, is 190-proof, potent enough to petrify even the most seasoned elbow bender. So they water it down to a mere 80-proof, or 40 percent alcohol, still a singular beverage, just right for a two-drink limit.

Often bottling two or three days a week, Orr & Young hand-fill every bottle, cork 'em, dip the tops in wax, sign and number each one, box 'em up, and ship them out the door. Rolling off the line in mid-'08, within a year they were delivering some 460 cases a month (or 2,500 bottles) -- more when the order book bursts at the seams, which it seems to do every holiday.

It's still just the two of them, plus Rob, their production manager. For those heavy production times, or when Orr is on one of his frequent marketing voyages, they recruit family and friends to work the filling line. One busy morning not so long ago, a half-dozen pals showed up, turned a four-hour shift, and ran nearly 1,000 bottles out the door. Their reward: a bottle apiece, plus a Boyd & Blair baseball cap. "The vibes alone were worth it," one man smiled.

In the end, there's commerce. With luck, there'll be a legacy for the Orr & Young children. But at the very least, Orr says, "we produce something we're really proud of."

Sign to receive Pop City every Wednesday morning.

Abby Mendelson's latest book, End of the Road, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.

Main image: Barry Young (left) and Prentiss Orr with portraits of Boyd and Blair

Photographs copyright Brian Cohen