June 16, 2024 • 14 mins
In this segment, host Phil Tower welcomes Kerry Lynch, sales director with Shorts Brewing, and Richard Anderson, co-founder of Iron Fish Distillery. Kerry and Richard joined the program to discuss the unique “Made In Michigan partnership with Iron Fish Distillery and Short’s Brewing regarding the return of the limited-release Soft Parade® Vodka. This special release celebrates a collaboration between two of Michigan's top craft beverage brands. The two Michigan companies have combined their expertise to create a unique spirit appealing to vodka enthusiasts and craft beer lovers. Soft Parade® Vodka is infused with strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries, the exact same fruit used in brewing Soft Parade® Beer. The 2024 batch is even more fruit-forward and comes in at 75 proof.
Online: Shorts Brewing
Online: Iron Fish Distillery
Online: Shorts Brewing
Online: Iron Fish Distillery
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
iHeartMedia West Michigan Weekend a public affairsprogram. It's West Michigan Weekend from iHeartRadio.
Very pleased to have you along withus, and you know, I
get excited anytime I'm in studio.I'm Phil Tower by the way, across
whatever iHeartRadio station you happen to belistening to. And don't forget we do
this as a podcast as well afteryou hear it on the radio. It's
(00:26):
at Woodradio dot com and the lefthand side of the page, and we've
got a lot of things, allthose five hundred episodes for you to check
out. And I'm very pleased tobe in studio with Carrie Lynch's sales director
and jack of everything at Short Spruigand also a real honor to be with.
(00:46):
Okay, I'm going to go allfanboy on our listeners here. Richard
Anderson, co founder of Ironfish Distilleryand beautiful Thompsonville, Michigan. Shorts Brewery
is in beautiful bell Air, Michigan, and for full disc I have not
been to either location so and neitherhave I known these guys for a long
(01:07):
time. This is the first timewe've actually met in person. Very excited
because we all know people who knoweach other. So here we are.
And first of all, Carrie,welcome to the program. Thank you so
much for having us. It's goodto be here. Well, it's great
to have you here, especially instudio in Grand Rapids. It's not a
short drive from bell Air, andRichard was wise. You came down from
Thompsonville home for iron Fish, Sowelcome to Grand Rapids. First of all,
(01:32):
Ken, we share with our listenersa little backstory on both of your
amazing made in Michigan companies. Someof the best, most iconic brands that
everybody, a lot of people talkabout, a lot of people are aware
of them. Shorts Beers are allthroughout restaurants in the Greater West Michigan area.
Ironfish products are probably on just aboutany liquor store shelf, including Meyer
(01:55):
stores. And it's a great madein Michigan story. But I'm going to
defer to Carrie first and then Europeon deck Richard. First of all,
backstory for Shorts Brewing. I knowthere's a guy named Joe Shorts involved and
a little bit about just a shortbackstory on the company, how it started
and how you got involved. Yeah, so Joe Short went to Western Michigan
(02:15):
University. He's actually originally from kalKaska, so up by Bellair, Michigan,
went for woodworking and then realized thathe looked like he was about twelve
years old when he was a freshmanin college. So there was no fake
ideas living in Joe Short's life,and he's just a very kind of industrial
arts enterprising kind of person. Sohe went to a homebrew store and got
(02:36):
all the ingredients to make beer himself, and from the first time he did
it, he would tell you thatit was just like getting hit with a
ridiculous bug that then he could notstop. And that's really who Joe is
a person. Once he starts doingsomething, he's going to go in one
thousand percent on it until he's perfectedit. So it really just started to
consume his life and he ended updropping out of college when he was twenty,
started apprenticing at different breweries and thenopen up Shorts Brewing up in Bellair,
(03:00):
Michigan, in a one hundred yearold hardware store in two thousand and
four. So we're actually celebrating twentyyears. How cool, which is wild
and crazy. I always say thatworking for Joe Short is both the best
thing that's ever happened to be andalso a really tricky thing for your ego,
because man if I was doing whathe was doing when I was twenty
two, you know, like justwriting a business plan and having a mission
(03:21):
statement that still hangs up in ourpub and makes us all feel really inspired
to do the things that we're doing. It's a really impressive thing. And
also to you know, be nowMichigan's largest independent craft brewery in a town
of bell Air is a ton ofone thousand people, you know, in
our pub can seat three hundred andfifty. We've got the production facility over
in Nowgrapids. Now we're in sevendifferent states, so we've kind of coming
up on eight. Actually eight nowI have to correct myself because we just
(03:43):
opened up Kentucky. Yeah. Soit's been a really kind of wild ride
and also fun to see what havinga pub and having that kind of environment
can do for a town. Bellairis now this like lovely thriving community.
We've got some really great things goingon. Yeah, and now you must
said I'm sorry to interrupt. Nowthat's okay from people all the time,
and you as well Richard. Theonly reason we're here is because so many
people told us to come to Shorts. Yeah, yeah, and we had
(04:05):
to meet this Joe Short guy.We had to see kind of the whole
story here. And there's another storydeveloping in this which I hope our listeners
are grasping onto, which is itdoesn't matter. You don't have to be
in Grand Rapids or in Arbor orDetroit or Lansing to have a business success
story. Absolutely you can do itin a tiny northern Michigan town and be
(04:25):
just a major force in the Midwest. That's such a cool story. And
Joe Short, I just got toask you before we turned to Richard with
Ironfish, is Joe as passionate nowtwenty four years later as he was,
or twenty six years later as itwas then, maybe more so? I
actually would say, Yeah, theShorts ethosis love where you live and love
(04:46):
what you do, and I thinkthat that kind of ties into all of
that. But yeah, we justdid our twentieth anniversary celebration last weekend and
Joe Short was the person, youknow, setting up all of our jockey
boxes to have beer available in multiplelocations. He also has a country Western
band that played at the festival.Yeah, he is incredibly involved. You'll
still see him at like Michigan BrewersGuild festivals. He's very very much still
(05:10):
intrinsically a part of everything that wedo, and I think that that makes
all of us. We're there.I've been there actually for eight years now,
and I have no intention of goinganywhere else. I love it very
much. Well, and Richard,you are co founder with Ironfish Distillery and
beautiful Thompsonville, Michigan. For thosewho don't know where Thompsonville is, it's
right next to Crystal Mountain, literallyjust a little bit north there, right,
(05:32):
great neighbors, unbelievable neighbors. Yeah, and Richard Anderson, co founder
with Ironfish Distillery. You guys havebeen around for a while. Give us
again a short backstory because the reasonyou two are in the studio with me
for the segment of West Michigan Weekendis I have a really cool collaboration that's
happened again for the second year ina row. It's actually a vodka,
(05:54):
a spirits collaboration called Soft Parade Vodka, which is really cool and we'll talk
more about that. It's already outnow. As we're talking here in mid
May. But Richard Anderson, thebackstory on Ironfish distill rere, Well,
you know, we've got the halflife, maybe not even quite half life
of shorts. Were coming into oureighth year. We came into this not
(06:16):
as twenty year olds, but wecame into this with a bunch of unrelated
decisions as folks that were heading intoour retirement. And we my brother and
nobody when they were planning their retirement, it would it would have been heresy
to say, well, you know, it's actually going to involve owning a
distillery on a farm. So thereare a lot of unrelated decisions that came
(06:41):
together. One is that my wife'sfamily is from Beulah area in Frankfurt,
so vacation time was that family region. My brother in law and sister in
law, we're on the Betsy Riverand going to their camp and their cabin
and the Betsy River required driving downthe dirt road. And on the dirt
road was a one hundred and twentyyear old farm that was abandoned and it
(07:06):
was abandoned for about ten years fromtwenty to twenty ten. And my brother
in law actually just wanted to drivea tractor around on the weekend and bought
the farm, and that became await a minute, Richard, we just
want to say for our listening onit, and that's the good kind of
bought it. Buying the farm,that's the good kind. And in fact,
(07:26):
actually he just wanted to drive atractor around on weekends off and so
that became a real topic of thefamily. Are we what is David Hide
going to do with this farm?And unrelated to all of that, Sarah,
my wife, threw a surprise birthdayparty for me, and the present
(07:46):
included a ticket to fly to Islaof Scotland to tour distilleries. And my
brother in laws, including David,who owned the farm, went along and
we all had this passion for Scotchand forpeded scotches. On the island of
Island in the middle of Ilah,we came across a farm distillery and I
jokingly turned to my brother in lawin twenty thirteen twenty early twenty fourteen and
(08:09):
said, David, I, howabout if we put our retirements together and
turn your abandoned farm into a farmdistillery. This reminds me of of your
farm in Michigan. I was kidding, but he turned to me and goes,
that is a hell of an idea. And my third brother in law,
who was along the trip, said, yeah, you guys should do
that. That seems like a perfectperfect wait wait a minute, wait a
(08:31):
minute, wait a minute. Listenevery listeners asking how much Scotch was involved
at that point. We were.We were deep into it, man,
We were deep in fact. Actually, flying back, I was kind of
you know, straightening out and flyingright as my dad would say, and
I thought, this doesn't make anysense. There's no way this is going
to happen. So I actually whenI first got home, I didn't even
tell my wife Sarah about it.But my brother in law called me about
(08:54):
three four days after after the tripand says, hey, I think I
found the still for our farm distillery. The lucky thing is that he had
a chemistry and biology background. Hehad doing home brewing and winemaking. We
had a vision of bringing back thisabandoned farm. We wanted to do it
as a farm distillery, not adistillery in a city. We wanted to
(09:16):
wrap our retirement around a learning journeyabout how could we how could this farm
never be abandoned again? And thatvision really attracted some unbelievably skilled people in
the industry. And today and forthe last five seven years, we've had
one hundred and fifty thousand people comingto visit our farm and it's grown as
(09:37):
quite a large brand in Michigan.But we never take any of that for
granted, because you know, it'sreally around our values, our commitment to
our employees and the communities that theylive in. That is a wonderful story.
Both of the stories are amazing andjust real quickly before we spent our
remaining two or three minutes talking aboutthe wonderful soft Parade release, which you
(09:58):
just had a pre release party forthat in the latter part of April.
We're talking here in the middle part, mid to latter part of May.
And this beautiful product should be availablethroughout wherever, Okay, wherever you get
your spirits, and I did wantto mention you have it at Ironfish in
(10:18):
Thompsonville. A lot of people rightnow in May are already planning where they're
going to go in northern Michigan,in the in the you know, here
in the Greater Grand Rapids West Michiganarea, and we're all hurt all around
the world on iHeartRadio. So peoplewho've never been to Northern Michigan, you're
listening out state. Oh my goodness, Gully, you need to go to
(10:39):
northern Michigan in the summertime and inshorts brewing bel Air is another just beautiful
area. You guys have you havea brewery, but then you also have
it's not a tasting room. Whatdo you call it, Carrie, Well,
we have both the pub and belAir O. The pub, yeah,
so that's the original seven barrel breweryis there, and that's a full
restaurant as we well, really incrediblefood. You have to get the pretzels
(11:01):
if you go, just trust me. But then we also have over in
elk Rapids now at the production facility. There's a full tasting room over there
as well. We usually bring infood trucks, some snacks and whatnot.
But both places will also have livemusic, all kinds of fun, beautiful
things. Not to mention the splendorof all the water of Northern Michigan.
Absolutely love it so Soft Parade.This is the second year. This is
(11:24):
a This is a vodka infused withreal fruit. The fruit came from from
Soft Parried. The beer yeah,so Soft Prey the beer, one of
Joe Schwort's original beers him taking freshstrawberry, blueberry, BlackBerry, and raspberry
pure and putting that into a beerto kind of give people sort of something
similar to a wine drinking experience,but in beer form, and really playing
(11:45):
around with that so that it willstill kind of dry, which is where
the wheat and rye come in there, which was also things that we kind
of tasked Ironfish with doing on theirside of it, and for us,
when we considered anything with some sortof Spirits collaboration, there's no other choice
for Shorts than Ironfish. You know, when I hear Richard tell the story
about Ironfish coming to be what theyare, it feels so similar. There's
so many things that just feel kindof aligned. And again difference between doing
(12:07):
it when you're twenty and doing itwhen you're tired, but still coming from
that same place of like caring aboutthe community, wanting to, you know,
help the places that you love thrivereally meant a lot to us.
All I want to real quickly mentionShortsbrewing dot com because you're hearing us talk
about Shorts bring you got to checkit out. As you're hearing us on
the radio and Ironfishdistillery dot Com bothopen great places for destinations and just great
(12:31):
Michigan business small business success stories,really wonderful success stories. Richard, you
were going to say something before,I won't run out of time. I
want to give you a chance tosay no. I just you know,
I think when you're in the craftbeverage industry, you quickly learn who's really
serious about their craft, serious abouttheir community. And it was such an
(12:52):
honor to be approached by Shortz Brewingto take their iconic and belove your brand
and turn it into vodka. Westrive really hard to execute that in the
best way possible, and it's thebest way now to bring in spring.
There's nothing like Account's cocktail, alittle strawberry muddled down to the bottom,
sitting on your patio having a SawtParaye vodka cocktail, and if you want,
(13:16):
throw a little Saft Paraded shandy asa bubbly on top of the cocktail.
Now we're talking pink drink, youknow, pink drink. That's the
right thing for may yeah, andjust it's okay for men as well too.
But most importantly you're going to haveto do for me because it's going
to be gone. It'll be gone, Yeah, it'll be gone. And
by the way, this just happenedseveral weeks ago, but Richard and company,
(13:39):
you do a wonderful Derby party DerbyWeekend at Ironfish where they really race
horses up the road in Thompsonville.I have yet to see this. I
know that because you were telling myfriend Amy and Gonzo for Behind the Mitten
and Carrie, let's do a wholesegment on shorts as well in Bell Hair.
Let's make that happen. Yeah,you just got to come visit.
That's the rule. Mary Lynch,a sales director for Shorts Brewing Shortsbrewing dot
(14:03):
com, and Richard Anderson, theco founder of Ironfish Distillery in studio with
us. And of course this marriageis soft Paraye vodka and it's just wonderful
vodka confused with real fruit from ofcourse soft prayed beer from Shorts Brewing.
They've been our guest in this segmentof West Michigan Weekend. Isn't Michigan amazing?
(14:24):
This is just all happening here.iHeartMedia. West Michigan Weekend a public affairs program
iHeartMedia West Michigan Weekend a public affairsprogram. It's West Michigan Weekend from iHeartRadio.
Very pleased to have you along withus, and you know, I
get excited anytime I'm in studio.I'm Phil Tower by the way, across
whatever iHeartRadio station you happen to belistening to. And don't forget we do
this as a podcast as well afteryou hear it on the radio. It's
(00:26):
at Woodradio dot com and the lefthand side of the page, and we've
got a lot of things, allthose five hundred episodes for you to check
out. And I'm very pleased tobe in studio with Carrie Lynch's sales director
and jack of everything at Short Spruigand also a real honor to be with.
(00:46):
Okay, I'm going to go allfanboy on our listeners here. Richard
Anderson, co founder of Ironfish Distilleryand beautiful Thompsonville, Michigan. Shorts Brewery
is in beautiful bell Air, Michigan, and for full disc I have not
been to either location so and neitherhave I known these guys for a long
(01:07):
time. This is the first timewe've actually met in person. Very excited
because we all know people who knoweach other. So here we are.
And first of all, Carrie,welcome to the program. Thank you so
much for having us. It's goodto be here. Well, it's great
to have you here, especially instudio in Grand Rapids. It's not a
short drive from bell Air, andRichard was wise. You came down from
Thompsonville home for iron Fish, Sowelcome to Grand Rapids. First of all,
(01:32):
Ken, we share with our listenersa little backstory on both of your
amazing made in Michigan companies. Someof the best, most iconic brands that
everybody, a lot of people talkabout, a lot of people are aware
of them. Shorts Beers are allthroughout restaurants in the Greater West Michigan area.
Ironfish products are probably on just aboutany liquor store shelf, including Meyer
(01:55):
stores. And it's a great madein Michigan story. But I'm going to
defer to Carrie first and then Europeon deck Richard. First of all,
backstory for Shorts Brewing. I knowthere's a guy named Joe Shorts involved and
a little bit about just a shortbackstory on the company, how it started
and how you got involved. Yeah, so Joe Short went to Western Michigan
(02:15):
University. He's actually originally from kalKaska, so up by Bellair, Michigan,
went for woodworking and then realized thathe looked like he was about twelve
years old when he was a freshmanin college. So there was no fake
ideas living in Joe Short's life,and he's just a very kind of industrial
arts enterprising kind of person. Sohe went to a homebrew store and got
(02:36):
all the ingredients to make beer himself, and from the first time he did
it, he would tell you thatit was just like getting hit with a
ridiculous bug that then he could notstop. And that's really who Joe is
a person. Once he starts doingsomething, he's going to go in one
thousand percent on it until he's perfectedit. So it really just started to
consume his life and he ended updropping out of college when he was twenty,
started apprenticing at different breweries and thenopen up Shorts Brewing up in Bellair,
(03:00):
Michigan, in a one hundred yearold hardware store in two thousand and
four. So we're actually celebrating twentyyears. How cool, which is wild
and crazy. I always say thatworking for Joe Short is both the best
thing that's ever happened to be andalso a really tricky thing for your ego,
because man if I was doing whathe was doing when I was twenty
two, you know, like justwriting a business plan and having a mission
(03:21):
statement that still hangs up in ourpub and makes us all feel really inspired
to do the things that we're doing. It's a really impressive thing. And
also to you know, be nowMichigan's largest independent craft brewery in a town
of bell Air is a ton ofone thousand people, you know, in
our pub can seat three hundred andfifty. We've got the production facility over
in Nowgrapids. Now we're in sevendifferent states, so we've kind of coming
up on eight. Actually eight nowI have to correct myself because we just
(03:43):
opened up Kentucky. Yeah. Soit's been a really kind of wild ride
and also fun to see what havinga pub and having that kind of environment
can do for a town. Bellairis now this like lovely thriving community.
We've got some really great things goingon. Yeah, and now you must
said I'm sorry to interrupt. Nowthat's okay from people all the time,
and you as well Richard. Theonly reason we're here is because so many
people told us to come to Shorts. Yeah, yeah, and we had
(04:05):
to meet this Joe Short guy.We had to see kind of the whole
story here. And there's another storydeveloping in this which I hope our listeners
are grasping onto, which is itdoesn't matter. You don't have to be
in Grand Rapids or in Arbor orDetroit or Lansing to have a business success
story. Absolutely you can do itin a tiny northern Michigan town and be
(04:25):
just a major force in the Midwest. That's such a cool story. And
Joe Short, I just got toask you before we turned to Richard with
Ironfish, is Joe as passionate nowtwenty four years later as he was,
or twenty six years later as itwas then, maybe more so? I
actually would say, Yeah, theShorts ethosis love where you live and love
(04:46):
what you do, and I thinkthat that kind of ties into all of
that. But yeah, we justdid our twentieth anniversary celebration last weekend and
Joe Short was the person, youknow, setting up all of our jockey
boxes to have beer available in multiplelocations. He also has a country Western
band that played at the festival.Yeah, he is incredibly involved. You'll
still see him at like Michigan BrewersGuild festivals. He's very very much still
(05:10):
intrinsically a part of everything that wedo, and I think that that makes
all of us. We're there.I've been there actually for eight years now,
and I have no intention of goinganywhere else. I love it very
much. Well, and Richard,you are co founder with Ironfish Distillery and
beautiful Thompsonville, Michigan. For thosewho don't know where Thompsonville is, it's
right next to Crystal Mountain, literallyjust a little bit north there, right,
(05:32):
great neighbors, unbelievable neighbors. Yeah, and Richard Anderson, co founder
with Ironfish Distillery. You guys havebeen around for a while. Give us
again a short backstory because the reasonyou two are in the studio with me
for the segment of West Michigan Weekendis I have a really cool collaboration that's
happened again for the second year ina row. It's actually a vodka,
(05:54):
a spirits collaboration called Soft Parade Vodka, which is really cool and we'll talk
more about that. It's already outnow. As we're talking here in mid
May. But Richard Anderson, thebackstory on Ironfish distill rere, Well,
you know, we've got the halflife, maybe not even quite half life
of shorts. Were coming into oureighth year. We came into this not
(06:16):
as twenty year olds, but wecame into this with a bunch of unrelated
decisions as folks that were heading intoour retirement. And we my brother and
nobody when they were planning their retirement, it would it would have been heresy
to say, well, you know, it's actually going to involve owning a
distillery on a farm. So thereare a lot of unrelated decisions that came
(06:41):
together. One is that my wife'sfamily is from Beulah area in Frankfurt,
so vacation time was that family region. My brother in law and sister in
law, we're on the Betsy Riverand going to their camp and their cabin
and the Betsy River required driving downthe dirt road. And on the dirt
road was a one hundred and twentyyear old farm that was abandoned and it
(07:06):
was abandoned for about ten years fromtwenty to twenty ten. And my brother
in law actually just wanted to drivea tractor around on the weekend and bought
the farm, and that became await a minute, Richard, we just
want to say for our listening onit, and that's the good kind of
bought it. Buying the farm,that's the good kind. And in fact,
(07:26):
actually he just wanted to drive atractor around on weekends off and so
that became a real topic of thefamily. Are we what is David Hide
going to do with this farm?And unrelated to all of that, Sarah,
my wife, threw a surprise birthdayparty for me, and the present
(07:46):
included a ticket to fly to Islaof Scotland to tour distilleries. And my
brother in laws, including David,who owned the farm, went along and
we all had this passion for Scotchand forpeded scotches. On the island of
Island in the middle of Ilah,we came across a farm distillery and I
jokingly turned to my brother in lawin twenty thirteen twenty early twenty fourteen and
(08:09):
said, David, I, howabout if we put our retirements together and
turn your abandoned farm into a farmdistillery. This reminds me of of your
farm in Michigan. I was kidding, but he turned to me and goes,
that is a hell of an idea. And my third brother in law,
who was along the trip, said, yeah, you guys should do
that. That seems like a perfectperfect wait wait a minute, wait a
(08:31):
minute, wait a minute. Listenevery listeners asking how much Scotch was involved
at that point. We were.We were deep into it, man,
We were deep in fact. Actually, flying back, I was kind of
you know, straightening out and flyingright as my dad would say, and
I thought, this doesn't make anysense. There's no way this is going
to happen. So I actually whenI first got home, I didn't even
tell my wife Sarah about it.But my brother in law called me about
(08:54):
three four days after after the tripand says, hey, I think I
found the still for our farm distillery. The lucky thing is that he had
a chemistry and biology background. Hehad doing home brewing and winemaking. We
had a vision of bringing back thisabandoned farm. We wanted to do it
as a farm distillery, not adistillery in a city. We wanted to
(09:16):
wrap our retirement around a learning journeyabout how could we how could this farm
never be abandoned again? And thatvision really attracted some unbelievably skilled people in
the industry. And today and forthe last five seven years, we've had
one hundred and fifty thousand people comingto visit our farm and it's grown as
(09:37):
quite a large brand in Michigan.But we never take any of that for
granted, because you know, it'sreally around our values, our commitment to
our employees and the communities that theylive in. That is a wonderful story.
Both of the stories are amazing andjust real quickly before we spent our
remaining two or three minutes talking aboutthe wonderful soft Parade release, which you
(09:58):
just had a pre release party forthat in the latter part of April.
We're talking here in the middle part, mid to latter part of May.
And this beautiful product should be availablethroughout wherever, Okay, wherever you get
your spirits, and I did wantto mention you have it at Ironfish in
(10:18):
Thompsonville. A lot of people rightnow in May are already planning where they're
going to go in northern Michigan,in the in the you know, here
in the Greater Grand Rapids West Michiganarea, and we're all hurt all around
the world on iHeartRadio. So peoplewho've never been to Northern Michigan, you're
listening out state. Oh my goodness, Gully, you need to go to
(10:39):
northern Michigan in the summertime and inshorts brewing bel Air is another just beautiful
area. You guys have you havea brewery, but then you also have
it's not a tasting room. Whatdo you call it, Carrie, Well,
we have both the pub and belAir O. The pub, yeah,
so that's the original seven barrel breweryis there, and that's a full
restaurant as we well, really incrediblefood. You have to get the pretzels
(11:01):
if you go, just trust me. But then we also have over in
elk Rapids now at the production facility. There's a full tasting room over there
as well. We usually bring infood trucks, some snacks and whatnot.
But both places will also have livemusic, all kinds of fun, beautiful
things. Not to mention the splendorof all the water of Northern Michigan.
Absolutely love it so Soft Parade.This is the second year. This is
(11:24):
a This is a vodka infused withreal fruit. The fruit came from from
Soft Parried. The beer yeah,so Soft Prey the beer, one of
Joe Schwort's original beers him taking freshstrawberry, blueberry, BlackBerry, and raspberry
pure and putting that into a beerto kind of give people sort of something
similar to a wine drinking experience,but in beer form, and really playing
(11:45):
around with that so that it willstill kind of dry, which is where
the wheat and rye come in there, which was also things that we kind
of tasked Ironfish with doing on theirside of it, and for us,
when we considered anything with some sortof Spirits collaboration, there's no other choice
for Shorts than Ironfish. You know, when I hear Richard tell the story
about Ironfish coming to be what theyare, it feels so similar. There's
so many things that just feel kindof aligned. And again difference between doing
(12:07):
it when you're twenty and doing itwhen you're tired, but still coming from
that same place of like caring aboutthe community, wanting to, you know,
help the places that you love thrivereally meant a lot to us.
All I want to real quickly mentionShortsbrewing dot com because you're hearing us talk
about Shorts bring you got to checkit out. As you're hearing us on
the radio and Ironfishdistillery dot Com bothopen great places for destinations and just great
(12:31):
Michigan business small business success stories,really wonderful success stories. Richard, you
were going to say something before,I won't run out of time. I
want to give you a chance tosay no. I just you know,
I think when you're in the craftbeverage industry, you quickly learn who's really
serious about their craft, serious abouttheir community. And it was such an
(12:52):
honor to be approached by Shortz Brewingto take their iconic and belove your brand
and turn it into vodka. Westrive really hard to execute that in the
best way possible, and it's thebest way now to bring in spring.
There's nothing like Account's cocktail, alittle strawberry muddled down to the bottom,
sitting on your patio having a SawtParaye vodka cocktail, and if you want,
(13:16):
throw a little Saft Paraded shandy asa bubbly on top of the cocktail.
Now we're talking pink drink, youknow, pink drink. That's the
right thing for may yeah, andjust it's okay for men as well too.
But most importantly you're going to haveto do for me because it's going
to be gone. It'll be gone, Yeah, it'll be gone. And
by the way, this just happenedseveral weeks ago, but Richard and company,
(13:39):
you do a wonderful Derby party DerbyWeekend at Ironfish where they really race
horses up the road in Thompsonville.I have yet to see this. I
know that because you were telling myfriend Amy and Gonzo for Behind the Mitten
and Carrie, let's do a wholesegment on shorts as well in Bell Hair.
Let's make that happen. Yeah,you just got to come visit.
That's the rule. Mary Lynch,a sales director for Shorts Brewing Shortsbrewing dot
(14:03):
com, and Richard Anderson, theco founder of Ironfish Distillery in studio with
us. And of course this marriageis soft Paraye vodka and it's just wonderful
vodka confused with real fruit from ofcourse soft prayed beer from Shorts Brewing.
They've been our guest in this segmentof West Michigan Weekend. Isn't Michigan amazing?
(14:24):
This is just all happening here.iHeartMedia. West Michigan Weekend a public affairs program
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