Gatineau craft gin distillery wants to bring spirits to the masses

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In a cluster of massive industrial buildings nestled between Gatineau’s executive airport and the Autoroute 50, Pierre Mantha is distilling his boldest ambitions yet.

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His business, Artist in Residence Distillerie, processes spring water from 90 metres below its property and corn from fields around the airport through two massive, gleaming copper pot stills. When all is said and bottled, Artist in Residence, or AiR as Mantha abbreviates it, has 10 kinds of flavoured gin, four kinds of vodka and eight liqueurs to stock its shelves and sell through Quebec’s liquor board, the Société des alcools du Quebec, or SAQ.

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Launched not even five years ago, AiR is among the top sellers in Quebec’s crowded craft-gin market and arguably the biggest craft distillery in the province, in terms of size and sales, Mantha says.

Citing internal SAQ tallies, Mantha says that while Montreal-made Romeo’s Gin is the province’s top-selling craft gin, with about 20,000 bottles sold last year, AiR sold about 30,000 bottles of all its products. Five of AiR’s 10 gins in brightly coloured bottles — blueberry, citrus, grapefruit, cucumber and cranberry — are among the top 15 gins sold in Quebec, Mantha says.

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“I want to sell volume,” Mantha says.

How much volume? Let’s put it this way: Mantha’s business has bought 500,000 empty bottles for its spirits, in part to get the best price on them, and he says AiR’s bottling line could produce a million bottles a year with just four employees.

“I want to be the Jack Daniels of Canada,” he says, before laying out his plans.

In early May, Mantha quietly launched his plan’s next phase, which will put AiR on the radar of liquor-lovers in Ontario. That’s when construction began on AiR’s even larger distillery in Hawkesbury, meant to crack the Ontario market, just as Mantha had planned years ago.

If all goes well, a 160,000 square-foot behemoth in Hawkesbury will one day dwarf AiR’s 40,000 square-foot facility in Gatineau, which is already twice the size of a standard car dealership. It will take Mantha eight to 10 years, $40 million and 50 new employees to realize his dreams in Hawkesbury, he figures.

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What’s more, Mantha has bought land in Erie, Pa., close to the I-90 freeway, intending to build a distillery there.

“This story is only starting,” he says. “Every three years, I’m building a distillery.”

When might he stop? His plan includes three distilleries in Canada, five in the U.S., all tapping into nearby spring water and corn, plus a tequila distillery in Mexico and another in Columbia for rum.

While Mantha has a liquor magnate’s thirst for success, he comes to it from modest beginnings.

He is 54 years old, born in Gatineau’s Hull sector, but a resident of Aylmer. He says he grew up poor, raised by a single mom with three kids, which is why he wants to throw fundraisers for Moisson Outaouais — the food bank — in the bar and event space on the third-floor of his main Gatineau building.

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But his father, he says, taught him how to work and got him started in the trucking business. “I’m a truck mechanic. I was born in trucks. I’m a typical redneck. That’s OK,” he says.

That may be. But his company Mantha Corp., is almost two decades old, and that commercial trucking business now includes a leasing company, a holding company and three Hino truck dealerships in the national capital region.

Artist in Residence was going to be just a side hustle. “It was supposed to be a little project,” Mantha says, although AiR nonetheless launched with the help of $700,000 in combined loans from Investissement Quebec and the federal government’s Quebec Economic Development Program.

But Mantha couldn’t stop himself from thinking big.

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“I like to build stuff. I like to create,” he says. “This is the rush. I live this 24 hours a day. I’m here at five in the morning.

“I think life is short. I don’t want to be that guy who at 75 says, ‘I should have done that.’”

Mantha has thrown himself into the booze business despite not drinking himself. “I didn’t know what a distillery was five years ago,” he even says.

While Mantha may have lacked knowledge, he says he made up for it with two entrepreneurial traits. “I’m good with numbers. I take risks.”

It was Mantha’s wife’s cousin, who lives in Columbia, who couldn’t stop talking about distilleries, he says. “‘You’re from Quebec. You have the best water in the world,’” the cousin told Mantha.

“I didn’t know anything about that,” Mantha professes.

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After he opened Artist in Residence in the fall of 2017, he had a lot to learn on the job.

“The first two years was a goddamn disaster. It was a s— show.” Mantha says. Artist in Residence lost money for three years, but now makes money.

One lesson for Mantha was to consolidate his products under one brand. “I had seven brands. I like to create brands,” he says.

In its early days, Artist in Residence was making a low-calorie, low-alcohol vodka called Vodkalight and a gin called Waxwing Bohemian Gin. But Mantha has retrenched to branding everything as Artist in Residence products, and he has about 30 products now with more than 100 envisioned. He already makes canned tonic water, and says he wants to get into everything from iced tea to energy drinks.

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Whatever Artist in Residence produces, it will be reasonably priced, Mantha says. His bottles are priced between $30 and $35, which considerably undercuts products from other craft distilleries. His price point has been key to his sales, he says. And while his bottles and labeling are plain, the liquids inside them are “state of the art,” he says.

“I want to be a craft distillery with reasonable prices,” he says, stressing the distinction he makes between a craft distiller and a liquor “manufacturer” such as Seagram’s or Diageo.

While his business is built on volume sales, he says he won’t buy equipment that could increase his output because he would not be a craft distillery any more, and it wouldn’t matter that he was using local spring water and local corn.

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“This is all marketing, all about pricing and story and branding. But I think we have something cool and unique,” he says.

Still, Mantha calls selling liquor “a tough, tough business.” He points out that hundreds of SAQ warehouse and delivery workers were on strike last fall. “That hurt everything we did,” he says.

Mantha says that despite his business achievements and real estate holdings, he’s “cash-broke.” Whatever money he makes, he says, he invests in his projects.

He planned on cracking the liquor market in English-speaking Canada from the start, he says. That’s why he picked an English name for his business, although “Distillerie” is in French. His business’s largely English name may even have hampered sales in Quebec, he says, although the French spelling of distillery has charmed Pennsylvanians. “They think I’m French. They think it’s sexy,” he says.

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But when Artist in Residence gets around to selling its products in LCBO stores some time next year, it will tweak its offerings according to demand, Mantha says.

According to Statistics Canada, the market share of gin in Quebec between April 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, was 14.5 per cent, just a few per cent behind the respective shares of vodka, whisky and rum. Quebec’s surging love of gin, while recent, is rooted in the European orientation of Quebeckers and fed by an explosion of new craft distilleries such as Artists in Residence, Mantha says. The website lesginduquebec.com lists more than 230 distinct bottles.

But in Ontario, the market share of gin was just 4.9 per cent, which was one-seventh the market share of whisky and one-fifth the market share of vodka. (Nation-wide, gin’s market share was 6.3 per cent, although in the previous decade, gin sales grew at the fastest pace of all spirits, rising by more than 63 per cent.)

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Says Mantha: “Ontario is not a gin place. So we adjust.” Artist in Residence’s whisky, which needs to spend three years in barrels, will be ready in October, he notes.

In addition to producing liquor for the Ontario market, the Hawkesbury location will ease storage woes of the Gatineau location (recall all those empty bottles). The Gatineau distillery could pivot to do more research and development, Mantha says.

Meanwhile, Mantha could deploy his trucking resources to benefit his distilleries. “I have a rental company, I have trucks. Distribution is easy,” he says, explaining that his dealerships could act as hubs within a network.

Mantha says he’s had already had two offers to buy his distillery business from him. He declined. “I want investors and I want a 51-per-cent stake,” he says.

The time for investors, he says, will come once the Hawkesbury distillery makes money. Then, investors will allow him to expand further and more quickly.

“I see the potential of this business model to explode,” he says.

“What’s cool about this project is it’s never going to end.”

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