Jaynie Kean and her sister sold seashells by the seashore to the tourists when they were little… And now she has the weight of the world on her shoulders. Or at least the weight of the Jackton Distillery.
A family-owned distillery is a very different animal from the giant, conglomerate-owned distilleries. Most of the names we all know, the big brands, are all run by corporations with a mountain of experts and corporate managers who all have limited responsibilities and expertise.
Jackton Distillery is family, basically the middle and youngest sisters and friends of the family since childhood, and several more recent additions to the dynamic.
At the time of this writing, there are nine people who run the entire operation, and Jaynie Kean is the tip of the spear.
Where does one go to school to learn how to run a family distillery?
Well, there is no such thing.
Jaynie started working in local pubs at the age of 18 and learned everything she could before heading to the USA for college. A year at Alabama and almost rushing a sorority but in the end, it was too monochromatic. She wanted more flavors of the world so she headed to George Washington University in Washington DC. The international energy changed everything as she majored in international business and marketing with a minor in sustainability. She considered law school and would have made a good lawyer, but decided against it.
Instead, she came home to Jackton as the family started to plan a distillery on some farmland. The Kean family had been building in Scotland for many years, so that part was already in the skillset, but creating a distillery was an entirely new animal.
And Jaynie was there for every step.
As an outside observer, I’ve watched how she is always quietly in charge and seems to have a master plan always floating around in her head. She doesn’t take long to make decisions; she just consults the plan and, in seconds, has a salient direction.
It’s the kind of leadership, and I generally hate that word. Open up LinkedIn, and everyone is calling themselves a leader, and the leadership memes are assaulting the screen with leadership bullshit, but in Jaynie’s case, it translates to “that’s a good idea, or that’s a bad idea…” And she moves on to something else that’s pressing.
When you look at the details of this operation, the design of the distillery, the storage warehouses, how everything fits on the property that once housed cattle and pigs, the quality of every building and design and architecture, the hotel rooms, one of which I’ve been very comfortably living in for a week now, and you might think this is the tenth distillery the Kean family has put up.
But it’s the first.
It’s all their first.
And you scratch your head. How the hell did they do it?
And the whisky and gins are really good. I haven’t even tried their first single malt, entirely made here with their own water and their own malted barley but I’m sure it’ll be superlative.
It’s a bit of a miracle.
It’s The Jackton Whisky Miracle.
There must be a grotto somewhere on the property.
For me, it’s a great bit of kismet to have randomly landed here to witness this in its infancy.
In the immortal words of Talking Heads… “How did I get here?”
I got the thought that after decades in the ad biz doing high tech brand development, that I didn’t want to high tech brand development so much and would love to go write about distilleries.
I found a website with all the distilleries in Scotland and started hitting websites to tell them my idea.
Howzabout I come live there for a few weeks, really get to know how you do it and who you are, and tell your story.
Jaynie was the first response, within a day or so. She liked the idea, let’s talk.
We went back and forth, she went to the States for some things, went dark, I kept bugging her, and it just happened that some friends were near the distillery one day, and I said, “Run over and see if you can find Jaynie and tell her I’m a genius.”
They did. And the joke now is that she liked the idea but didn’t know me from Adam, and I could be a murderer, and my friends assured her I wasn’t a murderer, so we talked and agreed I’d spend two weeks.
So here I am.
And here I see The Whisky Miracle.
Jaynie will continue to have the weight of the distillery on her shoulders, but she seems to bear it well.
And their first single malt will be coming out soon.
And they are poised to become a well-known name in the world of Scotch Whiskies.
Miracles aren’t easy to pull off, but I suspect it’ll keep getting more miraculous.
