Dave Schmier is a serial brand founder. Perhaps his best-known endeavor was Redemption Whiskey, which he sold a decade ago in 2015. Not one to sit back and rest, he founded Proof and Wood that same year. Schmier’s work in the world of sourced whiskeys often involves the former Seagram’s distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana that is now known as Midwest Grain Products, or MGP. Today, MGP runs two different branded spirits operations—Lux Row, which it acquired in 2021, and Ross & Squibb, under which it makes its in-house labels like George Remus Bourbon and Rossville Union Rye.

Schmier’s Tumblin’ Dice brand, part of the Proof and wood portfolio, has won numerous World Whiskies Awards, including World’s Best Single Cask Rye in 2024 and World’s Best Single Cask Bourbon in 2023. We recently caught up with him to learn more about the journey that led him to this multiple award-winning spirits business, and how the perception of sourced whiskey has changed over the years.

The Unicorn Review: How did you first get into the spirits business?

Dave Schmier: I spent quite a bit of time working on the retail side, mainly on-premise, bars, restaurants, nightclubs on the marketing side. I thought, "I've seen a lot of on-premise promotions, I think I can do this better.” So I founded a marketing agency to do just that.

Our first client was Absolut Vodka. We worked with Alizé, Chivis Regal, Budweiser, and Fisher Brewery's, creating a lot of entertainment-based on-premise promotions for them. I learned a lot about the business and a lot about different spirits, which eventually led me to create my own vodka brand. But I was drinking a lot of whiskey, learning more about that as I was going along. 

Why did you start with vodka? 

That was the currency of the realm at the time, so it was more a business decision than anything else.  My whiskey journey began while I was working with Absolut. They encouraged us to drink a lot of their products, so I started drinking Chivas and Bulleit and enjoying whiskey a lot more than vodka. I was fortunate enough to begin my lifelong association with rye while attending Gaz Reagan's Cocktails in the Country and having my first Manhattan with rye. That was kind of an epiphany, finding that extra dimension of flavor that came from rye. At that time, I think rye was maybe selling about 10,000 cases a year in the U.S.

What was the impetus to start a whiskey company? Did you notice a shift in the market where people were starting to look for something more flavorful than vodka? 

In the early 2000s, people didn't care too much about whiskey. There was a lot of whiskey being sold, but it was mainly the bigger brands. There was a really small group of people who were collecting Hirsch and were excited about Pappy Van Winkle. But there was plenty of old American whiskey on the shelf. So it wasn't quite a thing yet.

A couple of things started happening. One was the resurgence of the craft cocktail—you had bartenders in Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and LA bringing back the drinks that your grandparents drank that were kind of done away with in the '70s. And you had the growth of craft distilling. Distilleries were opening up all around the country. That helped introduce more people to the idea of drinking whiskey and understanding how it was made and where it came from.

[My friend Mike Kanbar and I] started drinking a lot of whiskey and looking around for cool barrels that we could bottle ourselves. That's when we stumbled on the old Seagram's distillery in Indiana and tasted some of their rye and said, "Wow, we should put this in a bottle." We thought we could sell a few hundred cases of this a year.

I think we bought three barrels from LDI at the time, which became MGP. I don't think we ever used the word “sourcing.” It wasn't a thing, but it had been done for hundreds of years just under different names. But most people didn't know how the back end of the business worked. The assumption was all the different brands that Jim Beam and Heaven Hill put out came from their own distilleries.

When did consumer knowledge about sourcing come about? And what was the initial reaction to that discovery?

When we launched Redemption, we were always straightforward with our customers about what we were doing. Most of them thought it was pretty cool that we were able to find barrels and put them in a bottle as our own brand. More importantly, people liked the whiskey we were giving them at the price we were giving it to them. But you had a fair amount of brands who might have put on the facade that they were distilling whiskey when they weren't. And some distillers were selling sourced whiskey but kind of implying that they were distilling it and charging prices as if they were distilling it in really small batches.

People found that to be deceptive. Everyone was painted with the brush of, "You're not distilling, there's something wrong with that." And then out of that came the term “NDP”—non-distilling producer—which I always hated. To me, you're putting something negative there, like if you're not distilling then you're lesser than somebody who is distilling. I prefer the term “independent bottler” or even the old term “rectifier.”

When did you come up with the slogan “sourcing is not a crime”? Why put that on a t-shirt? Is that a conversation starter? 

Sure, it's a self-serving conversation starter. But I was getting ticked off when I would talk about what we do and I would hear, "Oh, you just source.” A lot of the work in putting something in a bottle comes from the blending, from making sure you're maturing it right. Not everyone who sources is really doing the same thing.

And there's nothing wrong with that. But we do things that are pretty resource-intensive and we wanted to have a counterpoint to the, "You're just sourcing" [mentality]. Sourcing takes on a lot of forms. We're in this for the long haul, and I don't like being lumped in with people who started a whiskey brand because it's a hot thing and they heard they can make a lot of money doing it.

There's a couple of ways we go about it. One is buying new make distillate. In the past, I would buy standard mashbills like 95% rye, 75% corn, and 60% corn from our friends in Indiana. In the last five years or so, we also started creating custom mashbills with some of our distilling partners. When you're laying the whiskey down, you're also determining what kind of barrel you're using, so you have a little bit more of a hand in what the final product is rather than just accepting what they're making and blending it to your specs.

Some people will buy aged whiskey today and bottle it tomorrow, which is fine, but it's a different approach, less resource-intensive. And sometimes we'll buy aged whiskey and either age it longer, age it and finish it, or a combination of those things.

I have long stated that you put MGP on the map. What are your thoughts on that? 

There were a handful of us that were doing the same thing around the same time. I think you can't have that conversation without at least tipping your hat to the folks at Templeton, High West, Smooth Ambler, and to some extent, WhistlePig when they weren't bottling Canadian whisky. But I think we were the first to really talk about it overtly.

But you were the first person who was like, "Hey, this distillery's actually making really good whiskey and nobody's really paying attention to that fact." Would you agree with that?

It was like the lost distillery. There were a handful of people when we started Redemption who were incredibly excited that we were bottling Seagram's rye whiskey. And when I say a handful, I could literally count them on a hand. And then there was everyone else, including ourselves, that didn't know that this distillery existed.

Then you had that hurdle of, "Oh, this stuff is from Indiana. Shouldn't it be from Kentucky?" And, of course, with rye whiskey, I'm like, "Well, if you want to get technical, it should probably be from Maryland or Pennsylvania, but this is where some great rye whiskey was being made." We were fortunate enough to find it when we did. 

Proof and Wood is well known for some interesting blends and some single barrels. What's coming up next that you're excited about? 

The most exciting thing right now is we just launched an eight-year-old rye, which is an Indiana rye that was aged for seven years in Kentucky in its original charred oak barrel, and then spent an additional year in barrels that we got from Laird’s distillery that were used to age apple brandy.

Transparency is really what you have become known for, and that's the reason why the “sourcing is not a crime” slogan has been so popular. You're saying, “I'm going to give you all the information that I can possibly give you about this.”

Transparency almost sounds like I'm doing somebody else a favor. But as a brand, I think we're doing ourselves a favor because the stuff that we're doing is interesting to the people who buy the product. 95 percent of the drinking public don’t care about what we're putting on the label and aren’t buying our product anyway. But I think people are coming from a place where they felt like maybe people were misleading them. By talking about things, it's good for our brand and it's good for the business in general.

For folks who have never heard of Proof and Wood, what's your elevator pitch for why they should try it? 

For the most part, we do American whiskey, and we live by the motto of “good whiskey at a fair price.” Whether we're selling a $25 bottle of everyday bourbon or a 22-year-old Canadian rye whisky, they always know they're going to get high quality and something interesting in that bottle.