Sydney Jones took an unconventional path to working at one of the largest distilleries in the United States. Her original plan was to become a social worker, but a summer job at M.B. Roland, a tiny distillery in southwestern Kentucky, changed the trajectory of her life. After working as a distiller in Florida at Manifest Distilling and Chicago at FEW Spirits, Jones is now back in Kentucky at the helm of the new Heaven Hill Springs Distillery in Bardstown, which opened this past September and was built to replace the old Heaven Hill Distillery that was destroyed by a fire in 1996. We spoke to Jones to find out more about her journey in the whiskey industry.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The Unicorn Review: What is your current job at Heaven Hill?

Sydney Jones: My current title is lead distillery technician at Heaven Hill Springs. I am in charge of one of our day shifts. My day-to-day responsibilities include running our beer still, executing our mashing program, and maintaining our fermentations. As our dry house comes online, I will be running that to produce our DDG (distillers’ dried grains). So it is very much a multifaceted role, and it covers all of Heaven Hill Springs operations. 

You've been in the distilling industry for almost a decade now. Where did you get your start?

None of this was planned. This was all something that I serendipitously stumbled into, and I'm so thankful that I did. I moved to Kentucky with an ex-partner right after I got out of college. I wanted to go for my LCSW and be a social worker. There was a graduate program that I had my eyes on, and I was preparing to apply for it.

As you do when you move to Kentucky as a young adult for the first time, you visit distilleries, you do the Bourbon Trail. I fell deeply in love with it. I ordered every book that I could get my hands on. I read everything I could. I asked all the weird, dumb questions. And we were very conveniently located at the time, about 15 minutes away from M.B. Roland in Pembroke, Kentucky, right outside of Clarksville, Tennessee.

I took a tour with the owners and operators, Paul and Mary Beth Tomaszewski, and they recognized that this was not just a mild obsession with me. They offered me a job as an assistant distiller, tour guide, and retail associate. M.B. Roland back then was small enough that you wore a lot of hats. Working for a small craft distillery, especially one that was truly doing everything by hand and grain-to-glass, was a light-bulb moment for me. I decided maybe this is what I'm supposed to do versus the psychology route that I was going down. 

[Later] I went through a separation from my partner and was forced to move back to my home state of Florida. Conveniently enough, a craft distillery had just opened up in my hometown called Manifest Distilling. I showed up with a resume one day and told them to hire me, and they did. I was there for four years, producing gin and vodka and organic rye whiskey for them, as well as some other liqueurs. And that was my first “big girl” distilling role.

I also worked part-time in a bar, so I learned a lot about on-premise relationships, consumer trends, and mixology. That was a really helpful, informing experience for me. And then at the end of my four years there, I had just produced a gin and brought it to market, and I was feeling really confident. But I was also feeling like I had been four years in my hometown now, and that was not what I wanted for myself.

FEW Spirits in Chicago had posted a position that they were looking to hire a creative and artistic distiller. I blindly sent a resume to a general email, which unbeknownst to me went to Paul Hletko, the founder of FEW. He ended up offering me the role, and I put my dog and my cat in a U-Haul and drove 18 hours by myself and moved to Chicago out of the blue, post-COVID.

I was there for three years. That was an incredible experience. I have so much love for FEW, and I always will. I was promoted to head distiller, working with an extraordinary team. Around that time, FEW was acquired by Heaven Hill as part of the Samson and Surrey acquisition. That is what led me here.

How did you end up in Bardstown?

I had been in the head distiller role at FEW for about a year. After about a month on the road, I was talking to my operations manager, Riley Henderson, and he's like, "Heads up—I received a call from someone at Heaven Hill asking about you. I think Connor wants to talk to you about something, so he's probably going to reach out and schedule a call."

A week or two later, Connor O’Driscoll called and told me that Heaven Hill Springs was starting to look at staffing and that my name had been the first that had been brought up in the conversation, which fully knocked me on my ass. I was like, "But why? I'm a craft distiller girl. I huck bags of grain into a mashtun and I drive a forklift every day."

Connor was like, "You've worked with so many people. You've worked with so many things. You've built a really great team here at FEW. You've established a great reputation. I can teach you everything that you need to know, but I can't teach the things that you already have. I think that's why you would be a good fit.” I don't think I would have sought out the position for myself if Connor had not pushed me, and I'm so thankful that he did. Now it's something that I'm trying to do for people that I'm mentoring or working with. He's a fount of knowledge, and I count myself lucky to be under his leadership.

What are some of the major differences in your day-to-day life between FEW, which is in a tiny little garage, and Heaven Hill Springs, which is very, very big?

I get that question a lot from my craft distiller friends. What gives me a lot of comfort is, regardless of the scale that you make whiskey on, you still have to follow the same essential steps. The science does not change. We still have to grind grain, mash in, ferment. We still follow the same basic principles of boiling points and physics. That does not change, regardless of whether you're running a small 15-gallon pot still or you're running a still that can produce 500 barrels a day like I am here.

The biggest difference is I'm mostly sitting in a control room now. I'm working from a computer system. So I'm not necessarily in the field as much anymore turning manual valves, manually adjusting steam, grabbing 50-pound bags of grain, and pouring them into a mash. I have equipment that does all of that for me now. 

Some have wondered, does that take the human element out of it? I don't think it does. The systems that we work with are highly automated, but they still require a lot of attention. Like any technology, it can go off the track.

You went from a city that has a distillery in it to Bardstown, which is a town built around distilling. How different is it?

It’s really cool also to be in a town that is so connected to the thing that I love, which is whiskey. I step out my front door in the morning, and I can already smell mash down the street coming from Barton's. That's a really cool thing. It feels very comforting, it feels like I'm at home. I'll be having dinner one night, and I'll see people across the bar that I know from the industry. It's a town of distillers. We're this little colony that occupies it.

Do you have a particular style of whiskey that you like making or a particular grain that you like to work with? 

I love grains that are really big drivers of flavor, [like] rye whiskey. I made a lot of rye in my career. From a production standpoint, it can sometimes be a bit tricky because it foams and it turns to concrete. But I love the flavor possibilities with rye. 

When I was at FEW, I did a 100% rye before I left, which from a production standpoint was tricky. It did not want to mash. We used a lot of exogenous enzymes to make it work. But I used a POF negative yeast strain instead of a POF positive. And the result was a distillate that tasted like peach rings coming off the still. It was fascinating.

If you really get down to the nitty-gritty of science and play around with your fermentation and play around with your grain and understand all of these other drivers of flavor, you can produce some really unexpected, extraordinary stuff. The barrel gets so much attention, and it should, but if any of your fermentation or mashing or distillation fails, a barrel isn’t going to rectify that. 

Do you have any passion projects that you hope to be able to work on in this role? 

As of right now, the passion project is just getting it up and running. The dry house is still coming online, the yeast system that we're going to be doing here is also something that is going to be finely tuned in the coming year or so. Right now, my full focus is on making sure that the plant runs the way that it was designed to, and that's been taking a lot of my time and energy. 

I still feel really passionate about craft distilleries, and Heaven Hill has several craft distilleries in their portfolio from the Samson and Surrey acquisition, so I still do a lot of work with the American Craft Spirits Association. I still feel really strongly that great whiskey can be made at every single tier of production. When large distilleries like Heaven Hill succeed, small distilleries succeed as well, and vice versa. Rising tides, I truly believe, raise all ships.

I've also been doing a lot of work with the StepUp Foundation, which is a huge passion project of mine. It gives fully paid internships to underrepresented populations in the distilling industry.  Now that I've stepped into this incredible role, I've been working with a really talented woman this past year and mentoring her. I realized that I was given a lot of chances very early on in my career, and I want to pass those opportunities along to other people that come from similar alternative backgrounds. Anyone can learn the science, I don't think it just needs to be chemical engineers. I am trying very hard to invest in people the way that I was early in my career.