Spirits in South Carolina

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Engineers Todd Harbin and Lisa Messenger have been business partners for three decades. But when they decided to start a new business a couple of years ago, they stepped out of the world of engineering for something entirely different.

In April 2024, Harbin and Messenger opened New South Spirits, a Greenville distillery that produces rum, tequila, and cream liqueurs in distillation equipment the pair designed themselves.

“A lot of distillery guys are former engineers,” Harbin said recently. “I think as an engineer, you’re just confident enough and just dumb enough to think, ‘Yeah, I can figure that out.’ It’s a lot of work, but it’s a process, like anything else.”

Harbin said there’s craftsmanship as well as science involved in the design.

“It’s a struggle every day, I won’t lie, but it’s an enjoyable struggle,” Harbin said.

Harbin and Messenger aren’t alone in the up and down world of producing spirits. More than two dozen distilleries operate in South Carolina, said Kevin Osborn, who owns Twelve 33 Distillery in Little River and serves on the board of the South Carolina Craft Distillers Guild.

Twelve 33 was founded by Osborn and his wife Rebecca in 2017, and the distillery opened in 2019. The portfolio includes six bourbons, along with vodka, rye, gin, cream liqueurs, and an agave spirit.

For Osborn and his compatriots in micro distilleries, there are countless regulations that govern the sale and production of spirits, far more than those surrounding wineries and micro eweries.

Under South Carolina’s Liquor Micro Distillery License, businesses can distill, blend, and bottle up to 125,000 cases on the premises per year, and the distillery must do all three. It can offer tastings on the property to customers who tour the premises, provided there is no charge for the liquor offered, and the distillery can sell liquor produced on the premises for off-premises consumption provided the bottles are marked “not for resale.”

But there are restrictions related to the number of bottles that can be sold to an individual – it’s now six, changed from three in recent years – as well as when and where the distilleries can serve their beverages. Harbin said the bottle limit is especially frustrating considering that a customer isn’t limited to a certain number of bottles when purchasing from a liquor store.

The South Carolina Craft Distillers Guild works with new and established distilleries to share information and to work on changing the laws to make it easier to operate a distillery in the Palmetto State.

One law that the guild is hoping to change is the law that restricts distilleries from selling liquor by the drink after 7 p.m. In most cases, a distillery must sell food in order to serve their products later than 7 p.m., and adding a DHEC-compliant kitchen to a facility is an additional expense. And Sunday sales are not allowed.

Seven different governmental agencies – from the federal Tax and Trade Bureau to the State Law Enforcement Division – regulate the work of the distilleries, Osborn said.

Pixie Paula Dezzutti, owner of Charleston’s Striped Pig Distillery, has been in the spirits business for two decades, 12 of them with Striped Pig. She produces vodka, bourbon, gin, rum, and moonshine.

The distillery’s name is a tribute to the 15 Gallon Act of 1838, a Massachusetts law that was designed to restrict alcohol consumption by prohibiting the sale of spirits in containers smaller than 15 gallons.

In response, a group of enterprising entrepreneurs created a striped pig as a circus attraction, and the people who paid admission to see the pig were allowed into a speakeasy where they could consume alcohol, Dezzutti said. The striped pig mascot even inspired a political party.

Osborn’s creative passion for spirits began in his post-college years, when he was a home brewer of beer. In the early 2000s, Osborn and some friends founded a winery co-op, which they operated for 12 years, selling around 500 cases a year.

He spent much of his career managing the wholesale division of a boating equipment supplier in California, but after taking a buyout from his company several years ago, Osborn and his wife Rebecca established Twelve 33.

“This was our dream,” Osborn said.

In 2016, when they began looking into the business, they considered several locations, including one in Arizona. They found that California had at least 100 craft distilleries, while the Palmetto State had only “a handful.”

And the Grand Strand’s tourism-centric environment, along with South Carolina’s business-friendly economy, made it an easy choice.

Twelve 33 and New South offer distillery tours and tastings, while Striped Pig also has educational events, as well as a program called Sip and Share, in which nonprofit organizations can host events at the distillery, and $2 from the sale of each bottle benefits that nonprofit.

Osborn said many distilleries consider themselves part of the agrotourism industry because so many of the ingredients that go into the products are locally sourced. While the agave for tequila comes from Mexico, most everything else is sourced in South Carolina.

While the legal aspects of the business can be frustrating, distillers say they enjoy the process of experimentation and creating new flavors.

At Twelve 33, Osborn spends much of his time experimenting with new varieties of spirits, and the distillery often creates special limited-edition releases, such as a gingerbread cream liqueur for the holidays and a Carolina Blueberry vodka made from a base of blueberry wine.

“That’s the fun thing about craft,” Osborn said. “You want to change one product in the portfolio at Jack Daniels, that’s an act of Congress. But for us, it’s a science lab. We’re playing back here every day.”

For Dezzutti, some of the new creations are inspired by family traditions.

“We have the base categories, and then we’ll make some occasional flavor profiles to be responsive to consumers’ demands, and also to show off our creativity,” she said. “Our family is all Italian, so we’re really good at cooking and baking and flavor profiles. To pay homage to a lot of our heritage, we’ve come up with great products. We have a Doppio Espresso vodka. It’s quite common to have an espresso in an Italian meal. … It’s one of our best sellers.”

Another favorite is a black cherry bourbon that Dezzutti makes in honor of her grandmother, who often canned black cherries.

Harbin and Messenger offer just under a dozen varieties, including pineapple rum and Peanut Butter Cup Ghost, a cream with a distinctive candy flavor.

While Harbin describes himself as a “bourbon guy,” he said it’s not easy to make a bourbon that hits just right, so he and Messenger plan to stick with their current portfolio for now.

But he and Messenger chose tequila specifically because its popularity is increasing in the United States. According to the trade publication The Spirits Business, volume sales of tequila and mezcal rose by 5.7 percent in 2023. While vodka is the No. 1 selling spirit, it saw a slight decline in 2023.

“I worked real hard on those recipes, and they’re all our own,” Harbin said. “… The joy we get out of it is in people’s faces.”