The Future of Whiskey: Doing Things the Right Way

There are parts of distilling, bottling, and selling whiskey that people naturally gravitate toward. Our senses come alive with the tangible aspects like the grain or the oak. Even the less visible items can surface in your mind, like the slow work of time and the maritime air. These finite and known things directly impact the whiskey you sip. You can taste them; you can point to them. You can tell their story in a glass.

And then there are the parts unseen in the whiskey making process. The less glamorous aspects that come with running a business. The decisions made behind closed doors. The tradeoffs, the moments when the easier path presents itself, whether it’s cheaper inputs, faster timelines, or broader margins… and you choose something else instead. We hold these decisions with gravity. Westland has always been about doing things the right way, avoiding shortcuts. It’s true in how we distill and age our whiskey, and it’s true for us operationally.

Upon hearing that Westland is a Certified B Corporation, there may be a natural assumption that something must have changed. That certification marked or recognized a shift, a new direction. Perhaps this recognition was earned because the business adopted a higher standard at a certain point in time.

But in all honesty, for us the truth is quieter. It’s slow and built over time, from the beginning. B Corp certification didn’t change how we operate. It verified what was already true since day one. Long before there was a framework to measure up against, before there was a score to point to, there was simply a belief: that if we were going to make whiskey, we were going to do it the right way.

There is always a version of this work that costs less, and that’s not even unique to our industry. It’s felt globally. Ingredients can be sourced for cheaper than ours, but at the cost of losing flavor. Maturation time can be shortened, and margins can be stretched wider. But that path leads somewhere predictable. We see it as a slow erosion of character, a gradual drift toward sameness. A race to the bottom.

And as our beloved farming partner Dave Hedlin of Hedlin Family Farm says:

“If I win a race to the bottom, well…then where am I? “

Our company was founded on audacious believes, and we wanted to specifically design our business to live up to these values. It’s one thing to say you believe in something, but another to execute fully. One of the less visible aspects of B Corp certification is the expectation that a company’s purpose is embedded into how it operates at a foundational level. In practice, that means decisions cannot be made on profit alone. Purpose isn’t something we return to when it’s convenient, but rather, something that must be considered at every waking moment.

This matters because growth changes things. As a company scales, pressure increases. Expectations rise. The number of decisions multiplies, and with them, the opportunities to compromise. Not all at once, but slowly. A small shortcut here or a slightly easier choice there. Over time, those decisions add up. What begins as intention can quietly take over each decision. We built our company in a way that deliberately resists that drift.

For the person holding a bottle of Westland, none of this is immediately visible. You don’t see the internal conversations or the decisions weighed and reconsidered. But you experience the outcome. It shows up in the consistency of our whiskey year after year, and decision after decision. It shows up in how we source, how we mature, and how we speak about what we do. And perhaps most importantly, it shows up in accountability. We didn’t build this business to earn a certification. We built it because this is the only way we know how: to do this right. Source properly, invest in the future, operate with a long-term mentality.

The B Corp certification is simply the outside world colliding with our ideals. What it means for you is something more tangible: you can hold us to these higher standards, both in the taste of your whiskey and how it got there.

None of this is meant to suggest perfection. If anything, doing things the right way requires the opposite posture, an acknowledgment that this work is ongoing. There are decisions we’ve revisited and tradeoffs we’ve had to rethink. There are often moments where the right answer wasn’t immediately clear. And that’s part of the work. Accountability isn’t about always getting it right. It’s about building something that requires you to keep trying. Where transparency matters. Where reflection is part of the process. Where the standard is not fixed, but continually examined.

In single malt whiskey, we often talk about what shapes flavor: the barley, the oak, the climate. The barrel proof, the maturation time, the finishing casks.

But beneath all of that is something quieter; there we find a set of decisions about what kind of company this will become. And our most sincere hope is this: that we become kind of business that chooses the harder path, even when the easier one is right there. The producer that builds values into operations, not just in communication. We want to hold ourselves to the highest standard, and with that, vitally understand that what you don’t see is often what matters most.

If we’ve done this well, it ensures that long after the conversation about certification fades, the principles remain. Our goal is that these principles live on beyond where they’re written, but because they are built into the work itself. Each glass of whiskey is made possible because of the long road we have taken. As we near the end of B Corp Month, we wanted to say a small cheers: to doing whiskey the best way we know how. With the best possible future in mind. And none of this would be possible if it wasn’t for our supporters who show up release after release, or share a bottle with a new friend. Cheers to you. Cheers to doing things differently.