A businessman as an artist and scientist

When he was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, Herman Mihalich wrote a business plan for a microbrewery.  After graduating, he embarked on a successful career in the specialty chemicals industry.  Over the years, he observed the rise in popularity of craft beers and sometimes wondered: What would have happened if I implemented my business plan for a microbrewery?

Three years ago, Herman wrote a business plan for a small batch whiskey distillery.  He found a business partner, lined up a group of investors, and located a site in Bristol, Pennsylvania, to base the operation. Today, Dad's Hat Pennsylvania Rye Whiskey can be purchased in liquor stores and taverns.  

When I last saw Herman before this winter, he was an executive at the U.S. headquarters of a large global specialty chemicals company.  His Ivy League education, strong work ethic and direct approach to meeting challenges served him well.  His considerable skills and future potential had been recognized early in his career, and he spent five years at the company's Paris headquarters before returning to New Jersey to assume a series of increasingly important positions.

Herman seized an opportunity to join another major specialty chemicals company in an executive role in 2006. After three years, however, organizational changes there put him in a situation familiar to many middle-aged corporate executives in the U.S. today.  At a crossroad, he weighed his options and decided the time was right to pursue opening a craft whiskey distillery in Pennsylvania, the state where he was born and spent his childhood living above his family's tavern in Monessen.

"Making whiskey is part art and part science," Herman explained when I visited him at the Bristol distillery on a cold late January afternoon. "My experience as a chemical engineer has come in quite handy."

Herman and his business partner, John Cooper, roll up their sleeves to handle every aspect of their operation each week, from obtaining the raw ingredients, barrels and other supplies, to mixing and controlling the quality of each batch and marketing the bottles to distributors. In less than two years, the business became cash positive. Favorable reviews of the distillery's whiskey products have poured in from trade publications and other liquor experts.

Dad's Hat Pennsylvania Rye Whiskey is mostly sold in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.  Herman is practicing his fluent French language skills, however, to try to expand the brand into the European country he lived in 20 years ago as a fledgling specialty chemicals industry executive.

On the Dad's Hat Pennsylvania Rye Whiskey web site and inside the Bristol distillery, there are vintage photos of Herman's parents and grandparents.  Perhaps it's indicative of the American spirit that the son of tavern owners can obtain a great education, work hard, see the world and return to his home state to open a business that supplies premium products to people like those in his family.