Tens of Thousands
of dollars in at-risk batches protected each year
4-8
at-risk batches per year now protected
Weekends
reclaimed, with fermentation insights available without requiring on-site staff
Tarnished Truth Distilling Company case study: Download the PDF
A Distillery Built on Mastery
Tarnished Truth Distilling Company opened in 2018 inside the historic Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the first distillery in the country located inside a fully operating hotel. It was founded by Andrew Yancey, Founder and President, and designed by Larry Ebersold, a 40-year Seagram’s veteran whose recipes Midwest Grain Products still produce today. The distillery was built for quality and repeatability from day one. Justin Boyle, Master Distiller, runs production with two assistant distillers, managing four 500-gallon fermenters, a Vendome hybrid pot still, a column still, and a bourbon-aging program that produces roughly 250 barrels per year. Tarnished Truth’s flagship High Rye Bourbon and its wheated bourbon, Discretion, have made the brand a household name across Virginia.
THE CHALLENGE
Quality Without Visibility
For Tarnished Truth, fermentation isn’t just one step in a process – it’s the foundation of the product. As Justin explains, roughly 60% of the flavor compounds that define a bourbon are built during fermentation: the caramel, butterscotch, vanilla, spice, and fruit notes. Nothing in the still or a barrel can correct what fermentation didn’t create.
In the early years of the business, managing those fermentations meant periodic manual readings, the standard practice across craft distilling: a measurement at the start, a few in the middle, and one at the end. But between readings, the tanks were largely blind and problems went undetected, such as fermentations running hot over a weekend and stalling without warning. By Monday morning the options to save that batch were often slim to none.
As a result, four to eight batches per year were put at risk. Tarnished Truth’s quality standard is absolute: nothing that falls short of spec ever reaches a bottle. Each at-risk batch represented $500–$1,000 in raw grain, a full week of production labor, and product held back from market. The exposure across grain costs, labor, and lost revenue accumulated fast.
If you do not ferment correctly, you are not going to have a good product. It doesn’t matter what you do further down the line.
THE SOLUTION
Fermentation Intelligence from Sennosystem
Tarnished Truth had been searching for this kind of capability since opening, and previous temperature-only systems had come and gone without meeting their standards. “We just hadn’t found a solution that met our standards, until we adopted Sennosystem,” Justin said. Sennosystem now runs across the distillery’s active fermenters, with plans to expand to all four tanks. The improvements were immediate. Where fermentations were previously tracked through a handful of manual snapshots, Justin now sees continuous curves across temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen: the full picture inside each tank, available from anywhere.
Along with checking Brix (i.e., sugar concentration) pre-fermentation, Justin watches temperature very closely. The combination allows the team to dial in their cooling technique with a precision not previously possible, controlling how fast or slow each fermentation moves to fit the production schedule. That ability became critical during a recent mid-production boiler failure. Using Sennosystem, Justin was able to stretch the active fermentations by an extra day or two while repairs were made, saving batches that would otherwise have been lost.
THE RESULTS
Batches Protected, Weekends Reclaimed, Quality Delivered
The most immediate impact was on weekend production. Fermentations at Tarnished Truth finish during weekends when only retail staff are on-site. Before Sennosystem, that overlap was the single biggest source of risk, including overheated tanks and missed interventions, leaving batches at risk of having to be scrapped on Monday mornings. Once the entire team started receiving alerts on their phones, these failures were eliminated.
Having a bodyguard, essentially, watching over our fermenters throughout the weekends, has been the absolute best thing for peace of mind for my team and me.
Protecting the four to eight batches at risk each year has saved the distillery tens of thousands of dollars in grain costs, labor, and revenue. Justin also noted that Sennosystem has made him “a better distiller.” Overlaying fermentation curves batch over batch, and identifying drift before it becomes a defect is now a core practice in how Tarnished Truth pursues the consistency their bourbon demands, and consumers expect. Beyond these successes, Sennosystem also changed how their entire team relates to fermentation. System alerts invited non-production, retail staff into visibility they’d never had before, and weekly check-ins with the Sennos team became a collaborative partnership for everyone. “We collectively all got a fresh, new education in fermentation,” Justin said. “Sennos’ insight was just as valuable as mine.”
Sennosystem has fundamentally changed how Tarnished Truth operates day to day. The freedom that fermentation intelligence has created extends beyond the distillery building. Justin now has the luxury to step away knowing the fermenters are covered, and dedicates more time to work that fosters their brand, including attending bourbon industry events and visiting accounts.
LOOKING AHEAD
Justin’s near-term priority is full coverage, deploying Sennosystem on all four of his fermenters. As production expands to two-shift operation, that coverage will become more critical as more fermenters running simultaneously means more handoffs between shifts and more weight on continuous intelligence to confirm that every recipe is executed correctly. “With Sennosystem, I can not only monitor the fermentations; it allows me to monitor operations,” Justin says. “With one quick look, I can see how well they did the cook. Were the Brix levels where we needed them? Were the pH levels optimized?” In a distillery where consistency is the business model, Sennosystem is key to how Tarnished Truth intends to scale without compromise.
My wife is much more happy with me. It’s kind of like your cell phone – how was I operating this business before without having these checks and balances in place? The comfort level that I have now is just completely different.
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