Equally challenging: convincing the typical male drinkers, who Pearce finds eye the woman-owned Tenth Ward with skepticism. Especially when she was starting out, Pearce said she got a lot of arched eyebrows when old, white men looking for 12-year-old whiskeys came to the Tenth Ward table.
“Being a young woman in the spirits industry, I was viewed as not knowing what I was doing,” said Pearce, 34.
Tenth Ward leans hard into its uniqueness, both as a maker of unconventional spirits and as one of the nation’s few woman-owned distillers. Pearce feels it gives Tenth Ward a competitive advantage in a marketplace dominated by bland convention.
But that also means Tenth Ward and its staff have to prove its worth to the skeptics, of which there are many. It helps that that the distiller’s spirits are top notch – “The quality of the product speaks for itself,” Pearce said – but Tenth Ward doesn’t stop there.