The Education of Raj Bhakta

“Here, take some firewood,” says Raj Bhakta as he offers me a chunk of maple. I tell him, thanks, no, I’ve got plenty at home. He stares at me for an incredulous moment, then says, “No, take it” (the stupid is silent). “We’re going to the top of the hill.”

So I grab the log plus a few more pieces from the woodpile behind his Shoreham, Vermont, barn and distillery, and we set off at a brisk pace upward through a mature forest on a narrow trail. I’m following Bhakta and one of his employees, a young salesman named Larry Swanson, who is also bearing wood. After several hundred yards we arrive at the hill’s crest, where there’s a clearing amid white pines; in the center is a pine needle–filled fire pit flanked by a pair of Adirondack chairs. A ravine falls off to the southwest.

Bhakta is wearing a pink polo shirt, cuffed gray tweed pants, and smart brown leather shoes with laces as thin as capellini. He gathers some twigs and needles and piles them up. He lights the pile, it smolders, and he piles on more needles. More smoldering ensues. I think: This is not going to amount to anything. This is how city people build fires. Swanson helps by occasionally gathering more pine needles and dumping them onto the fire, then blowing on them. Between exhalations he says he was once an Eagle Scout, which seems suspect. While we stand watching the small flames grow almost imperceptibly larger, Bhakta tells me that fire-building is part of the application process for those hoping to work at WhistlePig, the whiskey distillery he started at the farm in 2010. Aspirants also must write an essay. Swanson says his assigned topic was how he would survive a post-nuclear-war era if he were the last human standing.

Remarkably, the fire catches after about 10 minutes, and more twigs are consigned to the flames. Then the logs. All of them. Eventually, we have to step back from the heat and sparks. At which point Bhakta appears to lose interest in our campfire and suggests we take a hike, pointing to a trail along the edge of the ravine. We set off, leaving the fire to grow ever higher, untended, surrounded by acres of fresh pine duff. I turn around for a last glimpse at the flames, now about 6 feet high and growing, and think: Well, it’s not my property.

But then it strikes me that I may have just witnessed the essence of entrepreneurship—you get something going, you fan it until it’s red-hot, and then you move on to the next thing, leaving others to deal with what you started.

What I just witnessed, it turns out, is how an entrepreneur builds a fire.

* * * * *

Raj Bhakta was not the most obvious candidate to buy a dairy farm in rural Vermont and convert it into a whiskey distillery. He’s the son of a Hindu Indian immigrant father, who arrived in America in 1969 with $68 in his pocket. After a stint at an auto dealership, the senior Bhakta, who had married a young Irish woman, launched a thriving business buying and operating hotels.

The younger Bhakta was raised in the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia, studied finance and economics at Boston College, then briefly worked for an investment bank in New York before joining his father’s hotel business. He spearheaded the buying and rebranding of a down-at-the-heels resort in Vail, Colorado. But then the great recession of 2008 hit, and Bhakta, in his early thirties and feeling hemmed in by the family business, decided to move on to the next chapter, even though it was unclear what that chapter might be.

That’s when a friend he’d known at boarding school and college suggested he apply to appear on The Apprentice, a new reality TV show hosted by Donald Trump. Bhakta thought, Why not? He was accepted as one of 18 contestants on season two. He lasted until the ninth week. His downfall: overseeing a bungled renovation of a small house. “I think you made a lot of mistakes,” Trump told Bhakta. “Raj, you’re fired.”

Still, in those nine weeks he made an impression on a national audience, although not always a favorable one. He came off as brash and a bit of a cad. (He tried to hustle a date with Trump’s receptionist after he was fired.) His dapper gentlemen’s wear also attracted comment, as it included bow ties and pants worn high on the waist in the manner of a bank clerk c. 1925. “The pants are where they feel right on me,” Bhakta told TV Guide. 

After being fired, he chose to parlay his modest slice of fame into a campaign for Congress, running as a conservative Republican in a reliably liberal Democratic district outside Philadelphia. He lost by a two-to-one margin. “I was a Republican reality-TV-show guy running for Congress in a liberal media environment,” Bhakta says with a small shrug.

The same classmate who had suggested he apply to The Apprentice then told him about a dairy farm for sale on 467 acres of rolling hills near his own house in west-central Vermont. Bhakta drove up and took a look and, impulsively, bought it. His plan? Well… he didn’t have a plan. He just assumed he’d figure something out. He usually did.

His father visited soon after, and looked around dejectedly. “Raj,” he said, “we left a broken-down farm in India to make our fortune in America. And what do you do? You buy a broken-down farm.” 

Bhakta thought about brewing beer out of the grain he would grow. But he concluded that the craft beer market had peaked, especially in Vermont, which already had more craft breweries per capita than any other state. He considered making vodka from grain, but he thought that market was also oversaturated.

Then he thought: whiskey. Scotch was Bhakta’s preferred liquor, and he contemplated growing barley and distilling that, as they do in Scotland. But he learned that international protocols prevent labeling something as scotch unless it’s actually made in Scotland. He would have to call it “barley whiskey” or the like, making it sound like an also-ran. Bhakta doesn’t do also-rans.

So it occurred to him to pursue another style of whiskey: rye.

Rye whiskey was one of the foundational spirits of the early republic, and it had a long and honorable run. As recently as the 1960s, New York commuters were knocking back tumblers of the stuff before dashing off to catch the 5:20 to Scarsdale. Rye was the spicier, more voluble cousin to bourbon. But then it suddenly fell out of fashion and grew silent. By the 1970s, rye was consigned to cameo appearances in short stories by John Cheever.

Bhakta’s instincts told him rye was ripe for a comeback. And the more he looked into it, the more he believed an assertive and talented marketer could move quickly, essentially cornering the premium rye market. Further consideration found no reason that this person shouldn’t be him.

“I was going to literally bet the farm and my future,” recalls Bhakta, now 41. “I would do a rye whiskey.”

* * * * *

Shoreham was founded around 1790 where the Green Mountains flutter down and unravel along southeastern Lake Champlain. Settlers were attracted to its supremely fertile soils, and the region thrived for decades. Hundreds of small farms grew apples and made dairy products, which were sent first by boat and wagon and then by train and truck to the outside world.

But the economics of farming shifted, and not in Shoreham’s favor. Sue MacIntire, the town historian, moved here 40 years ago. At the time, quite a few dairy farms were turning a decent profit with just 60 cows or so. “But that kind of a farm won’t support a family anymore,” she said. The smaller farms and orchards started slipping and either were bought up by larger operations or went out of business.

In 2010 a community economic development study singled out agriculture as still offering a promising route to a prosperous future, although in a somewhat different form. The study called for the creation of a “food incubator,” where “food entrepreneurs could start new food enterprises, from cheeses to applesauce, to advance the next generation of the agricultural economy in Shoreham.” Since then, a cidery and a winery have opened up, adding value to local commodity crops.

So it seemed Bhakta was in the right place at the right time—arriving with an idea of taking everyday straw and converting it to gold in a bottle.

But building a business in small-town Vermont has traditionally required a special set of skills—just being a talented entrepreneur isn’t sufficient. You also need to have the right personality and follow some basic directives. You keep a low profile and let your deeds speak for themselves. You make nice with the neighbors. You play by the rules.

Bhakta, it turned out, chose to work off a different playbook.

* * * * *

Perhaps the hardest part was for Bhakta to keep a low profile and blend in. It’s simply not in the man’s genetics.

Consider: When he ran for Congress in 2006, his platform included a call to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—foreshadowing the man who’d fired him on The Apprentice. But rather than hold a long-winded press conference, he flew to Texas, hired a circus elephant and a six-piece mariachi band, and set out to cross the Rio Grande undetected by the border patrol. “If I can get an elephant led by a mariachi band into this country, I think Osama bin Laden could get across with all the weapons of mass destruction he could get into this country,” he told reporters at the time.

The stunt quickly veered toward disaster. A farmhand had assured him the river was only a few feet deep, but when the elephant stepped into it, the beast and its handler instantly sank, disappearing from view into the muddy waters. The animal eventually bobbed back up, but now in a state of understandable agitation, and had to be coaxed back ashore. While Bhakta failed to cross the river, he did manage to mount the elephant riverside and, wearing an American-flag bow tie, speechify about shoddy border protections, a moment that was enshrined on YouTube. (The border patrol eventually did take notice; the elephant was detained briefly and sprayed for fleas.)

Bhakta and I recently had dinner at the historic Shoreham Inn with his wife, Danhee Kim; his young daughter, Hannah; and a prospective employee. Aside from the gas station and convenience store up the road, it’s about the only place to gather in public in Shoreham. A dozen or so people were sitting at tables scattered around the room.

“What do you think of fracking?” Bhakta asked me in a stage whisper. “That’s how we could fire the stills.”

When Bhakta brought up fracking, I detected a sudden, pronounced lull in the conversations around us. Danhee leaned forward and said quietly, “That always happens.” 

Bhakta doesn’t exactly blend into small-town Vermont. Tonight he’s wearing pale pink pants, a white-collared shirt, and well-kept brown oxfords. He’s half Indian and half Irish, and his wife’s family is Korean. “We’re creating the first Korean-Indian-Irish Vermonters,” Bhakta said loudly.

We actually weren’t talking about fracking at all, but rather about small-town life and how rumors start and propagate. When he acquired his farm at the edge of town in 2010, the local rumor mill cranked up pretty quickly. He was laundering money for a friend, whose family is from Colombia, on a nearby farm, people said. Others told neighbors that he’d been kidnapped. “The rumors that got going were something truly spectacular,” he said. I detected a bit of pride in his comment.

Bhakta’s M.O. is not to blend in but to stand out. He’s virtually a walking billboard for Brand Bhakta. He always looks as if he’s just exited the stage of a play set in an Edwardian drawing room, wearing tailored jackets and nice shoes even when, say, hiking a hill or building a campfire. People remember him and talk about him. When developing his Vail hotel, he not only wore bow ties but also strolled about with a walking cane. People remember that, too.

“Look, I’m a salesman with a bit of P.T. Barnum in me,” he once explained to whiskey writer Davin de Kergommeaux, “and I like that.”

Bhakta also has a surfeit of what people sometimes refer to as “boyish charm.” This overlooks the fact that boys are not always charming. Last fall, we were walking down the dirt road near the barn that houses his distillery, talking about the business, when a neighbor slowly drove by. Bhakta offered a small smile and a nod of the head, the classic New England greeting for someone known but not well. But then I looked down and noticed he had one hand cupped and he’d extended the middle finger of the other behind it. He muttered a curse after the car passed.

Bhakta’s plans and enthusiasms have led to some drawn-out spats with neighbors. George Gross and his wife, Barbara Wilson, bought a farm near WhistlePig at about the same time Bhakta arrived, with the notion of growing berries commercially. They’d heard about a fungus that thrives in ethanol vapors exhaled by whiskey barrels during the aging process (this accounts for the sooty black growth that’s commonly seen near whiskey warehouses in Scotland and Kentucky) and were worried that it would impact their crops. So before Bhakta started building out his distillery, they invoked Vermont’s Act 250, which allows community members considerable say in development decisions. Since farming operations are generally exempt from Act 250 oversight, Bhakta had ignored the paperwork. The state investigated; the dispute devolved into arcane arguments over whether the water used in making whiskey is actually an agricultural product, and so forth.

The state eventually agreed with Gross and Wilson that Bhakta was not exempt from Act 250. But it also gave Bhakta the go-ahead to build the distillery in his former dairy barn, and he was permitted to age up to 5,900 barrels on the existing property along with another 800 acres he had purchased nearby. (He’s now looking at land across the lake, in New York state, to build additional aging facilities.)

Gross told the Addison Independent he thought that “the outcome is just and it brings some closure.” But when reached by phone earlier this year, Gross refused to comment further, adding that he couldn’t be certain I wasn’t a paid spy for Bhakta. This suggested that the closure is not fully closed.

Another neighbor, whose land sits directly across a dirt road from the distillery’s back door, took Bhakta to court after he’d cut some trees on the neighbor’s property. (Bhakta says it was inadvertent and claims he apologized and offered a settlement, which was turned down.) The case is still pending; the landowner posted a large hand-painted sign clearly visible from the distillery that reads, “For Sale $1,000,000 or Keep Out.”

Few in the area were willing to comment on Bhakta for this story. “His personality gets in the way,” said one Shoreham resident. I asked another Vermonter who has been tracking Bhakta’s trajectory and didn’t want to be named whether it was Bhakta’s politics, personality, or ambition that got in the way. “All of the above,” he said.

“Yeah, there have been some problems,” agreed Sue MacIntire, the town historian. “I think it’s mostly personality. I don’t think he means it, but he just irritates people around here, especially the neighbors. Raj is kind of abrasive. He’s kind of an overgrown kid.”

* * * * *

Playing by the rules has also been an issue on the national level. The economics of whiskey are vexing. Investors spend a pile of money to make it, and then it has to sit in a barrel for years as it ages. It’s all outflow and no inflow at the start.

Bhakta figured there had to be a way to generate some cash and build a market while waiting for his whiskey to age. He didn’t have to look far. He had brought on Dave Pickerell, the former master distiller at Maker’s Mark and now a consultant, to help him design a distillery. Pickerell told him about some surpassingly fine 10-year-old Canadian rye whiskey he’d tasted at a distillery in Alberta. It had “a finish that’s so long it needs its own zip code,” Pickerell once told me. It had been distilled to add body and flavor to Canadian whiskey, which is typically a blend of rye whiskey and more neutral-tasting spirits made from various other grains.

Pickerell knew this batch was special and wanted to import and sell it, but he couldn’t find a partner. In part that was because Canadian whiskey has long had the reputation of being inferior to American whiskey. Charging a premium for it seemed a plan that would never turn a profit.

But Bhakta thought otherwise. He saw it as a marketing problem that a clever person, such as himself, could solve. And getting WhistlePig on the shelves quickly would give him a head start in cornering that premium rye market. So he and Pickerell bought about 5,000 gallons, hauled it down from Canada, and bottled it in an old milking barn. (Bhakta says his first bottling line involved two picnic tables, an 84-year-old farmer who liked whiskey, and four Middlebury students who liked weed.)

Soon after, WhistlePig Rye Whiskey started appearing on store shelves at $80 a bottle ($70 in Vermont). It drew considerable attention, mostly favorable. It earned 96 points from Wine Enthusiast—the highest rating the magazine had ever awarded a rye—and The Wall Street Journal named it one of the top five whiskeys of the year.

However, not everybody thought it was special. One of the unwritten rules of Vermont residency is that you don’t parachute into Vermont and immediately pretend to be a Vermonter. That’s doubly true for any products you make. WhistlePig was widely accused of claiming false residency, since the label prominently noted it was “hand-bottled at WhistlePig Farm, Shoreham, Vermont.” There was no mention of Canada.

That started WhistlePig off on the wrong foot for some Vermonters. “I’m very conflicted to say anything,” a former Shoreham resident told me. “From what I know, he’s really not making whiskey.” He believed the farm was simply an elaborate front for imported whiskey.

In 2015 WhistlePig was sued by a Chicago-area resident who felt grievously defrauded by claims on the label and the website, which the plaintiff alleged created the “illusion of a small farm-based operation” to justify the price. (The same plaintiff sued several other distilleries—Templeton Rye and Tito’s Vodka among them—on similar grounds, which suggests his grief may not be very profound.) Bhakta’s defense was that his label had been approved by the federal government and he was playing by the rules—after all, it was bottled at the farm.

Bhakta decided to clear the air in an interview in Whiskey Advocate, in which he spelled out in detail the story of his whiskey’s origins, talking about how much of it was barrel-aged and bottled on the Vermont farm. And he laid out his long-term strategy to make his own rye—which included using barrels from oak trees on his land.

* * * * *

Following our dinner at the Shoreham Inn, Bhakta and I drove up into the hilly farmland to his distillery on Quiet Valley Road. After the two-year legal delay caused by the wrangling over Act 250, an impressive copper still had been delivered and installed in the restored dairy barn in the fall of 2015. The still has been producing rye whiskey steadily ever since.

It was near sunset, and an employee was filling barrels stamped “Vermont estate oak” with freshly distilled rye. Full barrels sat near the door, awaiting transfer to the aging warehouses.

Bhakta looked out the door and saw the sun was spilling gold across the landscape. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go up the hill.”

We hopped into a four-wheeler and tore off along the dirt road at what some, including the passengers, might consider a reckless speed. Then he cut off and headed up between fields of rye and hay. Near the top, we talked a bit about his next battle, which is shaping up to be his most challenging.

In early 2016, two of the investors Bhakta brought on to help fund his rapid expansion suddenly sought to force him off the board. They cited mismanagement of the company, self-dealing, and “repeated unethical and unlawful behavior.” The courts issued a status quo order to keep Bhakta as CEO while the dispute wended its way through the legal process.

When we reached the top of the fields, Bhakta stopped. We looked across a valley with folds like discarded drapes burnished by the sun, and he said more quietly now that his recent troubles with his investors had forced him to refocus on what’s important: keeping the distillery going, making it a success. He said he wants this to be a model for modern agriculture—not just for the region, but nationally. I believed him.

We started back down the hill, moving from sun to shade. “I won’t let those guys take this away from me,” he muttered.

Whether it was because he loves the land and his new community, or he loves a battle and the attention it brings, I still wasn’t exactly sure. But one other thing struck me: He was sure starting to sound like a cranky old Vermonter.