How Dirty Dill Pickle-Infused Vodka Distilled Success

In this ongoing series, we are sharing advice, tips and insights from real entrepreneurs who are out there doing business battle on a daily basis. (Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Dan Graves is the Managing Member and CEO of Dirty Dill, the pickle-infused vodka that has seen phenomenal growth since its launch in 2022. “We started here in Colorado and are now in 10 states and will be in 12 by the end of the year,” he told Entrepreneur. Here he shares his brand’s story and his best advice to entrepreneurs looking to launch.

Please give us the elevator pitch for Dirty Dill.
It’s all about pickle shots! Pickles have been trending up for many years. Everybody’s making pickle chips and pickle almonds and pickle everything. But what we didn’t see a lot of, especially when we started, was pickle alcohol. A lot of easy drinking spirits are super sugary. We wanted to grab that health-conscious consumer who says, ‘Hey, I can drink a pina colada, but I know I’m not going to wake up feeling very good.’ So, we went the savory route to give consumers an alternative. And we also gave them our fun pickle mascot guy, who has really been great with helping us connect with customers on social media.

Credit: Dirty Dill

When did you launch?
We launched in March of 2022. That was our first month in the market. There were about two and a half years of just coming up with the idea, the branding, the name, formulating, getting a business plan and a go-to-market plan together. It takes forever to get licensed and all that stuff in this business.

Did you work in the spirits industry before this?
This was my entry. I was running a construction company. I’ve always toyed around with different entrepreneurial ventures. I tried to do some app stuff that didn’t work out. I think that’s what separates entrepreneurs, the willingness to take risks and say I don’t need to know everything, I just want to jump in and I’ll figure it out as I go.

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Do you remember when the idea hit you?
Pickle shots have been a big thing in Denver bars for years. And I noticed that all of the bars made it themselves with just pickle juice and vodka. They’re always a hit, and they’re delicious. And I just remember being out one night, maybe in 2018 or 2019, and I said, “This needs to be packaged. This needs to be in liquor stores.” So we got to work on figuring out how to put this in a bottle and get it on shelves.

Any big surprises along the way of figuring out the business?
Yeah, I still run into surprises a few years in! One of the pieces that took some time to figure out was production. We want to be this multi-million-dollar pickle shot company, but how do you produce enough and get it into the bottle? We started early on with hand-pumping bottles and hand-pumping shooters, and it was exhausting work. We’d get done with the day and realize it wasn’t enough to fulfill orders, much less grow this thing. That’s when we realized we needed to put much more capital into production. This is a very capital-intensive industry.

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Did you get investors?
We were partially self-funded. We each put in a little bit of money to get the warehouse, get licensing, get branding going, and all that. And then we raised a little bit of money from some outside investors, a real estate group here in Colorado that was crushing it. But as I said, this is a capital-intensive company, so we quickly went through that money and it’s like, crap, it’s time to raise again. And so we’ve had multiple capital raising stages. It becomes a little easier, but it is still far from easy. I’ve learned that you can’t be afraid to ask people if they’d be interested in investing — you never know who is connected to whom and what opportunities might come of it.

Credit: Dirty Dill

What’s it like seeing your product out in the wild?
It’s one of the best feelings in the world when you start seeing it on the shelves. Then you start seeing it in the bars, and then you start taking shots with other people, and you see their reaction. And one of the coolest things was when we went out of state. Our first expansion was Illinois, and I remember I went to Chicago for a market visit and saw our product on the shelves of another state. That is one of the most motivating things you’ll have.

Your biggest advice to people thinking about launching their own business?
Dive in before you even know what you’re doing. Have the risk tolerance to say, “I’m gonna learn on the go. I’m going to learn more every single week, and that’s how I’m going to get to the next point.” You need to dive in, and you’re going to have some failures. You’re going to hit your head hard, but you’ve got to get up and fail forward.

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