After his 38-year-old mother died suddenly after cardiac arrest, 10-year-old Victor Harvey and his three siblings were raised by their father, a hard-working banker.
Harvey grew up in Mount Vernon, east side of Columbus, Ohio, during the early 1980s. He saw basketball as his opportunity to get into college, a feat nobody in his family had yet achieved. When his aspirations to become a professional athlete did not happen, he became a hip-hop artist and invested his earnings in real estate.
Today, the money he’s made on real estate investments is helping bankroll Harvey’s expansion of his alcohol spirits production business Victor George Spirits, known for an award-winning premium vodka brand that bears his name Victor George. He’s getting a building permit to start construction this summer on the first black-owned distillery in Fort Lauderdale.
Victory Building will be a three-story structure covering 18,000 square feet that will take 16 to 18 months to finish. The building, named after the former Victory Theatre on Sistrunk Boulevard, will include the distillery, a restaurant, tasting rooms, a cigar bar, a rooftop patio featuring a DJ on weekends and a lounge for live music. The area where the distillery will be built had been an entertainment hub for Black people in Fort Lauderdale, and the historic theater the only one they could go to until the end of segregation in 1964.
The project will cost Harvey $6 million and bring more than 100 jobs to Broward County. Late last year, Harvey secured a $2.45 million loan from the Fort Lauderdale Community Redevelopment Agency to help pay for the distillery.
“Distilleries are very popular for people to visit whether you’re local or you’re coming in from out of town,” Harvey said, in a recent interview inside his Palm Beach Distillery in West Palm Beach. “It’s exciting for people to see how things are made. Working with the City of Fort Lauderdale, we knew what needed to be fulfilled was an entertainment type of area.”
Harvey, 55, hopes Victory Building will change how craft distilleries look and improve the customer experience. Instead of only being a production center for vodka and bourbon, it will allow people to relax and smoke a cigar, eat at the restaurant, or dance the night away in between sipping a cocktail. All of this is now a possibility thanks to a Florida law that went into effect last July enabling distilleries to sell their alcohol on site.
In May, Harvey’s company released its own bourbon called Fort Mosé, named after the first free black settlement established in 1738 in what became the United States. Fort Mose, located just north of St. Augustine, played a key part in the development of colonial North America.
“I’m telling you stories, black stories that need to be told,” Harvey said, explaining how and why he decided on the name of his bourbon. “Fort Mosé, being here in Florida, as we did the research, it was a no-brainer, because most people didn’t know about it, including myself. And once I came across it, I said, ‘This is it.’”
Harvey’s new bourbon tied to a piece of Florida and American history is getting noticed quickly statewide. It will be distributed nationally. His company’s flagship vodka is sold at retailers in 45 states.
“It got a lot of attention initially,” Kaushal Karia, owner of Primo Liquors, Fine Wine, and Cigars in Fort Lauderdale, said of the Fort Mosé bourbon. “It sold about 200 bottles in the first week. People saw the attention it’s been getting online and gravitated to its story and wanted to be the first one to get their hands on it.”
As an African-American producing vodka and bourbon, Harvey is part of a small group. There are about 3,500 active licenses to make spirits in the United States, and only about 200 of them are held by independent Black-owned and operated distilleries, said Conley Fitzpatrick, marketing chief for Pronghorn, an independent business working to diversify and grow the representation of Black entrepreneurs in the spirits industry.
“We believe that every industry should reflect the consumer. … Black Americans represent about 12% of drinkers but only about 2% at the executive level,” Fitzpatrick said. “We think that (diversity) is going to be great for business.”
Harvey’s key business collaborator is Summer Piep, founder and co-owner of Harvey’s Palm Beach Distillery, Florida’s first female-owned and operated distillery he acquired in January. Piep is master distiller of Fort Mosé and other spirits in the company’s pipeline.
“I create the great products and he knows how to sell them,” Piep said. “Both of us being a minority in this industry, me being female, him being Black, is what brought us together. So let’s make something big.”
Karia, the beverage and cigar retailer, thinks Harvey’s business strategy reflects his down-to-earth personality.
“He’s doing a grassroots approach. Like if you’re sitting at the bar Eddie V’s in Las Olas, you might meet Victor there on a weeknight, and he might buy you a Fort Mosé old-fashioned,” Karia said.
“And from that experience, having met the owner, having tried his drink, and him being generous enough to buy you a nice cocktail, people become brand ambassadors. And they’re gonna come out and look for his drinks at Primo or other local retailers.”
Karia has seen that a portion of his customers want to support minority-owned spirits purveyors like Harvey who started his business in 2016.
“You see customers coming in making a conscious decision when they’re going to make a purchase,” he said. “It’s going to be a brand that’s going to be minority-owned, Black-owned, Florida-owned. That seems to be a common theme.”
This story was originally published June 19, 2022 6:30 AM.
