Five Star Distributing shares facts, facility with local business people
(Talk of the Town photos by Jennifer Zartman Romano) Local business representatives enjoyed lunch and a tour of Five Star Distributing on Friday. Above, on the tour, guests walk into the large warehouse area. Below, Five Star Distributing not only dispatches beer deliveries from their Columbia City location, but houses a working graphic arts office, making signs, t-shirts and other marketing materials. Art director Michael MacLeod, below in the graphic arts office, checks the status of a project.
By Jennifer Zartman Romano
It’s amazing that within the walls of a 95,000 square foot facility, with close to 100 employees busily at work, an estimated three million cases of beer are dispatched to an area covering roughly 5,000 square miles in a 12-county area surrounding Whitley County. 
Local business representatives learned that and more Friday when they had the unique opportunity to tour the bustling Five Star Distributing facility in Park 30 just east of Columbia City.
Welcoming the group was Five Star Distribution president Stan Ziherl and Jon Leetz, executive vice president of North Coast Distributing, of which Five Star Distributing is a subsidiary.
For a facility with so much going on during their 24-hour a day, five day work week, Five Star Distributing was surprisingly quiet during Friday’s tour.
According to Leetz, that was because most of the company’s sales representatives were out in the field and their network of deliveries was well underway. In the main warehouse storage area, an area that is inventoried daily and houses approximately 200,000 cases of beer at any one time, was nearly silent --- save one worker quietly sweeping the aisles between mountainous pallets stacked high with cases of beer in every brand imaginable.
On June 27, 2005, North Coast Distributing bought out the former City Beverage company and it became Five Star Distributing. Originally located in Huntington, Five Star Distributing moved to Whitley County thanks to the efforts of the local Economic Development Corporation a year ago.
Five Star Distributing carries 100 brands of beer from 50 different suppliers, selling those beverages, in bottles, cans and kegs, to retailers. Leetz said they have approximately 280 off-premise customers and supply beverages to some 700 restaurants, bars, taverns and other facilities.
While many of the varieties they carry are domestic, well-known brands of beer, they also carry smaller, less well-known varieties as well, including a number of foreign brews. Their top sellers are Miller’s and Coors Light. The Miller’s brand alone can be purchased in about 17 different ways, Leetz said, when you consider the packaging and quantity.
Leetz said customer’s palates typically require different varieties of beer during summer and winter months. In the winter, he said, people enjoy dark, stout beer. In contrast, during the warmer days of summer, people like their beer sweeter and lighter.
According to Leetz, this year marks the 50th year since the invention of the aluminum can and 75 years since the end of Prohibition, both important dates for the beer industry.
While many think New Year’s Eve or St. Patrick’s Day might be the biggest beer consumption night, those at Five Star Distributing know the real answer: the night before Thanksgiving. We’ll let you determine why that might be!
In addition to sharing many excellent facts about beer and about their unique business operating here in Whitley County, Leetz also offered some helpful advice as well.
“Heat is an enemy of beer,” Leetz said. “If you keep beer cold and dark, you can keep it for a year – but left in a hot trunk, it will skunk in hours.”