Diary of a Distiller

Wow, it's the first weekend of Autumn and in marshy areas and along ponds and rivers the leaves are starting to turn red. It's only the first hint of color in most places, but it's that time of year again. My favorite time of year. The nights have already gotten cool enough that I have had the heat on for more than a week and that wonderful smell of woodsmoke from my neighbors' fireplaces drifts by every now and then. Time sure flies. It's been almost ten months since I first met Michael, Joan, and Jody; my partners here in Winterport; and eight to nine months since we first started building the brewery & distillery. A Loooong nine months! I had hoped for a small distillery that would be up and running by Memorial Day. Then I hoped for a small brewery and distillery and hoped it would be up and running after nine months of gestation, but alas, that was not meant to be. Now we are ten times the size we originally planned and will grow even more.

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After a hectic week in NYC I finally made it back up to Maine for a relatively a quiet and relaxing weekend. That is if you call driving 160 miles round trip on Saturday relatively quiet and relaxing. And that's after driving the 470 miles from NY City back to Winterport on Friday. Well, it's Maine; driving is part of the deal. You have to go quite a bit to get from place to place.

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The past week has been more focused on my career as a Food / Spirits writer, than on the distillery. I am in NY City covering several events which I will post about in the next week or so. One is a bacon tasting, hosted by my friend Josh Ozersky, of Grub Street. Another is a tour of a underground Chinese food malls in Flushing Queens. I found out about these food malls, which remind me of ones I ate at in my travels in China a few years ago. The NY Times and other sources have covered them a bit in the past few months, but I'll talk about two of my favorite stands. One has a fantastic "Lamb Burger" and "Cold Skin" which isn't. The other has a fabulous lamb soup with hand pulled noodles six feet long.

Also this week I had to connect with my friends in the cocktail business. I have been to tiki bars, rooftop bars, bars with hidden entrances, bars in train stations, ones with unpublished addresses, floating spirits events, etc. I'll tell you more about some of these later as well.
So everyone have a great weekend. I'll be driving five hundred miles back home to represent Winterport Winery at the Mid-Coast Food and Wine Festival in Maine.

As it has been for the past few weeks, and will continue for the next few months, this is wine making time. We are making every kind of wine you can imagine, and bottling as much as possible as well, to empty out fermenting tanks so we can start new batches. Our total wine capacity in tanks is around 7,000 gallons between fermenting and storage, and we are at around half that right now. The amount in tanks changes weekly as we start new batches or bottle mature ones. The beginning of the week was spent on labeling bottles we filled last week, but didn't have labels for. They arrived just a day or two after we needed them, so we were able to finish off that batch of cranberry wine and it's now ready for the holidays.

Then we bottled up the last of the strawberry wine, which should last us to next strawberry season. We started up some pear wine and apple wine and will be making quite a bit of both of these, especially the apple wine. Some of that will be ear-marked for when we get the distillery up and running, so we can make a Calvados style aged apple brandy.

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