Diary of a Distiller

Like usual its been a busy week. The fire grate for the copper spirits still was re-worked from square to round. I feel they overcharged me. It cost as much to re-work it as it originally cost new.

We had a few more small things to fix in the brewery. Basically, like I've mentioned before, everything that could be broken, or ruined through neglect, was. Sometimes it's difficult to order parts, they may not have been made for 20 years since the equipment was new. We had to get in touch with France and England to find new valve bodies since the rubber was fried in all the ones for the brew kettle, lauter tun, and fermenting tanks. Hopefully we can get them in the next few days and fix the valves. Otherwise they need to be replaces, at a grand or two for six of them.

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Last week was a busy, busy, week. Lots of hard work that brought us much closer to our goals of opening the brewery and distillery. At the end of the week I came down with a mild version of the flu, thanks to the open and sharing nature of my friends and partners. Finally on Saturday morning I ground to a halt at work. I was feeling pretty under the weather, not so bad I couldn't work, but my mental faculties were slowed down.

I decided to do some photography of bottles of the very rare, and out of production, Tanqueray Malacca Gin in my collection; to send to a potential customer who also collects rare spirits. As I was putting things away and moving cases around, I stumbled back in forth in a daze. Then due to my clumsiness a case of empty wine bottles fell from the top of a pallet onto my big toe. Usually I have pretty fast reactions and can catch falling stuff, or at least slow down or break their fall. This time I didn't even notice it until a few seconds after it landed, directly with the pointy corner of the case in the middle of my toe. It didn't hurt at first. Mike was near me hunting for some tools and I pointed out the case balancing on it's corner, sitting on my toe. He just shook his head and shrugged with a rueful smile. I knew it should hurt, but my reflexes were so slowed down that I felt nothing.

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Over the weekend Mike and I finished most of the pipe work for the brewery and distillery chilling system. All we now need is the pump and that project is done. I mentioned before, but we are using a 500 gallon wine chilling and clearing tank as the reservoir and cooling system for our chilling system. We had it already available, Mike had picked it up awhile ago very inexpensively, and it was just sitting there taking up room and unused. So being thrifty, we decided to make it useful once again. We ran PVC piping many months ago along the walls of the brewery / distillery; going to all the fermenters, the copper spirits still, and locations of future stills. Then we connected the brewery chilling plate and transfer system for the hot wort to the network. Finally we ran the pipe along the ceiling of the basement to the cooling tank, and prepped everything for installing the pump.

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Last Friday we took the day off from installing the steam pipes for our new brewery boiler, to bottle our first hard cider. This is the first new product to be released since I joined the team, and I had a lot of input towards its design. I have had some experience in the past creating hard ciders, both as a home brewer and wine maker, as well as commercially. Right after Mike and I shook hands to form our partnership late last November, I set off to Cornell University's Agricultural Experimental Station in Geneva, NY to take a week of workshops, primarily on advanced hard cider development and production techniques. The new information I picked up helped fine tune this cider into a great product over the past year.

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