Well, the conference was exhausting. Everyone was showing off their whiskey and moonshine and you couldn’t walk 20 feet without someone handing you a glass of bottle. I don’t want to even touch and booze for a few weeks. As I thought, my partner was overloaded with information on distilling. He is working frantically to integrate everything he learned into our business plan. Every few hours we would get together and tqalk and exchange notes about little details that we had missed, but picked up from conversations. The most important thing we came away with was information on construction.

I was also asked to be one of the judges of the spirits competition, instead of helping to coordinate it. The panel of us ten judges had to work our way through 65+ spirits in over a dozen categories. You might think this is fun, but it is very difficult work. The judging is completely blind, and all you know is the category that the spirit was submitted to. We can’t really talk much to each other, but every now and then you heard someone muttering to themselves. As the day progressed I found that I was getting more and more sensitive to some of the chemicals that are present in whiskey. they are in such tiny amounts that most people don’t notice that they are there, but it got to the point that they were becoming overwhelming to me. I’ve judged spirits before, but not whiskey, just gin and rum; as well as cocktails a few times. This became actually painful by the end of the day. Surprisingly, we found that the unaged “white” whiskey was better in most cases than the brown aged whiskey. If you want to see a list of the medalists, follow this link to my other blog, DrinkingtheWorld.com.

Hi Folks, here it is over a year later and there have been many changes. Penobscot Bay Distillery is no more. After a year of my ex partners stalling on construction, I pulled out of the project. They managed to draw out construction for so long that I ran shorter on funds than I had planned. There wasn’t much work that had to be done, but it was one excuse after another. A total of 6 weeks construction wasn’t finished after 21 months.  It makes no sense to me, after all the work I did to improve and market the winery, build the brewery, and establishing a brand; they let me down when it came to the distillery. Why?  Who knows?  I’m not going to waste my time and energy dwelling on it, I’m moving on with my life. So, I moved back to the New York City suburbs, and am working on other projects in the Spirit-ual realm.

Over the weekend we had a very busy time at the Winery. Saturday night was the culmination of a month of work by several dozen people from the area who entered in our Gingerbread House competition for charity. We have had several classes a week on how to make and decorate gingerbread houses and ended up with almost thirty contestants. There were five categories: Professional, Under 17, Traditional, Historical, and Fantasy. There were some absolutely wonderful creations, and I was surprised at the quality of all the entries, especially the fact that some of the best were by people who had never done this before.

Sunday night I went to a Sunday Night Cocktail event hosted by my friend and award winning mixologist, Lydia Reismueller, formerly of the speakeasy style cocktail bar PDT and restaurant/cocktail bar Elettaria in NYC. Lydia has been having these Sunday events for the past two months at the Westcot Forge restaurant in Blue Hill, ME and they have been a big success. I tried a few of her new creations and said my good-bye’s for the season, as she heads off to travel the world until March with her chef boyfriend. I’m already looking forward to when she starts up the Cocktail Sundays again next Spring when she comes back to manage one of the excellent, local, organic farms.

My supposed days off, Sunday and Monday, were filled with working on distilling and brewing research, writing, and consulting. Having three or four careers at the same time is getting exhausting. Tuesday we were back at the brewery, putting in some of the final touches. We still have a few more things to wrap up, but are now able to brew beer. Wednesday I got a delivery of another two tons of peach puree to make into brandy when we put the distillery online. Later in the day we did a wet run on the system, boiling water and testing how well everything works. So we’re going to brew our Old Factory Whistle Red Scottish Ale…and now it’s time for me to move on to brewing and distilling full time.

Slashfood.com / AOL.com have decided to cut all freelance writers, including me and my feature articles, as well as Diary of a Distiller, due to budget cuts. So there won’t be any posts for awhile until I get my blog, DiaryofaDistiller.com, up and running.

I’m starting off my day with a business meeting of the Maine Winery Guild. Last year I kick-started the association into forming and this will be our third business meeting. Owners of most of Maine’s 18+ wineries will be there. I also invited the owners of the State’s micro-distilleries to attend, so we can decide whether to join the Maine Winery guild, or start a separate association. I know that after-wards a few of us will be celebrating Repeal Day by tasting each others products.

After that I’ll be going back to the winery to bottle Cranberry Wine. The job just got much easier. When we bought the brewery equipment a large filter was part of the deal. We never got around to cleaning it up and using it until this week. It’s four times the size of the one we were using before. With that much more surface area the pump works much faster and easier. So running a 500 gallon tank of wine through the filter takes only forty minutes, compared with 1/2 a day or more with the old filter. Wine needs to be filtered sevral times through finer and finer levels until it is crystal clear. So what took three days before, we can now due in one day before lunchtime. Mike was practically dancing with glee.

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.

I picked up the case and heaved it over my head and back onto the pallet. Grumbling under my breath that this was going to hurt like hell. I started to make my way up the stairs to my office and as I did so my toe started to get warm, then hot, then to burn unmercifully. By the time I hobbled up the stairs and sat down at my desk in the distillery my toe really, really hurt!

You can see some photos of this in the galleries to come. Also I show a few of our 500 gallon wine fermenting and storage tanks. The reason I’m show them is to focus on the PVC piping along the ceiling above the tanks. This is for venting CO2 from the tanks, to the outside. Each tank that has active fermentation still in progress has tubing that comes out of an airlock and goes into the CO2 vent pipe. This way the basement winery doesn’t become filled with CO2, killing us. That just wouldn’t be fun.

Early Monday morning the boiler guys came to start the boiler installation. We are usually closed Sundays and Mondays, but Mike went in to work with them; while I was off down to Rockport, near where I used to live in Rockland / Owls Head, to meet with a Steel Work company to discuss my latest project. The boiler guys spent several days working on the installation, and will come back next week to finish it.

We started with several different batches of sweet apple cider, fresh pressed from locally grown apples. Each batch had a different blend of apples and was fermented at cool temperatures using different yeasts. After the primary fermentation, the cider was taken off the lees (old, spent, dead and dormant yeast that settles to the bottom of the fermenting tank.) Then put into new tanks to age slowly for months and months, all at cool temperatures in our wine cellar. The cool temperature and slow, slow, slow, fermentation ensure that there will be lots of fresh apple flavor in the finished cider; as well as the tones and notes from the fermentation. Since each batch was made from different apples, and different yeasts; they had a completely different character from each other.

One of the craft secrets to creating a great hard cider is long and slow aging; and this we had done. The other is blending the cider. If you just make one, huge, batch of hard cider using all your apples, it tends to taste flat and one dimensional after fermentation. But if you make several smaller batches, with different apples in each, and later blend them carefully together; you get a final cider that is greater than the sum of its parts. Really great ciders save back some of the final blend to age even longer, and this is added to the blend the following year/s to bring in even greater complexity.

We here at Winterport Winery / Penobscot Bay Distillery & Brewery live by the New England and Maine way of thrift. As Francis H. Sisson said almost a hundred years ago, “Thrift was never more necessary in the world’s history than it is today.” But there are many sides to thrift. As Orison Swett Marden said, “Thrift means that you should always have the best you can possibly afford, when the thing has any reference to your physical and mental health, to your growth in efficiency and power.” This holds true in business, as in personal matters. So, while we use and re-use what we can, we also make sure to use the best quality available as well. So in matters of construction, if it is good, solid, and recyclable, it’s back in the game. If not, then chuck it out; and replace with the best available.

Just as a side note: the type of pipe we are working with is called “Black Pipe”, the type of steel pipe used for natural gas, hot water and steam circulation in boilers, and it is made of heavy steel. It’s thick, strong, but not as hard as stainless steel; and so more malleable. It expands and contracts better and is able to handle shifting; that would crack the harder, but more brittle stainless steel. You need heavy equipment to cut and tread the pipe ends. So we rented a pipe cutter/threader to do the job. This pipe is connected with even more malleable cast iron fittings. All of which are very solid and long lasting, but weigh a TON.

The second time I had a tree branch break on me was when I was nineteen and I messed up my right knee real bad for the first time and was on crutches for awhile. (Note: Do not have keg parties in trees without safety harnesses. I learned the hard way.) As soon as I was healed I fell off the roof of a house during a thunderstorm. It had been real fun running along the long, low, slanted roof in the pouring rain and sliding down it; and then to bring yourself to a stop before you got to the edge. One time I tried to do a stunt from a cowboy movie and grab the gutter as I slid off, and do a drop kick onto a friend. Oops! There went my other knee. That was a great summer! As I got older I started working for Outward Bound and was always up in trees on challenge/ropes courses and got so comfortable I could make it through these airborne obstacle courses 30-60 feet in the air, blindfolded.

Every now and then over the years I would put in a stint in contracting and construction, thereby ending up on ladders and rooftops. Well, unsecured ladders started to scare the hell out of me real quick. I had a best friends father fall and break his neck when a ladder slipped. A fellow worker had a ladder slip and he broke both his wrists. I started getting really conservative when it came to ladder safety. Even when setting up access to a ropes course I always made sure the ladder was secured at the top so it couldn’t slip. Even after all my years going up and down ladders I am still fearful. But I also stubborn and refuse to be intimidated or controlled by anything other than myself.

As you may have noticed as I write my journal, things are speeding up here at our facility. I am starting to feel like an expectant papa once again. The feeling is almost indescribable; exciting and scary, filled with impatience and frustration, and every now and then a sense of wonder. We are now finishing the construction that had been put on hold way too many times, until we got certain parts and pieces of equipment. When we first got the brewery equipment we knew it was a good deal. What we didn’t realize at first was how badly the equipment had been misused. It came to us third-hand. The first owners knew what they were doing, but the second owners were clueless. Everything that could be broken, was. Fixing it all has cost almost as much as the original price. You wouldn’t believe how many hours have been spent on it as well. We have been building, rebuilding, cleaning, polishing, taking things apart, repairing them, and putting them back together. Manuals were ordered, read, studied, and memorized. I see the disaster of equipment in all stages of use and misuse, then partly dismantled and in a state of repair; littering what was once the beautiful and clean home of my future brewery/distillery. Finally it is all slowly coming together.

Do you remember the 70′s TV Show “The Six Million Dollar Man”? At the start of each episode they say “Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.” Well that’s what’s going on here. I feel like we are team of surgeons, or maybe mad scientists… re-building a living being from the horribly injured wreck of what once was great. Sometimes the surgery is detailed. Piecing together tiny wires, resistors, connections. Other times you reach for the biggest hammer or wrench you can find. We are discarding old and outdated parts of the brewery and replace them with the best, cutting edge, adding new technology. Computers, sensors, probes, you name it. We will rebuild it. Better than it was before. Better, Stronger, Faster. It will be The Bionic Brewery! (And hopefully not cost six million dollars!)

After the jump are photos of the first part of installing the steel vent pipe. It was heavy as hell, and I had to lift it into place by hand as the brew kettle was jockeyed into position, that had to be exact to within a 1/2 inch so it could connect to the pre-cut and fitted pipes that attach to other pieces of equipment.

In the afternoon we drove from Blue Hill down to Rockport for the the First Annual Mid-Coast Food and Wine Festival which was coordinated by my friend Bettina of Cellardoor Winery and Cathe of the State of Maine Cheese Company. It was like a reunion in that I saw so many friends who I only get to see on rare occasions, now that I moved up north 55 miles to the border between Mid-Coast and Down-East Maine. There were several wineries represented; my friend Keith’s Sweetgrass Farm Winery & Distillery, my friends Buddy and Holly of Savage Oakes Winery, and of course we at Winterport Winery had a table at the tasting. Mike and Joan’s daughter and her husband were there representing our winery, as I played hooky for the day. Another friend, Brian, who just started up Oyster River Winegrowers was supposed to be there, but couldn’t make it for some reason. That’s too bad because I haven’t yet tried his white wine that came out this summer.

At the food stalls I ran into several more friends. Ann Marie of Ann Marie’s Kitchen was there serving great pork cooked medium rare and juicy after being marinated in her Secret Sauce. Ann Marie is a firecracker and I like her and her fiance a lot. They don’t live to far from me and I have to get together with them soon to kick back and hang out, although hanging out with Ann Marie is usually anything but quiet, more like being in the presence of a human dynamo that’s putting out 10,000 volts.

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.

Well, the brewery/distillery had another slowdown. By this time I am amazed I have any hair left, let alone a full head. I have been pulling at it non-stop for months now. Well, it seems to be straighter than before, and lighter in color as well. Interestingly, my mustache and sideburns have started to go white in patches. I guess my hair is as stressed as I am. The latest is that the boiler quotes were way too high again from the last dealer we spoke to, and so we are getting in more quotes. These guys can’t seem to understand that we don’t want or need some multi-million btu steam boiler, but something on the smaller side.

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I  had a nice time last weekend wandering the woods. I spent Sunday with the Maine Mycological Association on a foray for wild mushrooms, then some hikes looking for wild teas and edibles on Monday.

Tuesday it was back to work. I have been researching many products I want to develop and have been seeking out old texts on distilling, wine making, etc. I spent my mornings brainstorming and working on possible recipes. I won’t say what they are quite yet, but when I get them into production in a few months, I’ll tell you more.

Tuesday afternoon we got in a nice large shipment of glass. Bottles that is. There is a bit of a global glass shortage and we have had certain wine bottles on back order for months and months; especially needed are the 375 ml. frosted bottles for one of our dessert wines, raspberry Rain. We haven’t been able to meet the demand and actually took it off our current list for almost five months since we didn’t have any bottles. We do have a full tank of the wine aging in the cellar, so bottling is the focus for the week.
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Wow, it’s already August 22nd and the summer is almost over. The past three days have been the best weather we have seen since early July. Until this recent weather change we had only two sunny days out of the prior 41. Now it’s nice and sunny, and will be for a week at least, but already there is an Autumn nip to the air. High 70′s with blue skies and puffy clouds during the days, it was actually cool enough last night that I had to close the windows and turn on the heat.

You’ve heard me complaining again and again about how we have so much equipment back ordered and it’s keeping us hanging on building the distillery and brewery. Finally it looks like some of the last obstacles are getting cleared up. Our propane burner for one of the stills arrived yesterday. Of course it seems that the box of parts opened up during shipping and was re-boxed and delivered to us missing one part. One of the air venturis is floating around out there in the back o some truck. So we have to return the burner and get a new one shipped to us. Personally I felt that just the missing part needed to be shipped, but that’s not how the shipper and seller feel.

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I’m going to keep it brief this week. It’s been hectic up here in Maine for me, and I am heading out for the weekend for a much needed vacation. Maine’s nickname is “The Vacationland,” so how come I feel like I need to get away to get mine? I thought I had a vacation early this summer around the Fourth of July, but it wasn’t as relaxing as I needed. I was so set on relaxing that I never did. Then I was in New Orleans for eight days for Tales of the Cocktail, but that turned out to be hectic work as well. So I’m heading down to the Hampton’s on Long Island in New York for the weekend. I’ll be seeing some of my oldest friends who I have known since I was in my late teens. It’s been a year or two since I last saw some of them and it should be fun.

So it’s wine making time for us at Winterport Winery, and bottling time as well. We have been making blueberry wine this week. The wild Maine blueberries are in season and we are making the most of it. These tiny, low bush blueberries have an intense, sweet flavor. Much better than those giant blueberries you see most of the time in the supermarkets. We have had an order placed for a year waiting for harvest time and earlier this week we got our delivery of organically grown wild blueberries. Joan scooped up four quarts for me to take home and packaged up a many more for the rest of the crew. I figure I’ll take mine to the party and make blueberry pancakes and preserves for breakfast.

As for bottling, our sparkling apricot wine, Fancy That, became the star at a bottling party Wednesday night. After closing for the day we sat down with a few pizzas and were joined by friends of the winery, come to add a few more pairs of much needed hands. To efficiently bottle the sparkling wine at any type of speed it takes us eight people. A few more would have been better, but at least we had the critical number. This is only the second time we have bottled a sparkling wine and while we have some equipment on order to make it easier, right now it’s a pretty exhausting and frazzling process.I’m glad that it was only a couple of hundred gallons that had to be bottled.

Our line-up of bottlers started with another Jonathan, a husky teen age football player, at the start of the line taking care of bottles. His job is loading and unloading cases of empty bottles, placing them out on a table, and arranging them at Mike’s side. Mike was on the filling machine, a huge gadget I like to call The Spaceship, because it looks like a art deco version of one of those old Mercury capsules from the beginning of the space program. Fred took the filled bottles and rammed in the corks, with Jody doing the same and also dropping the wire cages on top. I wound the cages on with a small spinning device Mike had made. Then I handed the bottles to Jim, Jonathan’s dad, who wiped them down, cleaning any spilt wine off. He then passed them to his wife who put the foil covers on and passed them to Joan to be put back in their boxes.

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Well, most folks have a dry job, but mine is wet. Making, serving, and enjoying fine libations is a hard and trying occupation. If you are one of those dry types, it just isn’t your calling. Me, I like it wet. I lived near a dry county once. I shudder to think about it. Yup, I like it wet. But in some things moderation is key. Until recently I wondered what those things were. Now I know. Sometimes it can be too wet. I guess it’s time to finally break out the umbrellas.

It’s been a dreary week here in Winterport, Maine. Actually a dreary summer is more like it. The weather has been the same as far back as mid-June. Hazy, rainy, humid, hot, wet, yuch. I’m normally like a duck and love wet weather, but some times it gets to be Just Too Much.

One day last week the weather broke and it was a Beautiful Maine Summer Day. Yes, it has to be capitalized. Warm with Cool Breezes, Sunny, Occasional Puffy Clouds Decorating the Skies, the Smell of Green Growing Things All Around and the Scent of the Ocean on the Wind. Not too hot, not too cool, as Goldilocks said, “This is just right.” Well, that lasted all of one day.
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Building our brewery and distillery is much like building a wall. first you have to lay the foundation. Then the first course of bricks, then corners, edging, etc. If you goof up in one area, it affects the whole thing. So you have to tear it down, correct the problem or make the change, and start all over again. As you can see above, we are taking apart every piece of equipment, one by one, and cleaning sterilizing them, replacing any wort out or broken parts, and putting them back together.That specific piece of equipment with the parts laid out on the floor is the diverter and chilling plate. It’s the arteries and veins of the whole brewery. By placing the elbow joints in various configurations we can send water or wort (freshly brewed but unfermented beer) to any piece of equipment such as fermenters, filters etc. and heat or chill it.

Well, this has been an intense week. As I mentioned, a few weeks ago we got out federal brewery permit, but the state permit is the one that makes us official. On Tuesday the state inspector came, and even though we still have lots of work to do before we can start brewing, we now have our state and federal brewery permits and are an official micro-brewery. Hooray! Now we just have to locate the rest of the equipment we need and finish putting it all together. Then we can work on recipes for our beers.

Once the brewery is up and running it won’t take much at all to finish off the distillery. Of course the simple, small distillery I imagined at the start of this whole journey, is nothing compared to what is in store. One small still is rapidly becoming two, then three…
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There is absolutely nothing worse than having to travel when ill, and then get rescheduled. Last time this happened I was quite ill after returning to the US from a voyage around the world. I got stuck in a blizzard and it took several days to get home, all the while shivering in unheated airports. I ended up losing my hearing for several weeks and so sick i was in bed for three months. Well, at least this trip wasn’t as horrific; just maddening.

Usually I’m quite happy to receive lots of goodies at events, although it is starting to get a bit more difficult to impress me. Well, Tales of the Cocktail certainly did! Sadly, I got sooo much schwag that I had to give most of it away or leave it for housekeeping at the hotel. The above photo is less than one days worth of stuff! By the way, there is a difference between swag and schwag, and what I got was a nice mix of the two. I kept the Plymouth Gin tips clock, the cool tiki cocktail stirrers, a bunch of nice notebooks and cocktail books, cocktail kits, and the dozen Riedel crystal spirits glasses; which were a nuisance to get home but much appreciated.

As I wrote last week I had several friends in town on vacation. We traveled all over and ate our way up and down the coast. I ditched the camera for awhile so I could stay in the moment so I can’t show you most of our meals, except for one day when we stuffed ourselves on local specialties. Maine Lobsters and Glidden Point & Pemmaquid oysters. I had a specific request from Joe Distefano for raw oysters, a favorite of his in hot weather, and it sure has been warm out the past week.

So we took off on a drive to get the best and freshest. We went direct to Glidden Point Oyster Sea Farm and picked up a dozen fresh Glidden Point’s that had been in the water just a few hours earlier. Then to Oyster River Lobster Company for some Pemmaquid oysters and eight 1.5 lb. soft shell lobsters. (Remember Oyster River Lobster Company? I wrote about their famous Blue Lobster and their amazing Lobster Pies.)

When we got home I shucked the oysters and steamed up the lobsters and we set down to a feast. Just a word of warning. If you take several guys away from their girlfriends for a week, add in several bottles of cold and crisp white wine, and good food; it can get rather silly out.

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Since I last updated my journal I have supposedly been on vacation. Different groups of friends came to visit and so at first it was work, as I gave them in-depth tours and tastings at the winery and brerwery. I helped out a bit at the same time by doing some tastings for visitors, because everyone else was busy as can be. Mike, Joan, Jody, and Fred were making deliveries, bottling wine, disassembling and cleaning the new brewery equipment, researching what other odds and ends of stuff we need to replace, locating manuals and technical info on the brewing system, etc.

A few mornings I let my guests sleep in and helped tidy up the brewery/distillery. Mundane things like sorting through garbage for nuts and bolts, valves, gaskets, and anything else that might conceivably be of use. The previous owners of the equipment had to move everything out fast from the old location and some important odds and ends had somehow made it into garbage bags topped with refuse. I’m glad that we ended up with a few of the garbage bags, even if it it wasn’t pleasant to dive into them, because solid stainless steel valves, tubes, etc. are quite pricey and it was worth it to save every one we can.

On Independence day my buddies Joe and Rob joined me for a weeks vacation, and we went in to Bangor to for the parade during the morning and the fireworks at night. I’ve been to quite a few great, small town parades since I moved to Maine a little over a year ago. This wasn’t one of them. It was a bit mellower than I expected but still interesting. I always like to take some great photos of characters in the crowds dressed in weird outfits, or some candid shots of overwhelmed kids, harried parents, and calm seniors enjoying the sights.

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Happy Independence Day Everyone, and X-mas in July too!

Well if it isn’t one thing it’s another. We have been at a standstill in building The Distillery, again. We’ve been back ordered for six weeks on delivery of a large, low pressure, multi-ring propane burner to heat the still. The large size we need limits us, and seems to be unavailable in the US, except from one company who imports them from overseas. I have been looking to order a smaller, temporary version that I hope to use for when we build the stills heating unit, called the firebox. It is going to be basically a brick oven that heats the still from below with a direct propane flame. Since we are a commercial space with an indoor set-up we want safety to be the #1 priority. So our firebox has to be well ventilated with an outside air intake and a flue to exhaust the unit up through the roof like a chimney on a fireplace.

I have also been searching like crazy on the Internet for stainless steel fermenting tanks and other pieces of equipment that I hope to get cheap. They’re hard to find and expensive, and we need them so we can finish building the rest of the distillery, and maybe get a small bit of brewing done as well. Our brewery permit should come through in the next few weeks and we want to make a small batch of beer for the fun of it. We don’t really plan on being a full scale brewery at this time because the equipment is so expensive. So we hope to pick up odds and ends, here and there, over the next few years. I’d love to have a full scale brewery as well as the distillery, but just don’t see it happening any time soon.

Last week I was warned by my partners, Mike and Jody, that on Monday I had to have my camera and be ready for a road trip. They wouldn’t say where or why, but that I could only make one phone call, if I even had cell phone service. Then they clammed up and wouldn’t say more, letting me stew on it all weekend.

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Some times you need to work like mad, other times you want to just chill out and wallow around enjoying life and making a pig of yourself. Today started like the former, and ended up the latter. Or was it the other way around?

When I got back to the winery / distillery everything was quiet since we are waiting on back orders of equipment, and so construction is delayed, again, like usual. Last Saturday morning I wandered around taking photos of the outside of the facility and our retail store. It’s Spring in Maine, what is usually called early summer elsewhere in the US, and the trees are starting to get lush and flowers are blooming. The Penobscot River’s stately flow down to the bay ebbs and flows quite radically with the tides. We are ten miles up from the ocean, but still get tides of around 12.5 feet. Winterport got its name because it was exactly that; a winter port to keep ships safe from the violence of Nor’easters, those intense storms that come in from the North East off of the Atlantic. They’re like a winter version of a hurricane at times, although they can form at any time of year. Here’s a glimpse of our building, the view of the Penobscot River across the street, our retail store, and the art gallery. The building doesn’t look like much right now after a hard winter, but we’ll spruce it up a bit when we get the chance. You’ll be surprised by the inside and we’re mighty proud of our place.

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So, last week I showed you a gallery of photos of us framing out walls, putting up drywall, prepping them, and priming the paint. This week I will show you how we painted the future Penobscot Bay Distillery & Brewery at Winterport Winery. Because we have windows on the second floor of Pairings Food and Wine Culinary & Education Center looking down into the distillery, we decided to splash a little color around. The main outside wall we left a nice crisp white. This wall is where we will have all the equipment stationed and a plain and simple background will be best to showcase all the copper, stainless steel, and brick nicely.

The interior as a whole was mind-numbingly bright and white. I felt like an Oompa Loompa in Willy Wonka’s factory working in the TV Room. (Especially the Gene Wilder version, which I feel caught the original book better than the Depp version.) It was scary how white and bright the room was, so we decided to splash some color around. We looked at color chips for a week or so, and then went with ones that we felt portrayed the image of various of the “Brown” spirits. Scotch, Bourbon, Rye, Cognac, Rum, etc. Then we threw a pair of accent lamps on the wall with aim-able lights to leave on at night for a soft glow of the equipment.

Yes, I know this is a commercial /industrial facility. But I’m the one who is going to have to be in there for hours and hours each day. So much so, that I am setting up a office in the distillery so I can write and do other business while the still chugs along. With distilling slow is good, but since a run can take twelve hours I need some way to keep my sanity. So an interesting and calming paint job, plus the ability to kick back and write for you guys, seems to be a working solution. Of course there was another reason we wanted to have a nice paint job for the facility… Continued after the jump. >

Photo gallery at end of entry.

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In the past few weeks I have complained about how we have been held up for months waiting for the gas lines to be installed. Well they finally were. A simple job that took them three hours, but a several month wait for them to show up. Now at last we can finish ordering equipment and building the facility.

The distillery didn’t look like much when we first started construction back at the beginning of February 2008. It had been a storage room for holding bottles and equipment for Winterport Winery and was just a big, barely used space with half finished walls, some painted and others just framed out.

As you see above in the rough blueprint of the floor plan, the facility is a decent size, but not too large. It’s apx. 13×44 feet with a few extra areas at the front end under some stairs for storage and at the rear for sinks and a refrigerator for yeast and other supplies that need to be kept cool. We were in no rush with the construction, because, although I had ordered the still in mid-December, it wouldn’t be built and delivered until the end of March. But I was still in a hurry to try and get things done, although so many things were out of my control that I was totally stressed out all the time. To find out more, read on after the jump.

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In the beginning of this journal, Diary of a Distiller, I told you a little about my early life, and how I entered the world of food, wine, and fine spirits. As I mentioned, I became disillusioned with my life and plunged into the world of food and beverages. I started a journey and as I walk down this road I hope that the bricks become yellow, then golden; and don’t just crumble away.

I’m still working hard on my still as I told you last week, buffing it to a mirror shine. I put some fancy and expensive protective finish on the Georgia Ridge Rocket still head and the top of the kettle to see how it looks. It’s not perfect. You don’t have the same intensity of a mirror shine or that silky, sexy smooth, almost oily texture, as you run your hand along it, as there is without the protective coat; but it still looks darn good.

I put the whiskey head on the kettle to hold it steady and started buffing that as well. About an hour later, when I was halfway through I decided to clean it off with some denatured alcohol to see how much of a shine I have. It was looking very nice when I noticed that some of the alcohol had dripped down onto the part of the kettle that I had already sealed and the finish was starting to turn white. I grabbed a cloth to wipe the alcohol off and realized that the alcohol had dissolved the sealant completely. Aaaargh!

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