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.