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.