A few days ago I posted a “Position Wanted” on the artisanal distillers online discussion forum, of which I am one of the two administrators. Amazingly, by the end of the business day I had been contacted by seven distilleries or distilleries in planning. I ended up being hired by two as a consultant, and was offered a job as master distiller for a rum distillery on a Caribbean island. I turned down the distiller position, it wasn’t the right distillery for me to work at and I don’t think I want to work for someone else. I’d rather have my own place. The following day I was contacted by a brand new, local distillery  about 20 minutes away. I went for a visit, and we  discussed collaborating on some distilling projects together. Possibly we will be making my late 19th century style, barrel aged peach brandy. I’ll have to go back up to Maine to get my distillery equipment down to NY. Hopefully this will be in the next week or so. If the project gets up and running I’ll post about it, including photos.

I am rebuilding this site, chapters and photos will be posted as fast as I can get it up and running. Chapters One through Thirty of Diary of a Distiller were originally published at AOL.com / Slashfood.com on the dates indicated. While you are waiting for me to move the content here, you can read the first 30 chapters on Slashfood: http://www.slashfood.com/category/diary-of-a-distiller/

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, and going to start a much bigger and better distillery than I originally planned. It may take awhile, but not too long.

So, I moved back to the New York City suburbs and I am in discussion with several groups about starting up a distillery again. It will be located somewhere in NY State. Whether in the NYC Metro area, or an hour or so upstate I haven’t decided yet. Currently my distilling equipment is in storage, but my plans are to move on with the project.

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  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.

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…

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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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. >

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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!