Diary of a Distiller

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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Hi Folks, well the last of the work in building the brewery, then distillery, is well under way. I mentioned that we are finally installing the steam boiler for the brewery. It's a difficult and heavy job. First we took apart all the old steam pipes attached to the brew kettle, and scavenged all the pieces that we could use. Then we cleaned them up to remove mild rust and treated them to prevent further corrosion. Many are already cut to the perfect lengths and threaded at the ends. So it will save us a lot of time and work to re-use them.
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.

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Wow, the twentieth chapter of my journal, and still no distillery! Whodda thunkit? Well, it won't be much longer now. (Fingers Crossed, as well as toes, eyes, lips, legs... I must look like I have to pee REAL bad.) Anyway, I always loved to climb, as a kid, and then a teen, I would scale the highest trees in the neighborhood, always trying to get my head above the canopy. I only fell twice when branches broke. The first time was on a young willow tree when I was in 4th grade. I slightly twisted my ankle and learned that willows have weak branches for their size. I promptly went to the library and read up on trees and learned to identify them and which were strong or weak. I also moved on to climbing the sides of buildings, radio antennas, and anything else that was possibly climbable, and a few things that probably weren't. Their were no rock-climbing areas near me, so I really got into tree-climbing, sometimes even using safety ropes, and what later became known as "Buildering," climbing buildings and other structures. The neighborhood cops got to know me by name, since they found me on roof-tops, telephone poles, flagpoles, light poles, street signs, tall fences, etc. on a regular basis.

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