by tmckenzie » Fri Jun 12, 2009 9:08 pm
We have some old barrels, most are new. They are just turning a dark color. The used ones hold grape and apple brandy. The new barrels are holding bourbon, made to a recipe of 70 percent corn, 20 percent rye, and 10 percent barley malt. We also have some new barrels holding rye, made to a recipe of 80 percent rye, and 20 percent barley malt. We also have some wheat whiskey aging. Our corn whiskey, which we hope to release next month is unaged, and made from a recipe of 80 percent corn and 20 percent barley malt. Unlike a lot of microdistilleries, we use barley malt to convert the starch of our corn and rye to sugar. Most use commercial enzymes. This makes a big difference in taste. We do have some rye in small barrels that is aging a lot quicker than the 53 gallon barrels. We hope to release it a lot earlier than those barrels. We released our 2 vodkas last week. We are in wine country and have access to fine wine that we distill in to vodka. We have Vintners, which is a true grape based vodka, and Vintners Wildberry, where we take our grape vodka, and soak blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries in it, then redistill it. Good stuff. We also released seneca drums gin, a little bit heavier gin, which uses our grape spirit as it's base. We use only local, natural ingredients. However, our malt comes from elsewhere. To answer your question, we double potstill some whiskey, we designed our still so that we could do that, also we can use a thumper. We also run some of our whiskey from the pot through a couple of plates on the column. This actually makes a more full bodied product than than double pot.