#micro-distillery

[mr-c-c]

This is intriguing. I do hope it becomes a success. Good to see businesses being built in the local economy.

First of its kind micro-distillery planned for north of Prince Albert

Prince Albert's Drew Martin dreams of one day see his brand of spirit sold at a Roughriders' game in Regina, o...

[thespiritedgrain]

The Social Still Rye Whiskey is distilled and bottled by a relatively young distillery in Bethlehem, PA. Their efforts, while ambitious, tend to fall short of mature, well balanced Rye Whiskey.  Social Still lists the grain mix as 70% rye and 30% malted barley and the bottle I picked up is labeled as batch 01, bottle 115, and states that it has been aged 196 days. That’s just a little more than 6 months, folks.  I get the impression that someone might be rushing things a bit here, because this spirit doesn’t seem quite done yet.

Complete review here...

[lifeofawhiskeydrinker]

Good article from Slate:

Craft Whiskey Isn’t Necessarily Better

[lifeofawhiskeydrinker]

I just found out a micro-distillery that will specialize in rye whiskey is opening up in my town. I'm pretty jazzed about it, and I'm wondering what you think of the micro-distillery movement and if you've gotten the chance to sample any of this small-batch whiskey.

No doubt this question is a can of worm. I’m going to answer in full, so I apologize for the length. To keep it simple I am whole heartily in support of the micro-distillery movement. When it comes to doing things on a small, local, craft, and sustainable level, I am almost always in support. And the industry as a whole does need some new blood to come in and mix things up. Yet, the largest mistake, the one I think which is central to the whole debate going on, is to assume that the micro-distillery movement is congruous with the micro-brewing movement in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. You hear many boutique guys saying things like, “micro-distilling is where micro-brewing was 20 years ago.” In all reality this is not, if only partially, true. The claim is that, just like the giant breweries (bud, miller, etc) who dominated the playing field for so many years, and gradually let quality decline through increased “proficiencies” and additions of cheap adjuncts (rice or whatever), that large distilleries have done the same – let quality decline in favor of quantity. Now, as has been declared by some micro-distillers, they have come along to “save” whiskey. The problem with these claims is they aren’t really true. First, the whiskey industry has taken a very different path than the brewing industry has and the quality you can find on a whole is very good. Second, the micro-distilling “industry” on a whole has not been very successful (yet) on creating really good products. Why? It comes down to two (main) things that have done the whiskey industry well the past couple hundred years: tradition and aging. So as to keep this relatively short, I will skip the fairly obvious factor, tradition, and say something about barrels. This I believe is the largest debate in the whole whiskey industry right now.

Starting a micro-distillery is very expensive and to actually provide a good product which is comparable to market standards, say you’re making bourbon, you need to age it at least 4-8 years in new charred oak barrels. What is happening with these small time (usually one or two man) operations is they cannot sustain themselves by producing a product which takes 4 years to come to market. They need money now, so they use smaller barrels (5, 10, and 15 gallon barrels) which equal less aging. Both the size and length you age a spirit in the barrel will dramatically affect the outcome. So with many of these small time setups claiming that they are producing similar products of the big guys (“my two year old – “baby bourbon” - whiskey is as good as your 8 year old bourbon whiskey”), when they are actually producing quite different products, somewhat makes a mess of things. They might be good in their own right, but not what one would consider to be traditional bourbon, scotch, etc. There are good producers out there though: Stranahans from Colorado, St. George Distillery from San Francisco and Edgefield distillery from Portland, OR – not surprisingly they are using 48 to 53 gallon barrels.

Ultimately, I do believe that the larger and older producers on a whole have better products, but only because of traditions developed and the time they have been producing their products. There are some big distilleries that produce really bad stuff, but that is not so across the board, like it was with beer in the 1970s and 1980s. What will be interesting is to see what will happen in 2, 4, and/or 8 years when all these small distilleries start releasing their whiskey which has been adequately aged. That is the point when the whole market is going to change.

So get excited about the new rye distillery and support them any way you can (they'll need it) - just know that it'll take years before you can actually taste a really good rye.

Here is a link to a blog post I wrote which talks about this – it is more of a link to experts who actually know what they are talking about.