A three distillery day

It didn't start out that way.

I was just going to run over to Twin Valley Distillers in Rockville, Maryland, to try some of the barrel proof whiskey Edgardo Zuniga had come out with since my visit last month.

Wheat whiskey, corn and rye bourbon, corn and wheat bourbon. All barrel proof.

These have each spent two months in three gallon barrels, which adds plenty of flavor though doesn't age out the new make notes. The wheated bourbon was the sweetest. The 100% wheat whiskey was too intense for me at 120 proof, but with water opened up nicely; it would certainly bring plenty of flavor to a cocktail. The ryed bourbon was my favorite, and Edgardo filled a bottle for me.

Since it was only two o'clock when I left Twin Valley, I hopped on the Beltway to see what all the fuss at One Eight Distilling in Washington, DC, was.

The fuss was huge crowds of children in their twenties packing the tasting room and the tours that ran every ten minutes or so. Given that the distillery only opened to the public two weeks ago -- and, you know, the shots of free booze -- the crowds were expected.

In the background, you can see One Eight's tiny gin still.

The size of the place was not. The tasting room by itself is about the size of Twin Valley Distillers, and the production space is cavernous. They already have three (or was it four, why don't I ever take pictures of these things?) 2,000 liter fermentation tanks, so they should really be able to crank out the spirits (or at least keep their small bottle filling station busy).

The One Eight Rye Whiskey Warehouse.

They have two spirits bottled for sale -- a rye/corn/malted rye vodka and a rye/malted rye/corn white whiskey. As of today, they have two full size barrels of rye whiskey aging, with a bourbon mash fermenting on the other side of the plant. The rye whiskey has the same mash bill as the white whiskey, but takes more of the tails for the extra dose of congeners. I asked One Eight's COO Alex Laufer, who led the tour I took, whether they were planning on releasing a whiskey at less than two years. He said they might, but weren't really expecting to.

What sourced bourbon looks like.

Of nearer term interest are the thirty-six barrels of 9 year old bourbon they've sourced. Right now they're playing with finishing in sherry butts, and they may try other finishings too before they' bottle it.

They also plan to work on a gin recipe, using a second, tiny still for the botanical runs. At least until they settle on their recipe, they'll be distilling the botanicals individually, then mixing the spirits to get what they want. (Coincidentally, I'm going to be doing much the same thing this year, with infusions, and the juniper will all go into my wife's bottle.)

In the tasting room, I tried both the vodka and the white whiskey. The vodka was smooth with some grain flavor. I didn't care for the whiskey; I thought the flavor was muddled for drinking straight.

After One Eight, I drove around the neighborhood a bit -- the roads of that neighborhood, by the way, are all 2 blocks long and form a network in non-Euclidean space -- and twice passed New Columbia Distillers, which is about as clear a sign as you get most days.

This was my second visit to New Columbia, and while they are still disappointingly gin-based, they have now put up several barrels of rye (which, since their revenues are also gin-based, they're in no hurry to release), and are even about to make apple brandy. I stopped in to try the "ginavit," their fall/winter gin with a bit of an aquavit kick from the caraway and rye. There's juniper on the nose, which thankfully fades quickly on the palate to citrus and other botanicals. I think it's going to make a great sidecar.

So that's three distilleries in three hours and only two bottles purchased. I don't expect to beat that any time soon -- especially the purchases to distilleries ratio.

Blackwater Distilling

I take the Chesapeake Bay Bridge from Annapolis to Maryland's Eastern Shore a few times a year. Most times, I have a moment of wistfulness as I pass the first exit on the eastern side of the bridge, Exit 37 in Stevensville, because Blackwater Distilling -- maker of Sloop Betty vodka and the first of the new microdistilleries in the state -- is just a mile up the road.

On one trip last year, though, I was wistfree, since I'd finally managed to budget enough time for a visit to Blackwater. It wasn't during regular tour hours -- Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 4:30 pm -- but Blackwater's Director of Marketing, Andy Keller (@andyhkeller), was willing to show me around. He was at the distillery that morning to have the place open for the workmen who were installing a new tasting bar.

And did I take a picture of this elegant, copper-topped bar? I did not. Did I take a picture of the 500 gallon production still, or the 100 gallon development still, or the vodka filtering set-up, or the bottling line, or my gracious host? I did not.

Did I take a picture of anything at all? Of course! Blogging is a visual medium, after all.

Take a look
And you'll see
Into your imagination.

Blackwater is in an unprepossessing business park; the new bar makes a visit more of a social and less of an industrial activity. Andy showed me the whole works, from the sacks of wheat to the corking station.

They've been selling Sloop Betty Vodka since 2011, and just about a year ago added Sloop Betty Honey Vodka. The vodka is made from wheat and sugar cane; the honey vodka is a slightly cloudy infusion with raw honey. They're 80 and 70 proof, respectively.

The name comes from the sloop Betty, captured in the southern Chesapeake Bay by Blackbeard in 1717. I'm not myself a fan of the pinup on the labels -- inspired, the press kit says, by "tales of our grandfather’s time in the pilot seat of a C-47" -- but then I've never had to catch the attention of the vodka buying public.

The sweeter one's on the left -- no, I mean... there's really no way to avoid innuendo here.

When I visited, they were experimenting with rum and rye. They've now settled on their rum recipe -- made with raw cane syrup and a yeast strain isolated from natural sugar cane fermentation -- and within a couple of weeks should be releasing Picaroon white rum. A gold rum (made gold by adding caramelized sugar) will follow soon after.

Before there was Maryland rye, there was Maryland rum. And the occasional pirate.

Once they get those production lines fully operating, they'll turn their attention back to rye. Maryland was, of course, once famous for its rye whiskey, though I've only ever seen vague descriptions of how "Maryland style" rye differed from the Monongahela style, which has either evolved into the ryes we know today or disappeared as well, depending on whom you ask.

In any case, Blackwater hasn't worked out a rye recipe to their liking yet. Past experiments didn't age properly, and I suppose it's to their credit that they didn't go ahead and bottle it anyway. They are, though, ready with the name -- Mr. Haddaway's Maryland White Rye -- and the label once the product is good to go. (The back label, if you can read it, tells the story of Mr. Haddaway.)

Labels via TTB.

As for tasting notes: Sloop Betty vodka tends toward the "without distinctive character, aroma, taste or color" standard of vodka identity -- as opposed to some microdistilled vodkas, that let a lot of the grain taste through. But there is a bit of wheat nuttiness on the nose, and a bit of sugar sweetness on the palate, with one or the other or both cutting down on the sour spirity aftertaste a lot of vodkas have.

Sloop Betty honey vodka is pretty tame on the nose, but a taste fills the mouth with honey flavor without any of the honey stickiness. The mouthfeel is slightly thicker than the plain vodka, but only a little, and the honey doesn't linger in the finish. There's a definite honey punch, but it doesn't feel like you're drinking a liqueur.

Both are well suited for mixing, with the honey vodka adding its own sweetness and making a decent honeybuck (honey vodka, lime juice, mint bitters, ginger ale or ginger beer).

A Visit to Twin Valley Distillers

I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, which has some screwy laws about the sale of alcoholic beverages. How screwy? I once met someone from Tennessee who marveled at how screwy Montgomery County, Maryland, is.

So Montgomery would have been the last county in Maryland I'd expect to have a distillery. And yet, we have one, as of a few months ago. Here's proof:

711 East Gude Drive. Makes you thirsty just looking at it, doesn't it?

Wait, no, that's what you see from the street. But if you trust the little signs with arrows and make your way to the back of the building, you see this, the home of Twin Valley Distillers:

You were expecting a shuttle to the visitor's centre?

The name is a bit fanciful. There's only one distiller, Edgardo Zuniga, who is also the founder, warehouse manager, truck driver, bottle washer, salesman, tour guide, and tasting room operator. "Twin Valley" is the name of the street he lives on, a few miles from the distillery. That's keeping it local.

Edgardo greeted me at the door (he knew from Twitter I'd be stopping by that afternoon), and launched straight into a tour, starting with the 100 gallon still that was pouring out the heads of a run of bourbon.

Next time I'll come when the temp is 195 F.

He apologized that he didn't have both stills going, and showed me the pipes and connectors he'd had made to join the twin stills and collect the distillates at the same time. I nosed some of the heads (coming off at around 185 F at the moment), and it smelled like some whiskeys I've bought.

Across the room, rum was fermenting next to sacks of corn, barley, rye, and wheat. Edgardo is having trouble sourcing local rye, so he may try a wheated bourbon next. (He is trying to source as much as he can, from grain to bottles, within 50 miles. Not a lot of sugar cane is grown in these parts, so the molasses comes from Florida.)

Bubbling away.

The bottling line consists of a machine for filling a single bottle, which in a one-man operation seems to be enough, though if he ever has a bottling party as some small distilleries do it would get pretty crowded on the line. Edgardo said he can produce 360 bottles of vodka, from milled wheat to boxed product, in a week.

Next we toured the bonded storeroom, with about a dozen five gallon barrels being warmed by a space heater. It's about half rum, half bourbon now. He also has some stainless steel tanks with rum and bourbon waiting for empty barrels; they've got oak coils in them to get the aging process started. Gotta start somewhere.

Room to grow.

Then we made our way to the tasting room, where Edgardo not only poured me one of everything, but let me try two batches each of the unaged corn whiskey and the bourbon. The corn whiskey showed a marked improvement with Batch 2, which is no surprise since he knew twice as much when he distilled it. The first bourbon he bottled was aged less than 30 days (that's what small barrels and oak coils can do for you); it was too young, but people were begging him for some bourbon in time for Christmas. He now has some 4 month old bourbon which is more to his liking; it's more to my liking, too, though I see it even more as a promise of things to come.

The proud pappa.

A few quick notes on the Twin Valley line:

• white rum: sweet on the nose, dry on the palate
• aged rum: less sweet on the nose, sweeter on the palate
• wheat whiskey: nice, warming grain flavor (so sue me, Mr. Without-Distinctive-Character)
• corn whiskey: both white and aged are fairly neutral until a strong corn finish; both a bit sulphury. White Batch 2 noticeably improved over Batch 1. (Didn't taste the aged Batch 2.)
• bourbon: Batch 1 < 30 days (rushed for Christmas), tastes like too-young whiskey. Batch 2 is about 4 months, tastes like young whiskey. Neither is overly bourbony (i.e., sweet or loaded with vanillins).

Overall, it's a respectable line for a seven month old, one-man distillery. Particularly when that one man was a chef running a restaurant several years back, who got into distilling by way of playing with rum infusions in his kitchen at home.

That makes a good backstory. The sidestory is pretty good too. This is an intentionally local operation, named after a local street (while also evoking something more rural than an industrial park). The vodka is called Norbeck, after a major Rockville road Edgardo takes every day to and from work, and the rum, Seneca Bay, is named after a part of a lake in a local park. The bottles come from Baltimore, the grains are grown by local farmers.

The county government has responded to this very favorably, much to the surprise of a lot of us who buy beer, wine, and spirits here (beer & wine sales licenses are very limited, and all spirits are sold through county-owned stores). Edgardo says they've supported him all along, and they're proud to have a distillery here. The next big question is whether he can get a distributor's license, which would allow him to sell at wholesale directly to restaurants (rather than them having to special order by the case through the county's liquor stores).

Still, backstories and sidestories will only get you so far in business. To have a good futurestory you have to have good sales. People will buy local, but a bottle of liquor can last a long time if you don't reach for it often.

I'm hopeful that Twin Valley will have a good futurestory, for several reasons. I think Edgardo is already making the vodka that he should be making. His not-too-sweet rum may also be a recipe for success, and it will only improve as time and capital allow him to age it better (i.e., longer and in larger barrels). For me, his bourbon is still a work in progress, particularly in how it's aged. But I think the chef in him will keep him going until he gets the recipe, including the barreling, just the way he wants it.

In addition to a steady and improving baseline, he's got plans to grow. Physically, the unprepossessing building housing Twin Valley Distillers has room on either side for, say, a larger bonded warehouse and a larger tasting room. In terms of products, in 2015 he's planning on working on a rye whiskey (if he can line up the local grains) and an infused gin (infused because apparently juniper really gets into your still). A gin should sell well, if the women in my family are any guide.

Edgardo also mentioned that he has some fruit brandy labels -- apple and pear, I think -- ready to go, in case he can get some fruit in. And that excites me, even more than the prospect of a Maryland rye whiskey distilled ten miles from my house, because at one point while we were chatting in the tasting room, he produced a small bottle of brandy made from figs he'd grown in his back yard. Wow, that was good stuff.

Drinking local in 2015.

In the event, I came home with a bottle of the Norbeck vodka and the Seneca Bay aged rum. I'll probably write up some tasting notes on them in the next couple of weeks, on the off chance that would be of any use to anybody. And I will certainly be returning to Twin Valley, to keep an eye on things and to restock as needed.

Friday in the park with George

On a recent business trip, I happened through Lynchburg, Tennessee. Naturally, I took advantage of the opportunity to visit the George Dickel Distillery, about half an hour to the north.

The George Dickel Distillery is, as they say on their website, "a ways off the beaten path," though even the last two miles down Cascade Hollow Road aren't too backwoods-country windy. (But then, I've taken more than one "short cut" down a logging road in my day.) When you come to the end of the road, the visitor center is on your left and the distillery on your right. The visitor center is done up in authentic Olde Tyme General Store, which both suits their image and suggests that some of what you'll hear on the tour will be... just as authentic.

Tennesseans of the 1880s were a hardy lot, needing only provisions of shot glasses and T-shirts.

The olde tyme angle plays up the history of whiskey distilling in Cascade Hollow, although George Dickel's own distillery (est. 1870) was a mile or so up and yonder from the current site, closer to Cascade Springs that provided the water. What for a while was the state's largest distillery had to close in 1911 (Tennessee was ahead of the national Prohibition curve), and when Schenley Distillers Corp., which owned the Dickel name (and, reportedly, the Dickel recipe and even yeast strains), decided to reopen it in 1958, they picked the current site (though they still use water from Cascade Springs).

When I arrived, on a sunny Friday morning just after 9:30, I was the only visitor. The tour guide on duty pointed me to an olde tyme rocking chair, where I watched a short video about the history of the distillery and what makes Dickel different from other sippin' whiskies. (You can watch it, too! "George Dickel - The Man & His Vision" is on this web page, along with a lot more information about the distillery than you'll read in my post.)

By 10 a.m., I was still the only visitor, so I got a private tour. (In fact, the tourist was outnumbered by the guides, since we were joined by a tour guide trainee.)

Getting a private tour was nice, since I got to ask any question that occurred to me, when it occurred to me. The downside was a certain awkwardness when some bit of tour guide schtick called for an appreciative murmur from the tourists and all I could muster was a nod and a smile.

The George Dickel Distillery. Rickhouse is back up the hill a ways. Bottling facility is past that, about 300 miles.

Now, I did not take notes, and most of the numbers were lost on me as soon as they were spoken, but the general process for making George Dickel Tennessee Sour Mash Whisky is this: Using a mashbill of 84% corn, 8% rye, and 8% malted barley, the grains are ground, cooked, and fermented in the usual sort of way. Then the wash is distilled in a column still, with the resulting low wines distilled a second time in a pot still.

Next comes the step that Dickel says makes a whiskey Dickel: chill filtering. Yes, I know chill filtering is supposed to be naughty, but as the story goes,"George A. Dickel discovered that whisky made during the winter was smoother than whisky made in the summer. So, George Dickel is the only Tennessee whisky to chill the whisky [to 40 deg F] before it goes into the charcoal mellow-ing vats. This filters out the oils and fatty acids inherent in most whisky products."

The charcoal is made by bonfire in a field across the road, up from the visitor center, then ground into pellets and packed in a vat between perforated steel plates and wool blankets. The chilled whiskey takes a week or ten days to filter through, after which it's barreled and taken up a side road to the warehouses.

Woot.

The warehouses (single story, and no, they don't rotate the barrels around) are not part of the tour, though they've redone part of their old bottling building as a mockup of a warehouse. This, apparently, is ideal for pictures, which I learned when I was told that they'd take my picture standing in front of the empty barrels if I wanted. I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so I said yes please. That's why I have a picture of me standing in front of empty barrels. I suppose this is a variant of, "Do you want a picture of yourself standing in front of the still?" which I've been asked at a couple of microdistilleries. (And I don't, particularly; they aren't my stills.)

I mentioned their old bottle building. They don't have a new one, for reasons of economics. Though their Tennessee Whisky is all distilled, aged, and blended in Cascade Hollow, not a drop of it is bottled there. It's all loaded into tankers and shipped to an out-of-state bottling plant; currently they're using one in Indiana. (If you're driving between Tullahoma and Indianapolis and you see a milk truck with a "FLAMMABLE" sign, make friends with the driver.)

The worst part of the tour was the walk (in beautiful sunshine) back to the visitor center. Worst because of what we passed on the way. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, surely, "And our brand new tasting house should be open in a few weeks," is in the top ten.

Even the camera phone had something in its eye.

To take my mind off that, my guide pointed out a couple of blackened trees right next to the distillery's exhaust vents (they've visible on the far right of the picture of the distillery). He gave me the helpful advice that, should I ever be tramping through the forests of Tennessee and come across trees covered in Baudonia fungus, I should hightail it out of there before the moonshiners return.

So, what about the whiskies? Well, there's Old No. 8, "the classic whisky that made George Dickel famous," blended from barrels aged six to eight years, give or take. No. 12 is bottled at 90 proof from, say, ten to twelve year old barrels. Barrel Select is a small-batch whiskey of ten or so barrels aged ten to twelve years.

And let's not forget Cascade Hollow, which I assume is their entry-level whiskey. I assume that, rather than assert it, because the tour guide forgot to mention that it existed. I'm not 100% sure it was for sale in their shop, and I didn't even realize they still made it until I saw it on their website.

We did get to chat about the new George Dickel rye, which I think was just released in December. Turns out it's a 95% rye distilled in Lawrenceburg, Indiana -- stop me if you've heard this one. Still, their position is that it's a bona fide Dickel whiskey because it's chill filtered. I suppose the truth is in the taste.

Speaking of taste, as intimated above, I didn't get a chance -- though I do have a tweet from last year, when I bought a No. 8 miniature and tried it in a plastic cup in a hotel room one night: "green apple gives way to caramel on the nose, woody corn w/ light mouthfeel.Touch of charcoal in finish. Is its own TN whisky." That last bit meaning, of course, that they aren't trying to copy Jack Daniel's.

UPDATE: Can a visitors center, a movie, a tour guide, and a website all lie about George Dickel's actual involvement in distilling whiskey? Yes.

Catoctin Creek Bottling Workshop

On Saturday, June 9, I participated in a bottling workshop at Catoctin Creek Distilling Company in Purcellville, Virginia.

 

Well, it's called a "bottling workshop," but of course what it really is is the work of bottling. Catoctin Creek has the unmitigated gall to ask for volunteers to come to their distillery and help them, a for-profit company, package their goods for sale.

And volunteer we do.

In fact, this was the third or fourth workshop I'd asked to attend, but the previous ones were already full. They limit attendance to 20 people (it's a hands-on process, and there's only room for so many hands); the workshops seem to fill up within a few hours of being announced.

Why, you might ask, would someone volunteer to help bottle and label a company's whiskey? Either "Because you get to bottle and label whiskey!" is a sufficient answer for you, or none is.

On the day I was there, we had a little bit of Mosby's Spirit -- Catoctin Creek's unaged, 100% rye distillate -- to bottle, and rather a lot of their Watershed Gin.

What I mean by "rather a lot."

Bottling begins at the famed "whiskey cow," which pumps the whiskey -- or gin, as the case may be -- from tanks into up to four bottles at a time.

The whiskey cow, and the whiskey farmer (Catoctin Creek founder Scott Harris, keeping up to date on paperwork for the revenooers).

Next comes corking and capping, with a hair dryer type thing that seals the plastic cap onto the bottle.

All day long they're singing
My, my, my, my, my, my
My work is so hard
Give me uisge, I'm thirsty.

Then comes the labeling. We were encouraged to sign the labels, with any little notes we wanted -- excluding vulgarity and politics, to the extent it's worth distinguishing them. (This business of signing labels, I have to say, was something of a dirty trick, as nowhere in the invitation to the workshop was it mentioned that some level of thought, even wit, might be required. In the event, the first label signed might read, "Dear Esteemed Customer, You hold in your hand a fine, handcrafted spirit. Enjoy it in cocktails, or sip it neat. Either way, it will be an experience to savor. And remember: Think Global, Drink Local! Sincerely yours, Tom the Part-Time Bottler." Soon enough, they would read, "Cheers, T.")

Ready, set, be clever!

Careful application of the labels front and back, and hey presto!, it's ready to be packed and shipped. (Less careful application of the labels, and it's still ready to be shipped, it's just... more obviously hand-crafted.)

The quality control process specifies labeling first, tasting later.

After a couple of hours, we'd bottled all the booze that needed bottling, so we had some pizza, followed by a taste of the Catoctin Creek range -- i.e., Watershed Gin, Mosby's Spirit, and the Roundstone Rye whiskey they make from Mosby's Spirit. (They also makes small batches of brandies -- both grape and pear -- but they're sold out now.)

Sleep away, my friends.

Though made from a 100% rye mash bill, Roundstone Rye is not a straight rye whiskey, because it's not aged for two years. I'd been thinking they could just leave a few barrels to age and have a single-barrel straight rye ready for limited release in short order, but they distill their Mosby's Spirit expecting it to spend less than a year in a cask. They might need to change the distillation process if the whiskey is to get more flavor from the barrels.

I did get a chance to ask Becky Harris, the master distiller, why they decided to use a 100% rye mash bill, when rye is well known to be a tricky grain to deal with. She said it was because of the tradition of making rye whiskey in Virginia, and they thought it was worth recovering that tradition. They also think it's worth making certified organic spirits -- which, ironically, means they have to import their rye from Kansas, since there's not enough organic rye grown in Virginia to meet their needs. If the distillery keeps growing, though (they sold 20,000 bottles last year, and will sell 40,000 this year), they may be able to make it worth Virginia farmers' while to go organic.

At the end of the tasting, we got a drop of Langdon Wood Barrel-Aged Maply Syrup, a syrup from Pennsylvania that's been aged in old Roundstone Rye barrels. Fantastic stuff, buttery and maply with some rye spice. To anyone who's used one of those one or two liter barrels they sell to age whiskey, I'd recommend putting some good maple syrup in it when they're finished with the whiskey. You'll want to make pancakes for a month.

"She worked us like dogs, but we loved her still."

Smooth Ambler, Maxwelton, WV

Last weekend, my wife threw a dart at the Googleboard and hit on West Virginia's Pipestem Resort State Park as a nice place to get away for a few days.^*

Once our destination was chosen, a secondary question for me was, is there any chance of shoehorning a visit to a distillery into this trip? Which is to say, given that it's a six hour drive to our hotel, how many more miles can I convince my wife and son to drive just so that I can have a taste of someone's white whiskey?

As it happened, I'd only recently heard of Smooth Ambler Spirits, a West Virginia craft distillery. I knew they made gin as well as whiskey, and I knew my wife likes gin, so if it were any reasonable distance from where we were going, I figured I could talk her into allowing joining me. I typed the address into Mapquest, and learned the distillery was 4 miles out of our way.

Yeah, I could swing that.


Smooth Ambler Tasting Room

We arrived mid-afternoon on Tuesday, and we had a chance to taste all of their white spirits -- whiskey, gin, and vodka (they were sold out of their very small run of bourbon).

Some vodkas, intended to have as little flavor as possible, wind up with nothing but a medicinal tang. Smooth Ambler purposely makes its vodka with a pleasant, bready flavor that doesn't need to be covered up by chilling or mixers. I imagine it would be pretty tasty sipped along with fresh-baked rolls spread with butter.

As for their gin: It's not that I don't like gin, it's that I hate and despise the very idea of gin. It took me years to get to the point of accepting that it is not necessarily a character flaw to drink gin on purpose.

I had been planning on passing on Smooth Ambler's gin altogether, but after four and a half hours in the car, I figured I could stand one small taste. And in fact, though I'm sorry to say the stuff smells like gin, the citrus they add to the botanicals makes it... well, potable in extremis. Or, as my wife the gin-drinker said after tasting it, "Oh, we're getting a bottle of this!"

Which left the white whiskey, bottled at 100 proof. I wasn't left alone with a bottle and a glass long enough for a proper tasting, but the couple of swallows I had were of a good quality moonshine with a lively complexity, particularly compared to the mellow homeliness of the vodka. (For the record, my wife couldn't stand the stuff, but then, you know, she drinks gin.)

Smooth Ambler's bourbon is their white whiskey aged in ten gallon barrels (they may have put some up in the standard 53-gallon barrels that will be ready in another five or six years). As I said, they were out of stock at the distillery, but they'd recently shipped some bourbon out, and I will definitely keep an eye open for it in my local liquor stores.

When it came time to leave, I for some reason decided to limit our purchase to one bottle, and since my wife had already spoken up, that one bottle was gin. I wasn't too concerned about leaving without any whiskey, since I had already learned that a liquor store a couple of miles from where I work carries Smooth Ambler. The next bottle of moonshine I buy will be Smooth Ambler -- unless I find Smooth Ambler bourbon first.

Two things particularly struck me during the visit. One was the quality across the Smooth Ambler range; they seem to take equal pride and care with each of their spirits. The other was how altogether different each of these three clear liquids was, though the equipment and processes, and even many of the ingredients, used are the same. The tours I've been on explaining how various beverages are made have given me the sense of a very technical activity, but sitting in the Smooth Ambler tasting room, looking through the windows at the stills and filters used to make their spirits, I gained more of an appreciation for the craft involved.

---

* My craft review of Pipestem Resort State Park: As a state park, it's great! As a resort, it's... a great state park!