I've been to a couple of distilleries for artisan liquors. The equipment always seems to be this mix of practical manly tanks and something Jules Verne dreamt up. Plus some barrels. It is laid out if to say, if all of this was equally shiney and fabulous looking, we would just be buying stuff to be pretty....not creating booze. Let's distract them with wood and chicken wire. Truth is, I would be a suspicious if there wasn't a little McGuyvering quality to the place. Too perfect would look like a someone just went on a really expensive shopping spree.
Lately, the word "artisan" is being thrown around like last years "Kindle." It is attached to everything these days from pizza at Dominos to Bagels at Dunkin Donuts. The literal interpretation of the word means a lot in this industry though. There are "infusers" that some aficionados tend to turn their noses up at; companies who purchase large quantities of spirits from other facilities and insert different essences into them, making them flavored. To many of these producers, there is an artistry to creating the flavors that make them unique and they consider their creation an artisan product. However, many distillers don't acknowledge that it is genuinely making your own product if you don't start from the basics. They find slapping a the label on a product that originated from elsewhere, sometimes even a different state that it professes to be a proud product of, is a questionable tactic. It is cheapened to them, easier, not truly "artisan." Their equipment isn't as big and creative and pretty.
The piece that I love the best is the vodka tower. It looks like it could have swallowed Willy Wonka's Augustus Galloop but more beautiful, more copper and brass and glass. The ceilings have to be over 20 feet high to accommodate its necessary height. It literally towers over all of the other units of equipment and has portals running up the front. I assume that these are to look in, not to look out. It reminded me of the metal art pieces that a rich friend's dad had in his New York City loft apartment. Except I understood the purpose of this. Sort of.
Besides the vodka tower and all of that lovely copper, my favorite part of the distillery is the previously mentioned barrels. Barrels are just cool. I told My Doc that maybe some day I would sell the distillery success purchased Bentley (I don't dream half-assed) and I would start a cooperage to match his booze. Then I thought about it a little harder and realized you would have to know how to do things like weld and not set things on fire in order to do this.
Barrels smell good. Some go from one type of industry to the next, sold for the next purpose. An American Barrel holding bourbon can wind up holding scotch in Glasglow. They are good to sit on and when you saw them in half you can use them to plant large quantities of basil in for when you make lots of pesto. They aren't complicated structures and have been around for centuries because they are very very useful, even important when it comes to keeping transported food products safe. A barrel is a statement of simple ingenuity, an idea that hasn't changed because it was so good from its start. It is wood and metal. Like its brother in the artisan crafts of a distillery the whiskey, it will be here hundreds of years ago from now, relatively unchanged with the exception of the individual imprint of its maker.
I look forward to the day that the copper and the wood and the glass and the grains have all arrived. The ingredients are poured, the electricity is turned on, the hums fill the air, the smells begin the process of aging into the odor we will all associate with our family's second home and money maker and we have really begun. So much of the money is there. So close I can see it.
Soon.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Monday, April 9, 2012
Ralph Ralph Ralph
This is how "Ralph" became a swear word.
A long time ago my husband and daughter and I lived in a trailer by a barn in a teeny tiny town that bordered the small city where My Doc (aka husband)went to undergraduate school. Down the road from our trailer was a gristmill owned by a nice man named Ralph. Ralph was a likable fellow who loved to rock climb. He had taken an old gristmill, refurbished it and began making flours and other grist things, attaching a really neat store to the whole operation. He also dreamt of using his new property to accommodate the visiting rock climbers, giving them a place to sleep cheaply via camping and other less rustic ways that weren't a hotel nearby a famous climbing spot. We loved to take our visiting friends to our cool neighborhood entrepreneurial endeavor. There was trouble in his paradise though. Ralph had a cranky neighbor that objected to most things Ralph and successfully squashed Ralph's peace and his dream of a rock climbing haven. We watched the gristmill crumble and Ralph decided to close the doors.
Right before we moved to Massachusetts, we recieved an email via the gristmill mailing list announcing Ralph's intentions to open a distillery. A distillery! We said. Who the hell opens a distillery in this century by himself (turns out it wasn't so much himself....he had attain a partner...but that's a story for Ralph to tell, not me)? No one was doing this. I didn't even know it was legal. I just knew Ralph was doomed to failure. Poor Ralph. He was such a nice man.
Flash forward six years. Thanks to people like Ralph and some changes in regulation/tax laws, small artisan spirits distilleries began to take on a new light. Like other micro versions of an ingestible product businesses, they emerged into the public conscience because attention to the craft and the details applied to the process was unique to them and more often than not from high quality products. They used local agriculture and special techniques developed with creative minds and lower budgets. The products were excellent and as individual as the people creating them. They cared about what they were doing. By the time the Two Doctors became a valid idea, the artisan spirit distillery had taken hold in the minds of liquor afficianados everywhere. And it seemed like so many of the ideas that they put out in their innovative a-ha moments when mulling over alternatives in production, Ralph had already done.
Poor Ralph my fat aunt Fanny. Ralph was a raging success. Ralph became a battle cry and an utterance of frustration. Small barrels to speed up aging? Ralph was doing it. Who just got worldwide distribution as a small distillery from an enormous name brand distributor? Ralph. Hey! I have an idea to make gin. Not a lot of people are doing....damn you, Ralph. There's Ralph in the New York Times. Isn't that Ralph on the cover of the national artisan whiskey convention's website? Ralph Ralph Ralph. The man I wrote off as doomed. The distiller who paved the way for so many other artisan spirit makers. The person, who at every turn, was there before us like the perfect older sibling.
We use his name enough to make me wonder if there was ever an innovative artisan named "Fuck!" I love to scream it when he periodically does something so freakin' wonderful that it is yet another moment to prove our point that all roads of success lead to Ralph. We admire you, Ralph, and we thank you. You are our great example of why people should invest in a whiskey distillery, the end result of your leap in faith, now a place people wished they could put their money. And for this I will always use your name to emphasize my passionate reactions to all things in the land of hootch.
RALPH!!!
A long time ago my husband and daughter and I lived in a trailer by a barn in a teeny tiny town that bordered the small city where My Doc (aka husband)went to undergraduate school. Down the road from our trailer was a gristmill owned by a nice man named Ralph. Ralph was a likable fellow who loved to rock climb. He had taken an old gristmill, refurbished it and began making flours and other grist things, attaching a really neat store to the whole operation. He also dreamt of using his new property to accommodate the visiting rock climbers, giving them a place to sleep cheaply via camping and other less rustic ways that weren't a hotel nearby a famous climbing spot. We loved to take our visiting friends to our cool neighborhood entrepreneurial endeavor. There was trouble in his paradise though. Ralph had a cranky neighbor that objected to most things Ralph and successfully squashed Ralph's peace and his dream of a rock climbing haven. We watched the gristmill crumble and Ralph decided to close the doors.
Right before we moved to Massachusetts, we recieved an email via the gristmill mailing list announcing Ralph's intentions to open a distillery. A distillery! We said. Who the hell opens a distillery in this century by himself (turns out it wasn't so much himself....he had attain a partner...but that's a story for Ralph to tell, not me)? No one was doing this. I didn't even know it was legal. I just knew Ralph was doomed to failure. Poor Ralph. He was such a nice man.
Flash forward six years. Thanks to people like Ralph and some changes in regulation/tax laws, small artisan spirits distilleries began to take on a new light. Like other micro versions of an ingestible product businesses, they emerged into the public conscience because attention to the craft and the details applied to the process was unique to them and more often than not from high quality products. They used local agriculture and special techniques developed with creative minds and lower budgets. The products were excellent and as individual as the people creating them. They cared about what they were doing. By the time the Two Doctors became a valid idea, the artisan spirit distillery had taken hold in the minds of liquor afficianados everywhere. And it seemed like so many of the ideas that they put out in their innovative a-ha moments when mulling over alternatives in production, Ralph had already done.
Poor Ralph my fat aunt Fanny. Ralph was a raging success. Ralph became a battle cry and an utterance of frustration. Small barrels to speed up aging? Ralph was doing it. Who just got worldwide distribution as a small distillery from an enormous name brand distributor? Ralph. Hey! I have an idea to make gin. Not a lot of people are doing....damn you, Ralph. There's Ralph in the New York Times. Isn't that Ralph on the cover of the national artisan whiskey convention's website? Ralph Ralph Ralph. The man I wrote off as doomed. The distiller who paved the way for so many other artisan spirit makers. The person, who at every turn, was there before us like the perfect older sibling.
We use his name enough to make me wonder if there was ever an innovative artisan named "Fuck!" I love to scream it when he periodically does something so freakin' wonderful that it is yet another moment to prove our point that all roads of success lead to Ralph. We admire you, Ralph, and we thank you. You are our great example of why people should invest in a whiskey distillery, the end result of your leap in faith, now a place people wished they could put their money. And for this I will always use your name to emphasize my passionate reactions to all things in the land of hootch.
RALPH!!!
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