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!!!