Hello Everyone,
We are a small distillery startup here in WI. We have an accepted offer on a commercial property for our future business. One of our contingencies is an obvious one, we want to know we can operate at this location. The city, which so far has been very supportive, is going to amend the zoning ordinance to include distilleries and brew pubs with a conditional use permit. What this means is that we will go through a couple different public hearings to both change the ordinance and then go through hearings again for the conditional use permit. This property is in a very good traffic location on main street with a mix of neighboring homes and commercial properties. Currently it is an auto garage.
I know someone in the town is going to look up distillery concerns and ask us to address smells and the black fungus associated with distilleries. You know someone is going to go to the internet and find some horror story. So, my questions are: How much of a concern is the black fungus for small craft distilleries? Is there any academic literature out there on this subject? Since I have never lived around a distillery myself, how much odor does a distillery really produce? Does it make much of a difference to move the aging/storage out of town?
Thanks for your time, Dan