johnny_teapot

You know, there might be. Before it goes to the municipal treatment plant, the city water is filtered near the reservoirs (they combine water from two of them, and then pump it into the city). If we could access it there, we might be able to get drums/tanks of it. Wouldn't be practical for mashing, volume-wise, but it might be for bottling - I'll certainly look in to it. Thanks for the suggestion!

Why not keep your current system but double or triple it, divide up your batch, and run simultaneously?

I probably should have mentioned that I was talking about this for whiskey, specifically; regardless of what we end up doing here, we're going to buy an RO system for vodka anyway (but not a DI system).. I guess the mashing with city water issue is more or less settled. As far as cutting the product, how do you (collectively) feel about carbon filtration as opposed to RO? That would remove the chlorine and any organic contaminants, but preserve the character of the water - which is, again, among the best in the country. This hearkens back to what Absinthe Pete was saying - if you're making a scotch clone, you're going to add minerals to mimic the water of whatever region of Scotland you're trying to imitate. We're making an Albany whiskey; shouldn't we use Albany water? Obviously we're going to be trying everything to see what tastes best; I guess I'm just curious to see if anyone has done something along these lines.

It's not a cost issue; it's a quality issue. That is, are we removing things from the water that would otherwise improve our product? Traditionally, a good deal of the taste associated with whiskey had to do with the water used. Bushmills springs (pun intended?) to mind; (as far as I'm concerned, their 10-year-old is among the best whiskies on the market) a lot of what they credit their flavor to is the volcanic rock through which their water passes. What are the benefits of filtration? Should we use carbon, reverse osmosis, a combination of the two, or something else? Why or why not? Filtration seems like the "safe" bet, but does it remove some character as well?

We've budgeted/planned for the lag in aging time for the bourbon, and it will be enough to carry us through the end of the year; it's the new make stuff that's a bit more of a wild card. We anticipate it being in reasonably high demand for the first month or two due to pretty decent media coverage and very positive local response. After that, if it continues to sell once the novelty factor wears off, we'll continue making it (well, we'll be making it either way - the question is whether we continue to sell it without aging); however, we're not necessarily counting on it, which is why we plan on developing more recognizable/marketable unaged products (vodka and rum) to put on shelves once we've got some whiskey in barrels. That being said, we're planning on using a variety of barrel sizes and char levels for some experimentation with the aged products. I've read pretty much everything the forums have to say about that; if anyone has anything more to share, I'd be more than happy to hear it.

Well, what he does is heat it the night before, which is sufficient to reduce the chlorine to non-detectable levels. Will it alter our product in that it will taste like the Albany water, or is there danger of other interactions of the compounds in our water with whatever we're bottling?

We've got pretty excellent municipal water, both in terms of taste, pH, mineral content, etc. We're also literally adjacent to a brewpub, and the master brewer of about 15 years there says the stuff is excellent for brewing (once he heats it to get the chlorine out) - he says it's very similar to the water in the Plzeň region. At any rate, assuming this is all true, is there any reason to filter it - either before using it in the mash or before using it to bring our product down to bottle strength?

What we're doing is making a bourbon mash whiskey, bottling half of it as new make and barreling the other half. Depending on how things go from there, we'd like to start a vodka by the summer, and a rum shortly thereafter; hopefully some of the smaller barrels of our first batches will be marketable by the holiday season.

Is there anything stating that a tasting room must be a physical room separate from the rest of the space? i.e. could we just designate an area near the entrance as the "room"?