Mr Beardy

I don't think that I'd worry about hyrdogen peroxide - it works by quickly breaking down into oxygen and water. By the time you work with the grain, it would be long gone. Don't know about the vegetable oil, but I guess any grain you're handling will contain its own natural vegetable oil anyway.

Interesting - I've looked at the distillery's site before, and there's no mention of that product - in fact their site says "Oak barrels are filled with the "New Make". Each barrel is numbered and stored in the warehouse for maturation. A spirit must age a minimum of 3 years in wood before it can be called a whisky" (http://www.glenoradistillery.com/smw.html) So, while the Nova Scotia liquor board has the product catalogued under "Whiskey / Canadian (i.e. rye)", as far as I can tell, the distillery itself is not calling it "whiskey", just "silver". Actually, it's probably "wronger" to classify that under "Canadian / rye" than under "whiskey", since Glenora makes an all-barley single-malt. One thing it does do is give me some reassurance, that liquor boards will be willing to put a whiskey that's legally not marketable as "whiskey" in with the whiskeys rather than relegating it to the wasteland of unclassified NGS + sugar + whatever.

It's a small world, isn't it? Saskatoon is my hometown! I'll have to visit next time I'm home; I hope you'll let me pick your brains.

Hello all I'm hoping to learn all I can about the business and practice of distilling, so one day I can follow my dream and start a distillery, perhaps without even going bankrupt. This is years away for me; I know I can't do it where I live now, in Alberta. I've looked into the regs in the Western provinces - BC and Saskatchewan have no requirements for minimum distillery production capacities, Alberta and Manitoba have such high minimum capacities, I can't see starting out anywhere near there. I look forward to learning from the knowledgeable people here.

To my knowledge, no, it isn't possible to buy unaged whiskey in Canada (spoken as a Canadian, but not one who has researched this extensively). There is one Canadian-made 'white whiskey', made by Highwood Distillers in Alberta. They actually take the roundabout route of aging it in casks for three years, and then filtering it so thoroughly that all the colour is stripped out.