twardena

Has anyone been successful classifying your distillery as a Mercantile occupancy? We have a 2,400 sq. foot building with neighboring buildings attached on each side. We are mashing, distilling, bottling and cask aging spirits onsite, but NOT milling grains onsite. We have a 740 sq. foot tasting room where we plan to sell bottles, merchandise and serve cocktails by the glass. We requested an F1 occupancy, but our local building officials are trying to push us into a Group-H occupancy (they are refusing to recognize the IFC exception to spirits in wood barrels from being classified as flammable storage). As an alternative we were considering requesting a Mercantile occupancy for the entire facility with an incidental use for the still, mash cooker, bottling, etc. If that doesn't work we were going to try a Mercantile occupancy for the tasting room as well as a separate barrel storage room with an F1 occupancy for the rest of the facility. Any suggestions? Thanks, Tonya

Is there any way to filter liqueurs without buying an expensive filtration machine? We have been doing some test batches and have used cheese cloth, coffee filters and even wet paper towels and none of those seem to work. We visited another distillery and they just attached a water filter to their pumps when bottling. I don't think that this will work for liqueurs though. Also we are just testing on small 1/2 gallon batches trying to figure out our formula. Any advice on how to do this for 50 - 100 gallon batches.

Was wondering if you can write off as a business expense purchasing other spirits as R&D? If I purchase various bottles of whiskey to compare and taste can we write this off as a business expense?

I was just wondering how specific you have to be on your formula application. In the quantitative list of ingredients do you have to list the actual manufacturer of any additives you are going to add or can you simply say 1% pure maple syrup. Also, how do you list the ingredients if you are sourcing some of your product from third party suppliers?