OldSpye

Hey! I'm never too busy for a beer. Finding sympathy, or even empathy, among the tangle of New Jersey Home Rule isn't impossible, but it does take work. My initial direction, when I was concept-building, was to start up in either the town in which I currently live or an adjacent municipality, where a friend of mine is an influential attorney. There were still challenges, even with those relationships. Eventually I decided to return to the town where I grew up, about 12 miles away. I have a long history there and now, 30+ years later, most of the government and administrative officials are guys that I went to school with and have known most of my life. I won't go so far as to say, "That's what it takes", but it certainly helps. New Jersey is, I believe, a very solid example of the old saying, "It's not what you know, but who you know." Even with all that, I've spent a lot of time educating and advocating in Sayreville. My first meeting with the zoning officer several months ago consisted primarily of me explaining to him (for about an hour) that we weren't trying to open a bar. I literally had to go all "Alice's Restaurant" on him - 8x10 color glossy pictures with the circles and the arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, explainin' what each one was about - before he caught on and said, "Oh. Okay. Yeah, you can do that, that's perfectly fine." Regardless of where you wind up in terms of your location focus, be prepared to do a lot of talking to a lot of people. You're going to have to become an evangelist. The more you're able to evangelize, the better off you'll be.

One possibility is that those operations have purchased barrels of spirit from other distilleries. The other, of course, is that they're omitting the required aging statement.

That's great work, Jake. I'd be delighted if I could get any of the local NJ legislators to even listen for 30 seconds. These guys have been entrenched WAY too long. I'm starting to think that what little time I have for politics over the next year will be spent sending Chris Smith to the Congressional Old Age Home.

I'm going to float mine down the Raritan from Johnson Park to the Raritan Yacht Club in Perth Amboy. I'm confident that the subtle notes of arsenic and untreated sewerage will impart a unique and desirable character.

Another couple supporters this week. Congressman Derek Kilmer (D-WA6) because the 3rd co-sponsor for HR 4083. Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) joins his Montana counterpart in becoming the 3rd co-sponsor for S 2169.

I think your local fire codes are going to be the determining factor, here.

You didn't specify the nature of your "strong relationship" with the brewery but depending on the specifics of that relationship, there may be advantages (accounting) to purchasing your wort from them.

I was pulled aside at an event this weekend and very solemnly presented with a tasting of what turned out to be a homemade honey-based spirit from Poland (the presenter is a Polish church deacon and his wife brought home a couple bottles on her last visit to relatives). It was outstanding. Damn near the best thing I've ever had. I've always had my eye on a the possibility of a honey-based spirit but, as mentioned, sourcing the honey is VERY challenging, even here in the Garden State.

"Dinosaur carbon"?

James is a smart guy, probably because he's from New Jersey. Our philosophy is "Crawl, Walk, Run". Take your time and thoroughly think through every decision. We have a challenging zoning officer to deal with, but we've been very careful to involve him in the process and educate him as to our exact intentions. We've been granted permitted use and are currently working with an architect to provide the town with a full set of sealed and code-assessed ADs so that all of our modifications to the building will be non-issues. The little bit of time and money spent on this process will save us money down the road in work stoppages and construction do-overs. Be reasonable in your expectations. I've got a great business plan, put together with the assistance of very solid professionals. There's tremendous up-side, but my expectation is not to "get rich". My expectation is to produce a quality product that I'm proud to put my name on, pay the bills and put food on the table. Okay, maybe in a few years I buy a 'Vette.

True - that's one difference, at least as things have "evolved". Bearing in mind that double-run whiskey isn't a rule, so to speak. Back in the old days a lot of the stills had thumpers which negated the need to do separate stripping/spirit runs (because the traditional moonshiners just didn't have time to run stuff twice), while today the use of column stills does the same thing (all of Barton's products, for example, are single-run from a 26 plate column). I've actually played around with it both ways, along with a 3rd way that includes pulling a high, narrow heart cut of a single run that's been soured with previous low wines, precisely like the OP suggests, then treating the rest of the run as a strip. In fact, as I'm sitting here writing, it occurs to me that you could do both, in virtually any combination. Pull a little from what's left of a strip, pull some more from your spirit run, mix 'em up and let her fly... You could spend endless hours... hell, you could spend a lifetime... tweaking and refining until you come up with something that's so solid it makes you weep when you drink it. I mean, isn't that what the passion of our thing, here, is all about? A lot of this flexibility, IMO, is amplified and accentuated by still design. The uniqueness of the your distillate and the uniqueness of your copper are closely related. For my part - and I know this doesn't work for everybody - I've made a very fundamental decision to avoid factory stills. I found a coppersmith, we've spent many, many hours researching, prototyping, playing around with different things (and just generally having a blast) and he's building our equipment. One of a kind. Or two of a kind, as the case may be.

Basic sour mash technique. And yes, the stillage will act as a pH buffer - that's one of the purposes, along with imparting some taste to the mash. Most folks sour the mash, although it's not unusual to sour the ferment. It's a matter of taste, preference, religion and witchcraft.

"RedRum"..? Haha... I see what you did there... Ours was easy - when it came. A namesake distant ancestor, in the town in which I was raised, turned his estate house into an inn in the early 1700s. During the Revolution, a British spy was captured and hung in the courtyard of the inn, which became known forever after as the Old Spye Inn. What's funny about it is that during business planning we came up with - and tossed - all kinds of names. The central premise of our marketing story is colonial New Jersey, its deeply rooted history both on land and at sea. The marriage of our concept with the long-lost inn simply never occurred to me until one morning, literally in the shower, the entire narrative just popped into my head. I shopped it to all the key stakeholders that day and it soared. The team working on my marketing plan (headed by a former Madison Ave exec) literally threw up their hands when they read it, declared the entire exercise over and tossed everything they'd done to that point. A good name is like falling in love - you don't know how to do it, you can't make it happen, but when it does happen you'll know it - for sure.

It's funny that you're asking this question - I mean you, specifically. Probably it wouldn't be funny to most people, but me... I'm a huge geology buff. And you... are smack in the middle of some of the best, most intricate and most unusual geology on the planet with some correspondingly fabulous names: Timbered Island Gros Ventre Sundance Sea Absaroka Fossil Mountain Flathead Tensleep Cascade Canyon Wind River Beartooth The takeaway, if you care to take one, is that if you let yourself unwind and think about the things that resonate with you... you'll come up with something pretty quickly.

A hearty "Good on ya" to whoever in Montana has been doing follow-up. S.2169, the companion bill to H.R.4083, has just picked up an additional co-sponsor in Sen. John Walsh (D-MT).

Hey, Jim! Check your PM.

Sounds like a temperature correction issue.

Not to be argumentative, but I've always been morbidly fascinated with this (recent) compulsion to minutely control fermentation temperatures. I'm a traditionalist. For me, controlling the temperature in the fermentation room is enough - minute variation in the temperature of the wash as the yeast propagates yields taste profile differences that please me. Hence, we're going the completely open route, probably in wood.

Definitely keep at them. As I posted on this topic in another thread, I haven't received any significant feedback from my own Congressman (Chris Smith, R-NJ4) but did get a letter from Senator Robert Menendez re: S.2169, which is the same bill as introduced into the Senate by Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). I'm staying on top of Smith, as well. I've supported this guy for decades, and I'm more than a little miffed that he hasn't been more attentive. For what it's worth, H.R.4083 now has 2 co-sponsors - Steve Strivers of Ohio and Ralph Hall of Texas.

Hello, New Guy!

An update on H.R.4083 / S.2169 - the Distillery Excise Tax Reform Act of 2014. Having sent correspondence to Congressman Chris Smith and Senators Cory Booker and Robert Menendez, I have thus far received and actual, contextual reply from only one of the three - Sen. Menendez, who indicated that he would be willing to support the legislation if it came to a floor vote. First, let me say that to be effectively ignored by a Congressman serving my own district (Chris Smith, NJ-4th) with regard to legislation that provides real economic opportunity for our state is, to say the least, troubling. The bill, introduced into both the House and Senate by New York legislators, currently sits in committee. The only way to move it forward is to get it out of committee is by brute force - that's how our system works. Legislation is introduced and referred to committee every day, but only those bills with broad support actually make it to the floor for a vote. And, unfortunately, the only way a bill gains broad support is if the legislators interested in supporting it feel that doing so will benefit them politically. And, of course, the key to political support lies largely in a strong constituent response. I urge everyone to take a few moments to locate the web sites of their legislators and send a brief message in support of H.R.4083 and S.2169. Reducing the federal excise tax on craft distillers will offer the industry as a whole a tax-based incentive to grow their small businesses, invest in facilities and equipment and provide real jobs for their local economies. Please exercise your voices and make yourselves heard.

Not sure how helpful this would be in developing a spreadsheet, but try going here: http://web2.airmail.net/sgross/fermcalc There are a number of brief explanations behind some complex formulas. Alternatively you could go straight to the calculator on that web site: http://web2.airmail.net/sgross/fermcalc/FermCalcJS.html It will allow you to determine, for example, that raising 50 gallons of water to a target SG of 1.04 using sugar requires 46.307 lbs of sugar and results in a final solution volume of 53.422 gallons.

If anyone is interested, I found this to be a fun read. As has been said before, the hobby distillers can be a useful source of "street smarts". Dunder pit experiment

I think your direct electric option might be good. It's easy enough to take a stainless tank, drill a couple holes in it for a standard NPT connector and throw a couple elements in it. Since it's just water the elements should last a good long while.

I'd be interested in seeing a more comprehensive, balanced view of the accounts in hopes of determining whether or not federal revenue derived from the brewery industry is, or is not, a zero-sum game. You mention the rise in taxable revenue from the craft brewing industry, but in order to contextualize your argument you would need to look at the revenue from the entire brewery industry both during the aforementioned period, as well as historically - to determine if, in fact, craft brewers have been peeling revenue from the traditional brewers' share of the overall market, or if their emergence caused overall beer consumption to increase in some non-linear fashion. Regardless, unless I'm missing something (which is entirely possible), you're conflating "craft" with "hobby". The federal government doesn't derive tax revenue from hobby (home) brewers because there's no sales volume. Ostensibly, the fed would derive no revenue from hobby distillers for the same reason. Like I said in a previous post - I'm on your side. I'm just not sold on your presentation. In my opinion the better argument would be to talk about the exponential growth of the specialty market in hobby distillation equipment and supplies and to correlate that with a complete lack of negative societal impact while flying 100% below the enforcement radar. In essence, it's the same argument used by marijuana legalization proponents - "People are doing this anyway, nobody's stopping it, nobody's being harmed, the economic impact is positive, so why not legalize it?" It is, fundamentally, the "Lockean" justification for legalization; the notion that you can not restrict benign human behavior.