Hello from Los Angeles

[dukerustfield]

I had tried to contact a local distillery, Greenbar, and they had recommended this site.

I've had the idea to do my own distillery for maybe 5-10+ years. Back when the microbrew explosion was really...exploding. I don't drink or care for beers much.

I'm self-employed as a writer and can, knock wood, make enough to survive on and have some money to invest.

I am primarily interested in vodka but a few things confused me and was hoping you all could answer off the bat.

-you can't distill at all without proper licenses so how can you come up with a formulation/recipe? That's almost like having to build a drive-thru restaurant to try out your grandma's homecook recipe.

-you need to put the grain source the vodka came from on the label, but I was interested in coming from industrial food grade grain neutral spirits. So it wouldn't be the full cycle of distillation (I think). Is this possible and at a high level what problems are there from distilling straight by hand?

Thanks for any insights you can provide. I've been looking around on this stuff for...a long time and had always gotten a bit twisted in the piles of regulations.