Something about our distillery that’s unique is that we are a craft farm distillery. We want to use real produce to make our spirits. We do not want extracts and artificial flavorings in our products. We grow most of our own ingredients for our products instead bringing them in from a third party. You may ask “Why go to all the trouble? The other distilleries in Kentucky purchases their ingredients from someone else.” And you would make a good point. We are adding more work to the process, but for us the difficult outweighed the simple.
We’ve chosen to use hard to find varieties for our products that give it an extra flavor profile that you would not get from the normal choices. And being hard to find, they are also difficult to grow. By growing our own ingredients we can control the standard by which our ingredients are grown. We can test which varieties we want to use in small plots instead of purchasing large amounts at one time. We can also control the methods and chemicals used during the farming process.
Monitoring the growth of our ingredients is not the only reason we chose the difficult path. We have set up our stills in the distillery building so that we can make just about any spirits we can think of. If we were going to have so much flexibility in the equipment, then we should have just as much when it comes to our ingredients. By being a craft farm distillery, we can experiment with ingredients such as agave, peppers, and peaches. We can go out the door, pick the ingredients, and test them in a product in a much shorter time frame than other distillers.
There was another compelling reason for us to be a craft farm distillery. We wanted our guests to see everything involved in distilling from the ground to the glass. At our distillery, you can see the ingredients that go into your drink growing in front of you. It’s not just a industrial experience. It’s a spiritual one. In everything we do, we are breaking the distillery mold.
CONSTRUCTION UPDATES
It’s been a rainy May this year, but we have tried our best to keep on track. Most of our efforts went into getting the production area ready for our equipment delivery. We now have our cooker, fermentors, and raw bourbon tank in the building! The sprinkler and HVAC systems are being installed. The trim work on the outside of the building is going up. The gas line is now up to the building and the sewer line is almost complete. Insulation has gone up in the retail section and lights are now being hung up throughout the whole building.
