distilling

Reading Labels – The Basics

Product labels are among the many critical items in the distillery start-up process, and they are just as important in the growth of the distiller’s product line in the marketplace. Whether simple and direct, or complex and wordy, the label reflects the art of the distiller.

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A Better Batch of Booze

It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, two hours before the official opening time of the tasting room at Montanya Distillers in Silverton. The place is already filling up.

Delena Aseere, assistant distiller and barkeep, is serving a trio of bedraggled, weather-beaten snowboarders lined up at the bar. Anywhere else, they might be clutching apres-ski PBR tallboys. But here, they each pull on a colorful, custom crafted, decidedly more foo-foo cocktail featuring the house specialty – Montanya’s own brand of rum.

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Spirits: Newfangled American Whiskeys go Beyond Rye, Bourbon

With his plaid shirt, cowboy hat and neatly trimmed mustache, Jess Graber is as quintessentially Western as sagebrush and the Marlboro Man. So when Graber decided to enter the whiskey business several years ago, he realized that making an eastern whiskey such as bourbon or rye just didn’t feel right.

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Important News for California Distilling Community

Distillers can serve for free at any non licensed venue, with a special permit, not just a non-profit. This is a new law.

AB 2293 expands on the set of rules with respect to what winegrowers and distillers can provide free of charge to consumers. AB 2293 generally allows wine and distilled spirits producers or their designated authorized unlicensed agent to provide FREE entertainment, food, wine, non-alcoholic beverages, and distilled spirits, to consumers at a facility not licensed by the ABC, such as an art gallery.

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Bay Area home Distillers Make Modern-day Moonshine

Moonshiners live among us. By day they appear to be respectable members of society, perhaps writing software to make your Internet experience run smoothly. But at night and on weekends, after a visit to the farmers’ market or a nice brunch, they work in secret, sterilizing equipment, taking specific gravity and temperature measurements, and waiting impatiently as their illegal hooch drip, drip, drips out of tiny stills.

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