Production & Process

Karen Hoskin of Montanya Distillers

Taking Sustainability Deep

In this day and age of jargon and dubious news, we hear terms such as green, sustainable, carbon footprint, renewable and eco-friendly daily. We rarely share a definition for these terms. A company might implement one sustainability practice and then...

Split Rock Distilling Sets its Sights on Sustainability

Conveniently located along the well-traveled coastal Route 1, Split Rock Distilling was co-founded by Topher Mallory and Matt Page. They regale me with how Newcastle, Maine, has grown in the 25 and 20 years they’ve respectively called it home....

Copper Love

The alembic, as I know it, or alembic (in American and English), is an anciently curious and cleverly designed distillation contraption that looks like it comes from another time and has little changed over the centuries (alambic from French,...

Nestville Distillery

Between Hungary to the south and Poland and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia has traditionally been regarded as one of the “vodka belt” countries. “Never in a million years did I think Slovakians would convert to drinking...

Slow Distillation

Being an aficionado of the Slow Food Movement since the beginning, I would like to add another antidote to the tyranny of the fast food industry and the frenzied pace of modern culture. Slow Distillation By using ancestral methods of distillation,...

Temperature and Maturation

Temperature is a critically important factor at every step of a distiller’s craft. Its affect on grains begins with the sun’s energy shining on the growing crops, and continues through the mash temperature of the malt. In fermentation, temperature...

Doublers, Continuous Doublers and Thumpers

In our distant history an ancestral distiller wasn’t satisfied with the elixir from his crude still. He no doubt had traces of grain carryover, entrainment, and greasy grain deposits called gunge (a term Americanized into grunge) and possibly patches...

The Great Eight

When did you read eight books on any topic? How about ten? Probably never. But now you can SAY you read ten books on craft distilling in one sitting. All courtesy of Distiller Magazine. On the other hand, if...

Cutting Edge Processes for Extracting Flavors

Flavor, the ultimate frontier; everything we do comes down to flavor. Flavor extraction is an important part of making a spirit and makes up a large part of the drinking experience. So, what’s new in the world of flavor?...

How to Create a Carbon Neutral Distillery

One of the questions we got asked several times at the sustainability summit at the Louisville conference this past year was how to achieve a “Carbon Neutral” distillery or how to mitigate or treat the production of greenhouse gasses...