Don Poffenroth and Kent Fleischmann get plenty of help at Dry Fly Distilling once their gin and vodka is ready for release.
That help comes each Saturday at Dry Fly’s Spokane distillery, where groups of volunteers work three-hour shifts bottling and packing the products for shipping.
For most volunteers, it’s more fun than work. They finish off their labors by having a free lunch, then enjoying what Poffenroth calls “sensory evaluation” of the Dry Fly inventory.
Which means the volunteers get three or four small shots of gin or vodka.
“Those volunteers find us,” Poffenroth said. “It’s grown popular entirely by word-of-mouth.”
Dry Fly first announced it needed volunteers about a year ago. Within a few months, help was lined up solid for all of 2008 and 2009. Poffenroth and Fleischmann will wait until this fall before starting to fill the 2010 signup list – which may fill up faster once Dry Fly releases its new all-wheat whiskey in a few weeks.
The new product – called Washington Wheat Whiskey – is the first of as many as four types of whiskey Dry Fly plans to release over time.
