Diary of a Distiller: Chapter Two - Oh, the Pain of it All

Welcome back to Diary of a Distiller.

In the beginning of this journal, Diary of a Distiller, I told you a little about my early life, and how I entered the world of food, wine, and fine spirits. As I mentioned, I became disillusioned with my life and plunged into the world of food and beverages. I started a journey and as I walk down this road I hope that the bricks become yellow, then golden; and don't just crumble away.

I'm still working hard on my still as I told you last week, buffing it to a mirror shine. I put some fancy and expensive protective finish on the Georgia Ridge Rocket still head and the top of the kettle to see how it looks. It's not perfect. You don't have the same intensity of a mirror shine or that silky, sexy smooth, almost oily texture, as you run your hand along it, as there is without the protective coat; but it still looks darn good.

I put the whiskey head on the kettle to hold it steady and started buffing that as well. About an hour later, when I was halfway through I decided to clean it off with some denatured alcohol to see how much of a shine I have. It was looking very nice when I noticed that some of the alcohol had dripped down onto the part of the kettle that I had already sealed and the finish was starting to turn white. I grabbed a cloth to wipe the alcohol off and realized that the alcohol had dissolved the sealant completely. Aaaargh!

After I calmed down a bit and stopped jumping around and swearing, I cleaned off the rest of the semi-dissolved sealant. Well, it looks like I have to face the fact that every few weeks, I or some other lucky soul, will have to polish the still by hand to keep it from tarnishing. I plan on having a few choice words with the saleswoman who recommended the product. I mean what the heck! I told her it was going to be used on a copper still. What do stills manufacture? Alcohol, of course! Will I be able to keep occasional spills off the still? Duh, of course not! So why recommend a product that is alcohol soluble? Grrrrrrr...

To try and get back my sanity I took a walk around the building. In the same facility are several related ventures. The Winterport Winery, the winery retail store and tasting room, and Pairings Food & Wine Educational Center. Today Pairings smells great. The chef for the culinary education program has been preparing for a cooking class tonight and has been roasting vegetables all morning. Garlic, carrots, onions, and more have been slowly caramelizing and perfuming the air.

My stomach starts to rumble and I realize it's lunch time. One of my partners, Mike, has some slow cooked ribs that he smoked at home and they are just the thing to help get me back on track after the mornings upset. I warm up two of them in the microwave for a minute and dig in. They are just the right tenderness from four or five hours of light smoking. They aren't fall off the bone soft, which for BBQ is a bad thing. They take just the slightest bite to get off the bone, and the smoky meat and luscious fat is just full of flavor. These ribs were cooked so well that they could have won an award at a national BBQ competition. Something I know from helping friends compete at BBQ competitions over the years. They were rubbed down with spices and then given just a bare hint of a basting with a tasty homemade sauce, which gave them just a tang of vinegar and a bit of spicy heat. The ribs were so flavorful and well cooked that two filled me up and left me very happy. I wandered back to the future distillery and sat myself back in a chair with my feet up on the still and thought back to a few years ago.


After ending my brief stint as a trauma counselor with Project Liberty I spent a few weeks looking deeply at who I was and where I wanted to go with my life. I kept coming back to the realization that food and beverages were my loves. Just as I had done with many of my counseling clients, I plotted out all the pros and cons. I made flow charts. I brainstormed and came up with ideas, writing down every one from realistic to outright outlandish. It was a time of opening up myself to possibilities and I made the decision to throw myself out there into the ether and see what happens.

I was surfing the web one day and saw a brief mention on a discussion board of a new artisanal dairy farm where they would be making raw milk, grass fed cheese and rustic, wood fired, brick oven breads. I checked out their website and saw that they were looking to hire staff and apprentices. I immediately picked up the phone and gave them a call. Soon after I was driving to an interview. Ninety minutes later I was in the countryside and arrived at the farm. I walked around following the owner for an hour or two as we chatted, when he offered me a job. I would be his assistant in building up the business, and an apprentice cheese maker and help bake the bread. It was just before Christmas and I took a few days to spend with family, and then right after New Years I moved onto the farm and settled in to what I hoped would be the simple life.

The days were long, as all farm days are. Up at dawn to collect eggs and feed the chickens. Then herd the cows into the milking parlor for the morning's milk. Then start the cheese making process. Grab a quick bite to eat and then walk around with a tool belt and nails and fix whatever needed fixing. Run new electric fence wires. Track down the sheep that kept running away. Install insulation in the roof of the dairy. Take a break for lunch and get back to work. Dig fence posts. Install a new thermostat in the staff house. Paint a wall. Make the dough for the bread. Bake the bread. Work on the cheese, form it and salt it. Go into the aging rooms and turn the cheese. Run heated water lines to the chickens and cattle that would run night and day in the intense cold that had settled in.

It was below zero at night and in the single digits during the days. I was working so hard at times that I would only be wearing a light jacket and still be overheated. I lost my excess pudge and became lean and trim. My forearms, biceps, and calves became defined and I saw my abs for the first time in five years. In the evenings after dinner we brewed beer and drank some of the last batch. Sometimes I would run to the beer shop so we could try an interesting Belgian ale and then try to replicate it. It was early to bed, after a quick wash in the tub, since there was no shower. It took some getting used to, but the simple life wasn't all that bad, if total exhaustion doesn't bother you.

Actually most of the time things were pretty good. Except for an occasional nudge. From a cow that is. One of the cows was, to put it simply, a mean and ornery brute. Twisted horns half grown in, she liked to sneak up behind you and give you a nudge with her head. A nudge is no big thing when it's one of your friends who are the same size as you, but from an 800 lb. cow it's more like a shove. A hard one. Now I don't know why, but this cow took a strong dislike to me. She bothered everyone a bit here and there, but I became her punching bag. That's something I'm just not used to, since most folks don't mess around with me too much, except for that one tiny guy in every bar with a Napoleon Complex who has to always try to start a fight with the biggest dude around. Usually I buy that guy a beer and soon we're talking up a storm and instant friends. But with this cow that just wasn't going to work. I even offered her some beer, but as soon as she chugged it she was back on my case again. You would think that I would be on the good side after I saved her and her calf's lives when she had a bad time calving and I helped her deliver. But no, she was a stubborn and ungrateful thing.

One day she got me out in the fields where the ground was frozen so hard it felt like concrete. She tossed me around and bulldozed me along the ground. Now I know how they got that term, bulldoze. I was roughed up a bit and my left shoulder, elbow, and knee were hurting pretty bad. I thought about going to see the doctor but my pride slapped me around and said "Cowboy Up!" I mean, hey, it was only a cow right? Not a big ole bull. So I just took a lot of painkillers over the next week or two and eventually started to feel better.

Then one day it happened again. This time that nasty critter got me damn good. My right side got messed up as bad as my left, plus some. I asked for some time off and went to the doctor. It turned out that I was going to need surgery, and lots of it. Both shoulders, both knees, possibly my elbows and left hand. I went through ten months of agonizing physical therapy to see if I could heal without the surgery. Of course this meant staying to work on the farm was out of the question. I could barely walk, let alone work a farm. Finally the doctors said that I had to have surgery. I went in and had my left shoulder done first. Basically they sawed it apart and rebuilt it again, grinding bones back into shape and removing torn cartilage. They told me that in a few weeks they would do my other shoulder, then my knees, then on from there.

A week or so after the first surgery I was at the grocery store. My arm was in a sling and I was pushing the cart around one handed. Try it some time. It isn't that easy, especially if you have one of those carts with bad wheels. Why is it that invariably you get a bad cart and the person next to you has a good one? Anyway I was looking at some canned soup when an elderly gentleman asked me to reach up and get a can off the top shelf. Because I am tall this is a regular occurrence at the market and I handed him the can. I went on about my shopping without giving it another thought.

Later I was pushing my cart across the street with my bags of groceries, when something caught my eye. I looked up in time to see a mini van turning the corner and coming straight at me. The man driving it was looking the other way as he made the turn and was accelerating straight at me. I tried to get out of the way and took to my heels at high speed, and almost made it. But he hit the cart, which went sliding down the road hitting me and spinning me around as I ended up being slammed by his fender. I got knocked head over tail and saw that the little old man I had helped in the store had just run me over! Needless to say the ambulance arrived soon after and took me off to the hospital. My knees had caught the brunt of the accident and I needed surgery right away. Well the next seven months were a nightmare. Surgery, physical therapy, more surgery, more therapy, more surgery. On and on it went. Seven months of surgery, with eighteen months of horrible physical therapy before, during, and after.


Looking back, that part of my life is a hazy blur, for which I am thankful. I am soooo glad that most of the pain is long gone and I'm sitting here with my feet up and just chilling out. Things aren't half bad today, if I say so myself. Now that I think about it, small upsets like the sealant on the still being useless, just don't seem that important anymore.