Last week was a busy, busy, week. Lots of hard work that brought us much closer to our goals of opening the brewery and distillery. At the end of the week I came down with a mild version of the flu, thanks to the open and sharing nature of my friends and partners. Finally on Saturday morning I ground to a halt at work. I was feeling pretty under the weather, not so bad I couldn't work, but my mental faculties were slowed down.

I decided to do some photography of bottles of the very rare, and out of production, Tanqueray Malacca Gin in my collection; to send to a potential customer who also collects rare spirits. As I was putting things away and moving cases around, I stumbled back in forth in a daze. Then due to my clumsiness a case of empty wine bottles fell from the top of a pallet onto my big toe. Usually I have pretty fast reactions and can catch falling stuff, or at least slow down or break their fall. This time I didn't even notice it until a few seconds after it landed, directly with the pointy corner of the case in the middle of my toe. It didn't hurt at first. Mike was near me hunting for some tools and I pointed out the case balancing on it's corner, sitting on my toe. He just shook his head and shrugged with a rueful smile. I knew it should hurt, but my reflexes were so slowed down that I felt nothing.

I picked up the case and heaved it over my head and back onto the pallet. Grumbling under my breath that this was going to hurt like hell. I started to make my way up the stairs to my office and as I did so my toe started to get warm, then hot, then to burn unmercifully. By the time I hobbled up the stairs and sat down at my desk in the distillery my toe really, really hurt!

I took off my running shoe and sock and checked it out. The whole toe was a pale, pale, white. The rest of my toes and foot a nice healthy pink. All the blood had been squashed from my toe and there was a tiny dent the size of a fingertip right below the bed of the toenail. As I watched my toe started to turn pink, then red, then purple. Then it started to swell, all the while burning and screaming at me.

I decided that I had had enough. It was Saturday and the end of a long week and I couldn't take any more. First physical exhaustion, then mental exhaustion, then the flu, and now a screaming big toe. So I left early and went home. When I got there I made a great big 22 oz mug of thick, warm, rich, creamy, spicy, deeply chocolaty, Mexican hot chocolate and put myself to bed; where I basically stayed until it was time to go to work again on Tuesday morning.

After spending Saturday afternoon through Tuesday morning in bed I went in to work. Tuesday is our Monday, since we are open Tuesday through Saturday. In the morning I spent a few hours working on my new still designs, doing more calculations, and putting together a table of still kettle dimensions with the relevant volumes of liquid capacity and total capacity. I tried out several formulas to examine vaporization levels of alcohol and water, to figure out column and condenser capacity. Then I spent the afternoon at a steel working company discussing my plans. They started looking into the technical difficulties of building my still, and working towards some price quotes.

I also dropped off the fire grate we had ordered months and months ago to use with our copper spirits still. The fire grate is a large, solid structure that will hold the still above the propane burner, inside the masonry firebox. It is currently square in shape, but we are getting it cut down and made into a circle, so it is exactly the same circumference as the spirits still. This will take up less room in the distillery when we build the firebox, as well as lead to a nicer looking structure. So the brick exterior of the firebox will now be round, instead of square.

Wednesday morning I spent doing more math, which isn't one of my favorite subjects. The only reason I didn't end up with a degree in medicine was because I strove to have as little involvement with math as possible. All my life math and I have had an off again, off again, relationship. It's not that I can't do it, or even find it difficult, but that I find it boring. It's just not fun for me and my mind doesn't work creatively that way. I remember a friend who shared an apartment with me for a few years after high school during college. He loved math and could play with numbers all day. Not so for me. I took some tests in college and passed the requirements, so didn't have to take any math besides statistics, which I ended up taking several times again during undergrad and grad school, because every school refused to accept the credits from other universities. Much to my annoyance.

I still flash back to my last year of undergrad when I had to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and there was a HUGE series of math sections. Besides statistics in college, the last math courses I had taken were algebra and geometry back in high school, and that was 14 years earlier. I had read a trigonometry text once for the heck of it, but that was the total extent of my exposure to math. The math required during the GRE was way over what I had studied more than a decade before, so during the exam I had to figure out the basics of the higher maths, using each problem as a primer to figure out the next. I still have no idea how I did so well on the math sections to get into grad school, but the test results said I was in the upper 60% for math ability for students entering grad school. I am not sure if this shows off my mathematical deduction and analytical abilities, or the current state of math education among college students. (Personally I felt depressed at the time to have done so poorly in the math sections, but what could I expect. At least I did exceptionally well in the other parts of the GRE, which made me feel much better about myself overall.)

Anyway, the latest series of calculations were working out the amounts of various fruit that I would need to make fruit brandy with. Each fruit will produce different levels of alcohol when made into a fruit wine/wash to distill. They all also produce different amounts of the good ethanol, vs. the bad methanol and other components. So I spent the morning working out formulas for peaches, then apples, so I would know how much juice or puree I needed to order now. Like making wine, it's a long process to make brandy and with so much time from start to finish I want to make sure I have enough premium fruit brandy to bottle next summer.

When I was done I called a fruit supplier and increased last weeks order for peach puree by 50%. I now have several tons of peach puree on the way. That's approximately 60,000 fresh peaches squeezed into juice and pulp with the stones and skin removed. I would love to be able to order that many fresh peaches, but we don't have the processing capacity, equipment, or space for such large orders. So we order some of our stone and pit fruits already juiced by local and regional orchards, growers, and suppliers; then rush shipped to us chilled so we can start fermenting it immediately.

It's really nice to get the peach puree this way. Fruit skins tend to have a lot of pectin in them and this turns into methanol during distilling, not a good thing and a waste of flavor when you have to throw out a good 10-20% of the spirits to prevent it from getting into the final spirit. Also the pits have precursors to cyanide, and can add off flavors, so it's nice not to have them in the wine/brandy as well.

Usually we like to process the soft, small, pit-less fruits like blueberries and such ourselves. They are easier to work with and don't require tens of thousands of dollars worth of specialized equipment that the larger and harder fruits require. In many ways I am glad, because the pre-juiced fruit is of excellent quality, ripeness, and freshness. Possibly better than it would be if we processed it ourselves. In this case this peach puree is the exact same that Gerber Baby Foods purchases, which makes me feel pretty good about its quality.

By noon I was starting to feel lousy again from the flu and went home for lunch. After a quick snack of leftover, spice rubbed roast chicken from the night before, I sat down to watch the Weather Channel for a few minutes before heading back to work. I live only 100 yards from the winery so going home for lunch is something I do several times a week. I sat back in my new recliner and watched the rain clouds moving around on the Doppler Radar. The next thing I knew it was 6pm and I had fallen asleep for almost six hours.

After my exhausting day I had a light dinner and went off to bed early. In my dreams I was chased around by numbers calling out, "It doesn't compute."

In addition to what I have mentioned, Mike and Jody have been very busy, with occasional help from our friend Fred, and with me adding my two cents or helping hands every now and then. (Or maybe getting in the way with how dazed from the flu I am.) By weeks end we had finished all the electrical wiring for the brewery and distillery, including to most of the sensors and instruments for the brew kettle, steam boiler, chilling system, fermenting tanks, and stills. We tested all the control and computer systems for the brewery and they are good to go.

Also the plumbing was finished this week. We installed a four stage filtration system that removes all impurities from our water, right down to the sterile .2 micron level. Winterports water is excellent coming from an aquifer of the same quality as Poland Springs, or even better; and after we filter it the water is amazingly good. Now we have filtered water run to the brew kettle, mash/lauter/sparging tun, sinks, hoses, still, etc. As well as extremely hot water to the sink and for cleaning. The welder stopped by and attached a port to one of our new pressure tanks so we could install a carbonating 'stone' and dropped off some stainless steel pipe work he did so we could run the filtered cold water to the brewery. We also set up a steam take-off for a steam cleaning wand to use to clean and sanitize the brewery/distillery.



Now we just have to run the water to the steam boiler and wait for the boiler guys to show up to finish connecting the boiler. They were supposed to be here at the beginning of the week, but they have been a no-show and we haven't heard from them. Typical. grrr...

As soon as they are done with their work, a few hour job at most, we can test the brewery and finalize our first beer recipe. We hope to have our Old Factory Whistle, Scottish Style Red Ale, in the bottle by Thanksgiving. Well, we will see. We originally had the slogan "Three long toots and you're done for the day" for the Old Factory Whistle Scottish Ale, but the Feds didn't like that although i fail to understand why, so it's now "Three long whistle toots and you're done for the day." Bleh! ;-)>

Well, I'm off to work and it's Halloween. I don't have any parties to go to locally, and the ones I am invited to are all in NYC and too far away. So I'm looking forward to those whistle toots some time soon. Have a Happy Halloween folks and remember to get your flu shot!