"penobscotbaydistillery" news and stories

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!

Over the weekend Mike and I finished most of the pipe work for the brewery and distillery chilling system. All we now need is the pump and that project is done. I mentioned before, but we are using a 500 gallon wine chilling and clearing tank as the reservoir and cooling system for our chilling system. We had it already available, Mike had picked it up awhile ago very inexpensively, and it was just sitting there taking up room and unused. So being thrifty, we decided to make it useful once again. We ran PVC piping many months ago along the walls of the brewery / distillery; going to all the fermenters, the copper spirits still, and locations of future stills. Then we connected the brewery chilling plate and transfer system for the hot wort to the network. Finally we ran the pipe along the ceiling of the basement to the cooling tank, and prepped everything for installing the pump.

You can see some photos of this in the galleries to come. Also I show a few of our 500 gallon wine fermenting and storage tanks. The reason I'm show them is to focus on the PVC piping along the ceiling above the tanks. This is for venting CO2 from the tanks, to the outside. Each tank that has active fermentation still in progress has tubing that comes out of an airlock and goes into the CO2 vent pipe. This way the basement winery doesn't become filled with CO2, killing us. That just wouldn't be fun.

Early Monday morning the boiler guys came to start the boiler installation. We are usually closed Sundays and Mondays, but Mike went in to work with them; while I was off down to Rockport, near where I used to live in Rockland / Owls Head, to meet with a Steel Work company to discuss my latest project. The boiler guys spent several days working on the installation, and will come back next week to finish it.

Last Friday we took the day off from installing the steam pipes for our new brewery boiler, to bottle our first hard cider. This is the first new product to be released since I joined the team, and I had a lot of input towards its design. I have had some experience in the past creating hard ciders, both as a home brewer and wine maker, as well as commercially. Right after Mike and I shook hands to form our partnership late last November, I set off to Cornell University's Agricultural Experimental Station in Geneva, NY to take a week of workshops, primarily on advanced hard cider development and production techniques. The new information I picked up helped fine tune this cider into a great product over the past year.

We started with several different batches of sweet apple cider, fresh pressed from locally grown apples. Each batch had a different blend of apples and was fermented at cool temperatures using different yeasts. After the primary fermentation, the cider was taken off the lees (old, spent, dead and dormant yeast that settles to the bottom of the fermenting tank.) Then put into new tanks to age slowly for months and months, all at cool temperatures in our wine cellar. The cool temperature and slow, slow, slow, fermentation ensure that there will be lots of fresh apple flavor in the finished cider; as well as the tones and notes from the fermentation. Since each batch was made from different apples, and different yeasts; they had a completely different character from each other.

One of the craft secrets to creating a great hard cider is long and slow aging; and this we had done. The other is blending the cider. If you just make one, huge, batch of hard cider using all your apples, it tends to taste flat and one dimensional after fermentation. But if you make several smaller batches, with different apples in each, and later blend them carefully together; you get a final cider that is greater than the sum of its parts. Really great ciders save back some of the final blend to age even longer, and this is added to the blend the following year/s to bring in even greater complexity.

After a hectic week in NYC I finally made it back up to Maine for a relatively a quiet and relaxing weekend. That is if you call driving 160 miles round trip on Saturday relatively quiet and relaxing. And that's after driving the 470 miles from NY City back to Winterport on Friday. Well, it's Maine; driving is part of the deal. You have to go quite a bit to get from place to place. Saturday turned out to be a day all about seeing my friends all over the place. Starting in the morning I had a date and we drove the 25 miles to Blue Hill for the North East Regional Mixed Doubles Petanque Championship. We didn't play, but were there to watch a friend of mine from NYC, Ernesto, play. He is a seriously good Petanque player and it was fun to watch.

In the afternoon we drove from Blue Hill down to Rockport for the the First Annual Mid-Coast Food and Wine Festival which was coordinated by my friend Bettina of Cellardoor Winery and Cathe of the State of Maine Cheese Company. It was like a reunion in that I saw so many friends who I only get to see on rare occasions, now that I moved up north 55 miles to the border between Mid-Coast and Down-East Maine. There were several wineries represented; my friend Keith's Sweetgrass Farm Winery & Distillery, my friends Buddy and Holly of Savage Oakes Winery, and of course we at Winterport Winery had a table at the tasting. Mike and Joan's daughter and her husband were there representing our winery, as I played hooky for the day. Another friend, Brian, who just started up Oyster River Winegrowers was supposed to be there, but couldn't make it for some reason. That's too bad because I haven't yet tried his white wine that came out this summer.

At the food stalls I ran into several more friends. Ann Marie of Ann Marie's Kitchen was there serving great pork cooked medium rare and juicy after being marinated in her Secret Sauce. Ann Marie is a firecracker and I like her and her fiance a lot. They don't live to far from me and I have to get together with them soon to kick back and hang out, although hanging out with Ann Marie is usually anything but quiet, more like being in the presence of a human dynamo that's putting out 10,000 volts.

As it has been for the past few weeks, and will continue for the next few months, this is wine making time. We are making every kind of wine you can imagine, and bottling as much as possible as well, to empty out fermenting tanks so we can start new batches. Our total wine capacity in tanks is around 7,000 gallons between fermenting and storage, and we are at around half that right now. The amount in tanks changes weekly as we start new batches or bottle mature ones. The beginning of the week was spent on labeling bottles we filled last week, but didn't have labels for. They arrived just a day or two after we needed them, so we were able to finish off that batch of cranberry wine and it's now ready for the holidays.

Then we bottled up the last of the strawberry wine, which should last us to next strawberry season. We started up some pear wine and apple wine and will be making quite a bit of both of these, especially the apple wine. Some of that will be ear-marked for when we get the distillery up and running, so we can make a Calvados style aged apple brandy.

Well, the brewery/distillery had another slowdown. By this time I am amazed I have any hair left, let alone a full head. I have been pulling at it non-stop for months now. Well, it seems to be straighter than before, and lighter in color as well. Interestingly, my mustache and sideburns have started to go white in patches. I guess my hair is as stressed as I am. The latest is that the boiler quotes were way too high again from the last dealer we spoke to, and so we are getting in more quotes. These guys can't seem to understand that we don't want or need some multi-million btu steam boiler, but something on the smaller side.