The distillery is really a manufacturing plant.  Sales projections tell us what to make, when to make it and how much to make.  These are all target numbers that the production crew gets given to them and it our task to get it all done.  

Today my thoughts were cleaning the summer shift away from whiskey and on to rum.  The molasses will be flowing into the distillery soon, well not flowing, but coming in giant bags in boxes that hold 3000 pounds or about 250 gallons each.  

These boxes of molasses are the best kind of packaging we can get, yet they are still kind of suck in many ways.  The cardboard walls are about two inches thick, and we have to cut them apart with a sawsall, and then haul them to the recycling center. It is tasks like this I never thought about when I dreamed about being a distiller.

Along with the molasses is a shift in yeast, nutrients for the yeast, cleaning all of the whiskey flavor out of the tanks and still, making sure we have enough used barrels in good shape to store the rum (we age the rum for our spiced rum at least one year), and so many other tiny things that we can’t forget.  

All of this happens while vodka is filtering, the bottling line is running full steam, gin is being distilled in the little still (named R2), and someone asks for some samples for a single barrel selection.  

It is a factory, full of machines, made of metal and/or flesh, powered by electricity, steam, propane, or cookies it works.  It sings its own song, polyrhythmic and complex, yet lyrical.  That song, if I listens, tells me what is happening at that very moment.  Good or bad, the song will let you know.  

The Italian Futurists found beauty in machines about a century ago (some of them had some horrible political ideas, but let’s put that aside for this paragraph). When all is going right, I understand their thoughts and wonder of what was then the dawning machine age.  It must have been amazing to see and electric motor whirl for the first time in their lives, making something as necessary as a sewing machine be powered by something other than a foot. When the distillery machine is working correctly we are happy.

Sometimes the song changes. An instrument gets quiet or something is off key.  Then the day can turn sour.  We don’t talk about those days.

I started to write this to de-romanticise the distillery. I don’t think I did, but perhaps I changed the romanticistic view away from calmly sampling whiskey barrels to a steam-driven calliope that might just break at any moment.  I guess that is okay with me.