This one’s quite a mouthful… Sunday morning, bleary-eyed and unhappy to be awake, I stumbled to the Royal Sonesta for Dale De Groff’s cognac seminar.

His panelists included Salvatore Calabrese, Alain Royer, and Olivier Paultes. Calabrese is one of the world’s most famous bartenders and also author of a book about cognac. Alain Royer has worked with cognac for most of his life and now works with Renaud-Cointreau Group. Olivier Paultes has also worked with cognac most of his life; he is now cellar master for Frapin and Fontpinot. And if you don’t know who Dale is …

So DdG started off with a history of cognac, the region and the spirit. He moved quickly through this material, so my notes are somewhat sketchy. He wanted to get right into the first tasting portion of the panel. We started with a 2009 distillate of cognac, bottled off the still. Not a lot of complexity to this, as you’d imagine. Floral (lavender, violet) and fruity (a hint of citrus zest) on the nose and tongue, but also quite hot. It needed a few drops of water to open it up and get past the alcohol burn. We moved on to a VSOP Frapin, then a VSOP Château Montifaud and an XO Château de Fontpinot. I’m pretty inexperienced when it comes to cognacs of this caliber, so I don’t really trust my tasting notes. I’ll just say I thought the Fontpinot was just gorgeous, though.

A quick aside here: if I remember Dale’s definition correctly, in cognac terms, a château is a single house producing all its own cognac. These cognacs don’t blend their cognacs with distillates from other houses, like mass-market cognacs do. This is, in a rough sense, analogous to a single-malt scotch.

The final cognac tested was called Vat 49, and it was unusual. It’s from the Forgotten Casks program imported by Preiss Imports. A blend of older cognacs, containing brandies from 1904 and 1955. Interesting and a bit of a challenge.

Next part of the panel dealt with still construction in the cognac region, and this part was great. Royer played a video showing craftsmen taking a flat sheet of copper and hammering, bending, and shaping it into the rounded wall of the boiler. Someone interrupted with a question to Royer: “What’s the price of a cognac still these days?” Answer: “A Ferrari.” As labor intensive as it is to build one, I’m not surprised.

We were running low on time at this point, but Calabrese, the mad bastard, had a couple of surprises for us. First up, a pre-phyloxera cognac from 1865. That’s Eighteen Sixty-Five, the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Phyloxera is a pest that nearly destroyed the European wine industry in the late 1800s. The only salvation was to take European vines and graft them onto North American rootstock, which had evolved alongside phyloxera and was thus resistant. Many wine and brandy experts insist that pre-phyloxera wines and brandies were much different in flavor and character from today’s. I don’t know the provenance of the stuff that Calabrese brought along, but it’s a survivor. I thought it nosed like a madeira or a sherry, and caught a lot of complex aromas, but I also thought that the flavor was a little flat.

However, it was the other surprise that was a true treat, an 1805 Sazerac cognac.

A little history here: when the Sazerac cocktail–now rye whiskey, sugar, absinthe, and Peychaud’s bitters–was originally a brandy cocktail. And the brandy of choice was Sazerac. From what I can tell, though, the Sazerac cognac succumbed to the phyloxera pest. A bottle from 1805 is a rare thing indeed.

Which made it surprising when Calabrese mixed about half of a 200ml bottle into a Sazerac. I was one of the few who caught a sip of it, and zoh-mah-gah. The drink was far richer and more complex than any Sazerac I’ve made or tasted with rye or modern cognac, and I can reasonably suspect, a tipple I’ll probably never taste the likes of again.

Thursday morning, I had the pleasure of sitting in on the Botanical Garden seminar, presented by Charlotte Voisey and Jim Ryan of William Grant & Sons. Voisey and Ryan discussed the roles that various botanicals play in gins.

The seminar was lighthearted but info-packed. Four actors played the role of different botanicals and were decked in colorful outfits. At the right moment, the actor would come out into the room, dance or strut or even swagger around to music, and then exit. It sounds cheesy but it was actually quite fun.

Charlotte started, describing the history of the science of botany, and how our understanding has evolved over time.

They then split the world of gin botanicals into four groups: spice, floral, citrus, and other. They said there was honestly no better term they could derive than “other.” In spice, they covered first the biggie: juniper. They worked through coriander, caraway, and cubeb.

The cocktail served during this portion was the Snapper. Their version included Hendricks gin, rice wine vinegar, spices and a float of port.

They moved on to citrus: orange peel, lemon peel. They use a bitter orange, like that found in marmalade, for Hendrick’s. As for the lemon, it’s there to help correct and soften other flavors. Cocktail was the Citrus Fizz, in which they tried to layer the citrus flavors in the drink. It was gin, Solerna Blood Orange Liqueur, creme de violette, rhubarb bitters, and the juices of orange, lemon, and lime.

Among the floral botanicals used in making Hendricks are chamomile, elderflower; meadowsweet, and rose petal. The cocktail served here was the Pall Mall Punch: Hendricks, chamomile tea, lemon, honey syrup, and Peychaud’s. Lovely drink.

Finally, the elusive “other.” Just three things here, one of which will certainly not surprise anyone: first, angelica root, and orris root and the non-shocker, cucumber. I was interested to learn that cucumber’s essential oils are too low to be added in distillation, so they’re infused in afterward. For this round, they served up the La Luna, which was really kind of fun, but a little strong: Hendricks, cucumber juice, jalapeno syrup, and lime. A very green drink.

First day in New Orleans! Sazerac, chicken and jambalaya at Coop’s Place, and a group tasting panel at d.b.a.! [read more]

Rookie. Newbie. Freshman. Dare I say, virgin? Cocktail enthusiasm continues to grow in the United States as more and more people are developing an interest in craft cocktails. Cocktail bars are spreading across the country, and there are even brick-and-mortar stores now that sell cocktail equipment and tools. So, say you’re a bartender and it’s a slow night. You’ve got a patron across from you who’s finishing up her beer and puzzling over your cocktail menu. “I don’t really know much about cocktails,” she says. “What do you recommend?”

So, hotshot. What do you recommend? And if this patron becomes a regular at your bar, diving fully into the cocktail ocean, how do you help her navigate the shoals? Join me, Robert Hess, and Adam Lantheaume on Saturday morning at 10am and give us an earful! For more, check out my blog.

*Outside Irene’s.

Just a quick note to let you know that Mud Puddle Books is set up in the Cocktail Market in the Queen Anne Ballroom. In my opinion, it’s the only booth worth visiting, but perhaps that’s catty.

I’ve already grabbed my Harry Johnson (narf, narf), so be sure to yank yours too, while you still can:

If you miss them today; if you’ve already blown your budget on booze, po boys, or pay-per-views of LeNell’s Bitter Truth tattoo; or if you just don’t have room in your luggage, check out their website: www.cocktailkingdom.com/

My first panel of Tales 2k8 was also among the discussions I most eagerly awaited. I am not what you might call a dedicated Hemingway fan, but I’ve read many of his books and they never fail to entertain me. Now that I am also a drinks nerd, I like reading them with a barfly’s eye.

Led by Phil Greene, cofounder of the Museum of the American Cocktail and Hemingway enthusiast, we romped through passages from Papa’s novels, short stories, and letters, and tasted some of the giant’s favorite cocktails.

We began with the Jack Rose, and may I say, this was the finest version I’ve had of this drink. I suspect the Fee Bros.’ grenadine played a role in that, and I should order a bottle when I return home.

Next, was the Green Isaac’s Special, a drink that Hemingway himself invented and named after a Caribbean island:

To break from the red drinks, we had a Montgomery martini. If I remember Phil’s story correctly, it’s named such because British field marshal Montgomery was said to avoid leading his men to battle unless they enjoyed a 15 to 1 advantage. Hemingway mixed his martinis to that ratio, and, thus, the Montgomery Martini:

Next, the Papa Doble Daiquiri; his love of the daiquiri is legendary, so I’ll say no more:

Finally, the Death in the Afternoon. This apparently originated in a recipe that Hemingway submitted to a book (So Red the Nose, or Breath in the Afternoon) collecting the tipples of famous writers and actors. A fine drink:

*N.B.: Bols played no part in this. Don’t blame them for the pun.

And now, the end of my Leviathan conversation with Mike McCaw, Matthew Rowley, and Ian Smiley. Part 1 is available here, and Part 2 can be found here. I had a great time talking to these guys, and I expect the Hausgemacht panel to be engaging and informative.

Michael Dietsch: Now, Mike and Ian, do you find that home brewing and home winemaking is sort of a gateway drug for home distilling? Do people start off as brewers and winemakers and then become distillers?

Ian Smiley: Yes, I find a lot of my customers are that. Now, my book Making Pure Corn Whiskey is focused on making whiskey and vodka and other flavored spirits, so a lot of people who have been making what they call artisan beers, or making excellent product all-grain beers, or making excellent wines now want to move into distilling. They’re looking to do it properly, and they’re looking to do it for high quality, that this is often a segue that has come from the brewing and winemaking. In a manner of speaking, that’s how I started myself.

I do find, in answer to one of the questions you asked Mike earlier, is I see a lot of customers who really don’t feel too hands on with making the equipment, they don’t want to experiment with it, they don’t want to go through the phases of having equipment that doesn’t work very well, they often want to just buy, get it made, get it perfected right from the outset, and move forward like that so they can produce the excellent product because they are pursuing excellence.

So, in summary, to answer your question, yes in my business, I do have a lot of customers that come through the brewing and winemaking venue.

Mike McCaw: I’d say that it’s probably more than half. Where I especially see, though, people with no experience is people that are wanting to get in to the business end of distilling. So we get a lot of contacts from people saying they’d like to buy a PDA-2 and they want to set up a microdistillery because they’ve run the numbers on the back of an envelope and it looks like a hugely profitable business to be in. But they’ve got zero brewing or distilling experience. So those are actually my biggest challenge.

Dietsch: How does that wind up working out for them? Do they get started and then realize they’re in over their heads?

McCaw: No, what I usually do is gently dissuade them. What I do is I send them a big questionnaire to fill out, trying to make them think about the scale of what they’re proposing to do and frequently they haven’t thought at all about the whole front end.

If you’re going to be producing, say, 20 cases of vodka a day, you need to be fermenting several hundred gallons of grain-based or grape-based or sugar-based wash to process into that every day. And just the scale of the operation is much bigger and much more intense labor than they’ve usually thought and a large number of them simply drop out when they realize that. But much better to cull at the front end than have them spend several thousand dollars on equipment and then discover they can’t handle it.

Dietsch: That might be why a number of professional brewers, like Fritz Maytag, start a brewery and then a distillery—because he already has experience running equipment and working at that scale. They don’t have that naïve expectation that they can just start this without any sort of experience.

McCaw: Right. There’s one other aspect, at least in the States, which is that onerous process of getting a license. I’ve worked with people that I’ve sold the equipment to, for their fully legal microdistilleries, and it did in fact take them two and a half years to get all their licensing in order. But if you already hold a Federal license, as a winery or brewery, they already know you, they don’t have to redo the background checks, and you can get the additional stamp on your license to distill usually in a matter of a few months.

Smiley: I can add to this. I’m a member of the American Distilling Institute, and I go to their conference each year, and I have a lot of give and take with them. More than 50 percent of the membership are actual start-up, small microdistilleries, and one of the things that’s become quite fashionable among them is to contract a microbrewer or a small or medium-sized brewery to make the wash for them. For example, there was Stranahan’s in Colorado who makes an American straight malt whiskey; they’ve got a brewery making their mash for them. I think they’re now starting to make their own, but one good way to get started is to contact a professional brewer to make your wash.

McCay: Sure, that reduces your capital costs a lot, too.

Matt Rowley: I see Charbay has been doing that in California. Although they’re charging $250 a bottle for their whiskey, which is a bit steep.

Dietsch: Now, Matt, to pull you back into this for a moment, you’re not manufacturing stills or that kind of thing, but how did you get interested in this?

Rowley: I was kind of tickled, listening to Mike and Ian talk, because we’ve never really talked about how we got started. Beer, for me, was the gateway beverage, again. I was in college, I was about 19 years old when I started making my own beers. I also liked big, heavy things—y’know, I did Irish reds, I did stouts. Back in the day, Coke still came in 16-oz. glass bottles, so I had my bathtub filled with bleach and water and Coke bottles. Then I got to really liking this a lot.

I was at a Derby Day party when I was maybe 20 or 21 and had some applejack made by the host of the party. No, not made by him, but by his family, who he claimed had been apple-cookin’ for ten generations or so, and it was fantastic. I had had some really bad moonshine before and been around stuff that from the smell of it I didn’t want to try, but this stuff was great.

So I started looking into it a little bit more. And this was 1990, 1989, something like that. There really wasn’t a whole lot of reliable information out there. Like Ian said, you could look in encyclopedias, and I remember the Foxfire book, the first one, from when I was a kid.

But the first thing I got that was specifically about moonshining was a guy giving directions, and his still was, well, you take two pressure cookers and you cut the top off one and the bottom off the other and you arc-weld them together and that point, I went, “No. No, I’m not going to be that guy. I’m going to kill myself if I do that. Or blow up the house.”

So I became interested in it more from an academic and historian point of view. I trained as an anthropologist and have been a museum curator, so my angle has been, sort of the stories about the people who are making it and why they’re doing it and sort of seeing how it differs primarily within the United States, but by extension you’re taking that back to, okay, why is the tenor of distilling and distillers different in Appalachia than it is in Washington State. Those are the sorts of answers that I like to find out about—why people are doing what they’re doing.

Camper English, from the San Francisco Chronicle, was doing an article last summer, and he asked me if I could put him in touch with some of the distillers I knew in San Francisco, and the guys I knew didn’t really want to talk to him. So I said, okay, here’s sort of my trick to finding distillers is to talk to craft brewers. Or go to bars where the bartenders are really known for doing exceptional cocktails. Because especially among the craft brewers, without exception, they either are distilling themselves or they know someone who is.

And that really is the clear pattern to me is to see that Ian and Mike both started with beer, I started with beer. It seems like beer just leads you to think in the direction of whiskey. Especially if you’re thinking about putting out a really quality product, and you think, “Okay, I’m happy with my beers, I’ve done some great stuff, and re-created old styles, I’ve got the Belgian beers down pat. What can I do with turning this into a whiskey?”

McCaw: It’s the new frontier, yeah.

Rowley: That’s one of the reasons that, because my own personal interest is more of a sort of anthropologist/historian take on this, as a distiller as well, when Ann [Tuennerman] originally asked me to do a presentation, I was really happy to do that, but I thought, I’m not the only voice out there in distilling, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that I am, so that’s why I reached out and asked Mike and Ian if they’d be interested too, because I thought, between the three of us we can probably give a pretty balanced view of what the scene is like out there today.

Hausgemacht takes place Thursday, July 17, from 4:30 to 6:00 pm at the Hotel Monteleone. Tickets may be purchased here.

Welcome back to the epic Hausgemacht interview. In part 2, I ask Ian Smiley and Mike McCaw how they got their start building, selling, and reselling distilling equipment. Ian’s up first, so enjoy:

Ian Smiley: I have always been fascinated and intensely interested in the making of beverage alcohol in general and in particular, distilling. I even had little experimental stills that I made when I was a teenager.

And as the years went on, after I had gotten out of the university and things like that and got settled in to a job, I started getting into home brewing and winemaking. And then I got into some fairly advanced distilling processes, almost as an extension of the brewing and winemaking hobby. But I found that there was a significant lack of information.

I could look up in encyclopedias, I could look up how distilleries advertised, how they did their things, but there wasn’t a lot of solid how-to information, so I got into experimenting very heavily and for years I experimented and developed processes that emulated the commercial processes. I solved the problems and actually got some good process going.

I learned how to make much better stills than I had been making before and eventually I got active on the Internet, and I started getting so many emails that I was pumping out multiple seven, eight, ten, eleven page emails every day, and I got to the point where I was saving the emails in a Draft folder where people would ask familiar questions and I would take out a ten-page email and just tweak it into the response and send it out.

And at that point, I decided to write a book because I realized I am in effect writing a book in bits and pieces and giving the information away, and I developed a website to sell the book. And then on my website, I started selling other distilling equipment.

I had a partner named John Stone. He’s dead now, but we made a glass still together, and we were selling the glass still. And eventually, I got to know the Amphora Society—the Mikes, as they’re called in the world—and they had the PDA-1, which in my opinion is the best hobby still you can buy out there. And I got into selling those, and those were selling well.

Further to that, I became involved with Brewhaus America, in Fort Worth, Texas. And they have a reflux still that they sell. A very popular style of still, but in my opinion, not an optimum technology. But I must say that that type of reflux still is probably the singularly most popular design of still among home distillers. So now that I’m the Canadian distributor of the Brewhaus line of products in general—Brewhaus and Gert Strand—I am now selling the Brewhaus Essential Extractor as they call it.

Dietsch: Yeah, I saw some of that equipment on your site earlier. Now, Mike, do you mind answering that question, too? How did you get involved in building and distributing distillation equipment?

Mike McCaw: I’ve been operating for the past 20 years as a process-optimization scientist for a big manufacturing company. I’m not a chemical engineer by background, but I’ve sort of become one through experience.

I used to be a brewer of pretty significant proportions. I would have five or six different things on tap, in my basement, at any one time. But I tended to like my beers big and chewy. And as I aged I started to have to watch my blood sugar a little bit, so I pretty much had to quit brewing those beers because if I brewed them I’d drink them. I don’t get invited to nearly as many parties anymore.

Anyway, at about the time I realized I was going to have to give up the brewing—I really enjoyed the process and had done a lot of work on processing it. I did all my brewing from grain, had a pretty sophisticated process down, and enjoyed running the process and tinkering with it.

So at that point, I was casting about for, gee, what can I do? And I remembered having read the Foxfire books a number of years previously and one of them—I forget which one it is now—is basically devoted to bootlegging arts from the Appalachian region from back around the turn of the century. So I pulled that out and read it, and as I was rereading it, I said, “No, I couldn’t practice this. This is too big and covert.” I suddenly had a flash–this would have been about 1998, I guess—“Gee, I ought to see what’s out there on the Internet.”

So I went out and did some Internet searching and came across this little book called How to Make Your Own Gin and Vodka. And John Stone and Mike Nixon were the authors of that. So I downloaded a copy for five dollars and read it; it was interesting, but it was a little, “Build exactly this, and do exactly this, and you’ll turn out alcohol.” And the process part was pretty interesting, but their fermentation technology stunk.

So I wrote the two authors and said, basically, “Gee, I liked your little book, but as a brewer of 15 years’ experience, I’ve gotta tell you guys that the fermentation process you give isn’t going to work the way you say it will.” And I got a rather terse note back from one author, saying, “I’m a Ph.D. chemist, shut up and do what I tell you.” And got a note back from the other one, saying, “Tell me more, I’m hearing from our customers this doesn’t work.”

So, at any rate, that started an Internet conversation, and six to eight months later, Mike Nixon proposed that we write a new book. And I said, “Yeah.” I was honored but I didn’t want to do just another version of “Do exactly this…”. So we spent the next two years writing The Compleat Distiller. And I don’t know if you’ve seen that book or not, but it really digs down into the science and somewhat into the art of distilling, but tries to give the person who reads it the tools they would need to actually design an optimal still for themselves, should they choose to do so.

Dietsch: So it’s not so much a recipe book or a follow-these-instructions-and-you-will-get-this-product as much as it is an introduction to the theory and science behind the art of distilling?

McCaw: Right, we have a couple of chapters on the same things for the fermentation process, and we cover distilling in the broad sense, so it’s distilling of essential oils, it’s steam distillation, but 80 percent of the book is devoted to distilling to make alcohol, but it is a general text on the whole subject. And that book is now in its fifth printing and second edition.

But somewhere after a couple of years of selling the book, we started to get a lot of calls back from people, saying, “Yeah, I liked it, but I don’t have the time or skills to design and make my own.” And we designed the PDA-1 and started to sell that…. We call the PDA-1 a laboratory-scale still, and then designed the PDA-2, which we call a pilot-scale still, which would be pilot scale for a real commercial distillery, but is actually an ideal start-out size for somebody setting up a microdistillery. And that’s something that’s starting to sweep the country right now just like microbreweries did about 20 years ago.

In fact it turned out that my primary interest is in designing and tweaking the design of the equipment. For me, watching a still run is a lot like watching paint dry. I’m much happier down in the workshop tweaking the designs. There’s so many different aspects to a hobby like this. Some people get involved for economic reasons, some people get involved for quality reasons, some people just want the biggest and best equipment in their basement.

Dietsch: As fascinated as I was by reading the description of building a still in Matt’s book, I’m a person who can barely put together a coffee table that I picked up from Ikea. So the idea of building something like that at home is extremely intimidating. Do you find that that’s the case with a lot of your customers?

McCaw: With some. I don’t know a lot, because I think most of the people who come and buy the book are people who feel handy are looking to see, What does it take to do this?

We certainly get hits on our website from people who will state flat out, I do not work with my hands. I say, Okay, fine. And those are the people that we design the equipment for, those who want the highest quality and either don’t have the interest or the time in making it.

But in both the home brewing community and in the distilling community that we’ve served with our business, I divide people into three broad categories, and I’m sure there’s more, or you could divide it up differently, but there’s one group of hobbyists who really are all about economics. And in home brewing I would say these are the British brewers, where beer is expensive, it’s highly taxed, and if you read the British brewing websites, almost all the recipes involve copious amounts of sugar because what they’re really trying to do is make beer cheaper. In the States, it was all about making a quality product that at the time you couldn’t buy in the store. So recipes were all about malt and people were spending a lot more money on equipment. But so there’s the pure economic person and they’re not our customer because they don’t want to spend up for a high-quality still; they’re all about, What can I do the cheapest?

Then there’s the group that I call the tinkerers, and I would probably put myself in that group. These are the people who are primarily interested in the equipment and the process and they’re always tweaking their equipment and trying to make it better. Frequently they get caught up in the wrong cycle and instead of making it better they get caught up in making it bigger and faster. So if you scan the Yahoo distillers groups’ archives, you find all sorts of messages from people saying, “Gee, I’ve been doing this for six months, and suddenly I find that I’ve got 50 gallons of vodka in my basement. What am I going to do with it?”

And then there are the people who are really into and all about trying to make a better quality product. And some of them will tinker and build their own and some want to just buy the equipment, but they’re focused on the product and not the process. That’s just the way I see it dividing out.

***

Next up, gateway drugs, and Rowley gets a turn!

Hausgemacht takes place Thursday, July 17, from 4:30 to 6:00 pm at the Hotel Monteleone. Tickets may be purchased here.

On May 17, I had the pleasure of participating in a Skype conference call with Matthew Rowley, Mike McCaw, and Ian Smiley, who will present the Hausgemacht panel at Tales. Hausgemacht, of course, is a German word that simply means “homemade.” Their panel will address the rise of modern nano-distilling–the art of distilling at home. Messrs. Rowley, McCaw, and Smiley were, as you’ll see, eager to talk nano-distilling with me, and so I wound up with a lot of material. With Paul Clarke’s blessing, I’m breaking this into three parts.In part 1, we’ll discuss the cultural perceptions of home-distilling and the current laws on the ground, focusing specifically on Europe, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Belly on up to the computer and we’ll begin! [This interview has been lightly edited for brevity.]

• • •

Michael Dietsch: To begin, Matt mentioned in an e-mail to me that when he’s been interviewed on the radio about his book Moonshine, radio interviewers have played up the sort of cornpone, hillbilly humorous aspects of it, which I think we all think is unfortunate. So I wanted to start by talking about perceptions of home-distilling in other parts of the world.

Mike McCaw: In much of Southern Europe, it’s fully legal and always has been to distill at home. You go to any village in Portugal, Spain, during the spring or summer, Greece, much of Italy, Austria for sure, you’re going to find a stand or a store that’s specializing in hand-hammered copper brandy stills.In Southern Europe, basically what everybody’s doing is making fruit brandies from their excess fruit production. In Scandinavia, it’s widely practiced, but is illegal, and several times I’ve set next to a Swede or a Finn or a Norwegian on an airplane and started talking to them about the book and what I do and then they’ll look at me and they’ll say, “Two things you need to know: first, it’s illegal; second, everybody does it.” And it’s pretty widely tolerated.New Zealand actually is a really interesting story, because it’s been illegal since about the time of the first world war, like in Australia, but in 1996, the government realized that it wasn’t cost-effective to prosecute people for noncommercial home distilling, and they had a right-wing government or a fiscally responsible government or whateveryou want to call it at the time that looked at all of their laws in terms of whether they’re cost-effective and do they do what they’re intended to do. So they legalized it over the protests of the big distilleries. And what’s happened is, in contrast to Southern Europe, where it’s always been legal and it’s a very traditional art and there’s not a lot of innovation, after it suddenly became legal in New Zealand, there was just an explosion of experimenting and tinkering and people trying stuff and trying new things. That’s really the center of development at this time for new processes and new ways of doing home distilling, to be able to make high-quality products across a wide spectrum instead of just one traditional thing.Ian can probably talk to the legal situation in Canada much better than I could. As you know in the States, it’s quite dire. They’re not lookin’ for ya, but they will follow up any leads they get, but if they do catch a home distiller, your house is forfeit.

Ian Smiley: In Canada, it is still technically illegal to home distill, but a lot of my customers have contacted their local law enforcement, to ask about it, just in case, before they bought into anything, and the answers they’re always giving now are that if you’re not selling it, we’re not interested. And I know that my website probably would have been closed down by now if the Canadian government were actively pursuing home distilling. So it’s pretty slack here with respect to that, but I don’t think they have actually legalized it per se. I’ve read the legislation over—it was rewritten in 2002—and they may not have legalized it, but they are very close to having legalized it. It’s almost to the point where maybe lawyers could argue that it is technically legal right now.

McCaw: They made it the lowest priority, right?

Smiley: That’s right.

McCaw: I had a conversation a couple of years back with an ATF officer, who I happened to bump into some place and asked him about that without identifying myself and what he said fits sort of that same pattern. He said, “We’re not interested in people who are only doing it for themselves. You would just about have to go out and tack up flyers around your neighborhood to bring yourself to our attention, but if a disgruntled ex-girlfriend or nosy neighbor turns you in, we will follow it up.”

Smiley: I do know that that has actually happened to a friend of mine and the police literally refused to pursue it. They just said, “Tell me, what is it doing to you?” And the person could not identify any kind of a deleterious effect on the complainer, so they didn’t even follow up on the complaint.

McCaw: The difference there is that the enforcement in the States is at a federal level and it’s in the taxing sphere rather than the law-enforcement sphere. So when it does come to their attention, they do get diligent.

Dietsch: Now, Mike or Matt, either one of you might answer this. You’ve both spoken with home distillers in the States, people who are just doing this for their own home use, are they getting in legal trouble because of it?

McCaw: I’ve got some anecdotal information—it’s not first hand, and you can find that same information if you go out and search the archives on the Yahoo distillers group. People do get busted, a few a year, and I don’t know what the follow-up is. I do know what the law states, though, and the law states that they can seize your house if it’s been used for illegal distillation. It’s considered the same in that sense—because it’s run out of the tax laws—as if you had illegal drugs and were running a drug operation where they will seize your house and your car and everything.

Matthew Rowley: And that aligns pretty closely with what I’ve found, as well, that when I was writing my book and also the kinds of distillers I like to talk to are generally not the guys who are cranking out a thousand gallons a week. If they’re firing up their still, it’s only just a few liters or a few gallons at a time. While they’ve certainly had their share of legal troubles, it’s never really been about alcohol. It’s other things not related to that at all. And the impression seems to be that, as long as they’re just sort of keeping a low profile and not telling just everybody what they’re doing, they tend to get left alone these days. But like Mike says, it is technically illegal and, if you come to their attention—the Feds—they’ll bust just as if you were running a meth lab.

Dietsch: So if you go into it, you really need to be aware of the legal risks.

McCaw: Yes, you really do, and it’s surprising how many would-be customers don’t. They just assume that since brewing is legal and winemaking is legal, that distilling is too. Which is a real rational point of view and, politically, it’s a point of view that we in the Amphora Society really like to push, but it’s not the facts on the ground, as of this date. And as somebody who actually sells distillation equipment, we take the point of view—and we’re real straight up front with our customers—that we’re working on the assumption that you have a license. And if you tell us you don’t have a license, we won’t sell to you.

Dietsch: I’ve seen contradictory reports on the Internet as to whether it’s legal to purchase distillation equipment without a license.

McCaw: It absolutely is.

Dietsch: It is legal to purchase it?

McCaw: It’s perfectly legal to own a still, and it’s legal to use it for anything but ethyl alcohol production.

Dietsch: You can use it for distilling water…

McCaw: Oh, absolutely, essential oils, anything like that. And that’s the grounds under which most of them are sold in the States. The government will give you a permit to distill alcohol for fuel. They’ll give it to you and they’ll give it to you eagerly. Once again, you cannot do it in your house. In the United States, distillation in a building in which anybody resides is just flat out illegal. You can do it in your garage if it’s a separate building. And all you have to do to get the federal permit is give them a plan drawing of your proposed facility and then keep scrupulous records on what you produce.Your still is then legally available for inspection at [any] time, but I know a lot of people who have fuel permits, and I don’t anybody who’s ever had a drop-by inspection.

Dietsch: And then of course, the process for becoming a legal distiller of beverage alcohol, from what I understand, takes a considerable time.

McCaw: Many months to a few years. And really that depends upon the particular inspector you draw.

Smiley: There’s one thing I can contribute there. Getting through the TTB [Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau]—that’s the Federal part of it—is the easy part of it. It’s the state governments that tend to be the most difficult to get past and because you’ve got 50 states it becomes very difficult to get your product into the entire country.

McCaw: Yes, and the same is true also for that fuel permit—that the Fed permit is easy, but every state has its own rules and some don’t permit it and some do and in general that fuel is only really legally useful for off-road use. So farmers [are] really the target market there.The beverage alcohol thing, one of the nasty pieces of that process is, you cannot have your permit in hand, they will not give it to you, until they have physically inspected your plant. So you have to invest all of the capital and labor up front to build your distillation plant and have it ready to go before they will even give you the Federal license. And in general, you can’t even begin pursuing your state license until after you have the Federal license.

Dietsch: So, the irony there, obviously, is that you need to build the equipment to do something that, because you’re not licensed, you can’t legally be doing in the first place.

McCaw: Right.

Smiley: Yeah.

Rowley: Mm-hm.

Dietsch: But then, of course, if you’ve got the equipment ready, you’re going to want to test it in some fashion, I assume, and so the product that you make is then illegal, but you have to have the thing set up before they can come out and inspect.

McCaw: It’s not just the product that’s illegal. That’s the nasty twist to the U.S. Federal laws. It’s the tax. There are two taxes involved. So the product is untaxed alcohol which is illegal to possess. But the tax is on the act of distillation.

Dietsch: So they getcha both ways. That’s interesting. That’s a really messed-up system.

McCaw: Well, it dates back to the Whiskey Rebellion. And basically the U.S. Government caved to the interests of the big distillers and brewers in Philadelphia to squelch the farmers on the west side of the Appalachians who were using whiskey as currency at that time because it was much easier to transport than grain. That’s a fascinating history if you’ve never read it.

Rowley: You can see why a lot of them packed up and moved to the Carolinas and Kentucky.

• • •

That’s it for part 1. Later entries will cover the panelists’ backgrounds and discuss what kinds of people are drawn to home-distilling.

Hausgemacht takes place Thursday, July 17, from 4:30 to 6:00 pm at the Hotel Monteleone. Tickets may be purchased here.