A couple general distilling questions.

[cowdery]

Home poduction of spirits is still currently illegal. Only beer and wine may be made for personal consumption. If you want to run a still you MUST market it for sale.

Not really true. You simply have to comply with all of the same regulatory and taxation requirements that a commercial operation is subject to, but no one cares if you actually sell anything. This is not the case for beer and wine production. You may make wine or beer for personal consumption without even telling the government about it, so long as you don't sell the stuff. The different regimen for spirits doesn't mean you have to sell your product, it just means you have to comply with all the same rules as people who do.

From a reality-check standpoint, a person interested in doing this, even on a very small scale for personal enjoyment, will need a lot of money. It's a very expensive hobby.

[jeff]

Home poduction of spirits is still currently illegal. Only beer and wine may be made for personal consumption. If you want to run a still you MUST market it for sale.

Or you could move to New Zealand, which I believe is one of the few places in the WORLD that personal distilling is legal.

See:http://www.homedistiller.org for some good information from New Zeland on home distillation.

[FlashPuppy]

Found an interesting link:

http://www.ttb.gov/spirits/spirits_regs.shtml

[barturtle]

True Chuck, I was just checking this myself. The ATF site refers to this as making it impractical to do for personal use.

Here's the link you need, if you wanna read all the regs you would need to follow:

http://www.atf.treas.gov/alcohol/info/faq/genalcohol.htm

[chasking]

I believe that one of the requirements for getting a permit for a distillery is that the operation be commercially viable. I suppose that is different from actually selling anything, but it does mean that the operation should (in theory) be capable of producing spirits for sale economically. Of course, ATF no doubt has its own interpretation of what that phrase in the regs means.

[cowdery]

If one were to choose the path of trying to make an artisanal American whiskey, part of the journey would be navigation of the regulatory requirements, but nothing in the law is ever definite until it has been tested and even then, things can change. They have just recently made fuel ethanol licenses very easy to obtain and there are arguments to be made that certain differences between the two regimens are arbitrary. There also is now a trade association to do lobbying.

In other words, you'll never really know until you try.

[FlashPuppy]

Chuck-

Well, I actually have a fuel ethanol permit. I am licensed to distill up to 10,000 gallon of fuel ethanol. I actually purchased a five gallon copper still a little while back, and that is actually how I led myself to this sight. In "tasting" the product of my "fuel ethanol" distilling, it is actually not as bad as I would have expected. Much better than a few of the corn whiskeys which I have tried.

Either way, I know that there is a lot of red tape to cut through. I have actually been dedicating the first week of my vacation to reading a bunch of federal regs. I am going to be going over to Kinko's later in the week to have a bunch of stuff printed and bound.

I think that this may be do-able, it is just going to take a lot of work. I am excited.

[cowdery]

Believe it or not, reform or updating of state laws regarding distilling is not impossible. Montana has passed legislation that many are using as a model for other states to follow. This came across my desk today, so I thought I would pass it along.

It is designed specifically to encourage micro-distilleries, which it defines as one that "produces 25,000 gallons or less of liquor annually." That's a little more than a barrel a day, so on the order of the Prichard's or Michter's bicentennial stills (which are the same).

[barturtle]

This one does require that you sell to the department (section 3, 2a).

[FlashPuppy]

As I was doing some reasearch, and VERY preliminary calculations as to start up cost, I realized that this may be WELL out of my budget. Upon discussing the matter with a friend, he brought up a good point. What about federal grants for starting a small buisness? I started looking into this some, and there is lots of money being given to people just to start their own small buisnesses. I found one grant that has given out an average of 178k for the size of buisness I would be looking at. Interesting things to ponder...

[FlashPuppy]

Can someone please explain to me why there is a lock on the "spirits safe"? I am having any luck finding an answer to this.

[barturtle]

I would guess-and this is pure speculation- that the lock is there, because that way the spirits proof can be measured without being removed from the system and going through the gaugers measurements. I would think the lock is-or was-put there by the ATF and can't be removed without their permission.

[FlashPuppy]

That's kinda what I was getting, but that makes no sense to me. How can the ATF tell you you can't open part of your own still? Anyone else have a definitive answer?

[TNbourbon]

Remember, the government 'gauger' also once had a key to the warehouses, into which even the warehouse manager could not go without him. Related to bonding (aka, Bottled In Bond, et al).

[cowdery]

That's kinda what I was getting, but that makes no sense to me. How can the ATF tell you you can't open part of your own still? Anyone else have a definitive answer?

Ah, youth. That is precisely what the "government man" did. They controlled access to all parts of the distillery, to make sure the government was getting its cut. There are no more government men, it's all handled with post-audits now, but until the 1980s every distillery had a "government man" who carried all of the keys and, in fact, could and did keep the owners out of their own premises.