Hudson Valley Distillers

[raketemensch]

I went camping last weekend, and stopped in for a tour at Hudson Valley Distillers. They have 5 products -- A white dog, two different whiskeys, a gin and a vodka.

ALL of them are sourced from apples, and were incredibly tasty. They use White Labs yeasts, but he didn't say which ones.

They had a huge orchard out behind the distillery, but it had run kinda wild -- as the guy said, "it turns out that growing apples is very chemically intensive," so they source them from someone else in the area. There are also a bunch of vineyards in the area, so HVD sometimes picks up their "lesser" efforts and distill them, giving bottles of brandy back as payment.

They toss all of their heads, and the vodka (and I'm assuming their gin) are entirely made from the tails. Both tasted incredibly clean, far nicer than anything I've produced myself so far. I think I might be hanging onto too much heads.

They had a beautiful still, with a route for bubble plates for flavored spirits and a very tall plated stack for neuts. There was also a flute hanging on the wall in the stilling room, which they said was from Hillbilly Stills -- wasn't Kentucky Shiner building those for them? They're working on an all-grain whiskey, with a giant motorized steam masher in the process of being installed.

Another thing I hadn't heard of -- their fermentation room was pretty cold, with fans blowing all the time. It was genuinely chilly in there, like a walk-in refrigerator set a few degrees warmer than normal. He said that it was fruit fly season, so they keep the ferments at the very low end of their yeast's comfort zone, which is too cold for the fruit flies. Very clever, and there were no off flavors in their product. The white dog we tasted was very fresh, and incredibly clean.

The main surprise, for me, was that of all their products I bought the gin. Gin's been banned from the house (not officially, just kind of "spiritually") for a little over a decade now after my wife managed to get completely wrecked on it the two times she tried it. Their recipe is low on juniper, but includes cucumber. I really liked it, enough that I skipped their other offerings for it. Very tasty.

[Still Life]

Nice verbal excursion...
I bet distillers really like it when someone shows an educated interest.

[raketemensch]

Nice verbal excursion...
I bet distillers really like it when someone shows an educated interest.

Yeah, but the tour was very basic, so I was trying really hard not to be "that guy" to the other people on the tour with me.