Slainte and Hey Ya'll

[whiskythief]

Hey guys,

I started off traveling to Islay, Scotland back in 2017 and found everything I wanted there and more. Being a massive fan of Laphroaig and Islay whiskey in general, I took the tour at the distillery, had a dram or two, visited the barrel house by the sea, staked out my little square foot of land in the field across the road, stood in the kiln, inhaled the absolute peaty essence of what's in the bottle and knew I was in the right place. I'm American, but heavily Scottish by ancestry, and there's something inherently --familiar--and connected feeling visiting this land. I've been back a handful of times since and it's always like being home.

The thing that stuck out for me in learning about the whisky making process was that it's made from beer. BEER. I had friends who made beer and I certainly appreciated beer, but I never knew that was the foundation of my favorite spirit.

So I decided I wanted to learn to make the whisky I loved so much. I figured I'd need to make sure I gained absolute competence in all areas if I wanted to be legit, so I decided my curriculum involved first being able to make great beer. So I bought a beginner beer kit and started learning. Wasn't long doing extract brews before I moved to all grain, then went from the stovetop to a propane burner in the back yard, then fermentation temp control, then to kegging, then to building an electric system in the quiet of my basement, then to my first conical fermenter. Then two conicals. Plus a homemade glycol chiller. I got way way into beer making and sort of forgot about whisky for a while. Even did pretty well in some homebrew competitions.

Then I moved to Tennessee. One of the whisky capitals of the United States. Wasn't long before I started meeting homebrewers and mead makers and moonshiners. One day I went into my favorite local brewery and started talking to the owner about beer making and my portal into it and the real reason WHY I even started, and he mentioned that one of the biggest underground spirit makers in town was coming by in about an hour. I stuck around and met the guy and he invited me to his weekly club meeting. I showed up, saw the absolute culinary level potential of this space and realized that NOW was time for the next phase, and it was finally time to move on it. I got on this forum the next day and have been lurking for months, learning everything I can. Started using Chat GPT to accelerate things, and most of its content seems to ultimately come from here. I'm moving hard and fast right now. Safety is paramount to me, and that slows me down a bit, but I've almost got everything worked out in my new system now.

I have two milk can pot stills, one 16 gallons and the other 8 gallons, and my home brewery has begun morphing into a distillery. I'm running the whole rig off my existing Auber brewery control panel. Just finished my last stripping run using a version of Jimbo's all grain recipe (though mine uses a grain bill a little more akin to a scotch ale). Today I began a UJSSM that exists to utilize waste material from my all grain runs and will morph with it over time, including when I move to Islay and Campbeltown experiments. I guess it's a little pseudo-sour mash Tennessee-style sidecar to my attempts to be as Scottish as possible in the other fermenter. Hope it works out. Doesn't matter, I'm having a really great time with this, especially not having to be so concerned with sanitation, and even leaning into being a bit more brutal and chaotic with handling the wash, at least from the perspective of being a very careful beer maker. It's extremely liberating to transfer beer by dipping a 1 gallon steel saucepan into my 20 gallon fermentation barrel versus a pump or siphon. No starsan in sight. Just wanging it into the still with abandon. The whole process feels more like cooking, (and I'm absolutely a cook more than a scientist). Homebrewing is more like baking. You have to dial everything in on the front end. This is more like making a stew or a sauce. Less precision but more control over final product. It really feels more like an art versus a craft.

In other words, guys, I love it and I'm fuckin' IN.