A mentor familiar with business as well as distilling

[creativemind]

I sure could use a brothers shoulder as life has really become interesting. To shorten the story as time is short, a friend put me with an investor and we filled an LLC last week to form a company whose intention is to start a micro-distillery. A design group is working on labels, I go next week to look at a second possible location, though Im unsure about it because its actually an old barn, but nonetheless, we met with the city zoning folks later in next week, and have begun ordering various pieces of equipment. I work rotating 12 hour shifts as it is, but now am knee deep in reading laws for compliance, dealing with graphic artists, forms, bonds....I want to scream. LOL
Would be nice to have a distiller in the biz that can help with occassional questions. Or perhaps I should be posting in ADI forum, I dont know. But Im understanding the requirements fairly well, but often unsure of the order in which to get various things rolling. I read where Uncle Jesse learned the hard way that hydrometers had to have a specific certification , and scales had to have a certain specification...I havent found the area of law which says what that specific certification is, dont want to waste precious resources on double buying. Starting smart folks, slow, scalable, end product and customer in mind, creative merchanding since we know we wont get premium eye level shelf space as a start up......

[LWTCS]

Lots of intrest by a number of folks here,,,,,perhaps.....

But this is a hobby sight. And hobby talk is what we try to stick to.

Couple folks round here doing similar research....regular forum likely a better place to post this.

[Husker]

I have moved this topic out of QA mentors, into a forum where it is OK for the membership to post to.

Now, as for the question at hand. Yes, we do have a few members here, who have struggled through the gooberment requirements needed to assure that the proper graft gets paid to them. UJ did so, and a few other craft distillers, evem one lives just up the road from me, bohunk. So it is likely that you will get a few followups on topic, to help you out.

One thing I would recommend, is to read the 'Opening a legal distillery in the US' thread (sticky thread in the same forum as this one), which UJ wrote. I believe there are numerous links to the many of the required fed regulations. As for City/County/State regs, you are sort of on your own, wading through those.

Also, I would strongly recommend getting on the ADI forums. Those forums are DESIGNED for people in your situations. Bill Owens, who runs ADI is a nice (but very talkative) guy. I have met him a couple of times, although he does not know me from this site. This site/forum (homedistiller.org) is really targeted at the home hobby distiller.

We have VERY different needs/goals overall than a 'legal' micro shop will have. Even though we both perform the same base procedures (distill, age, bottle), We do so from a very different view of the process. A home distiller may toss out half of the product, looking for that center 'sweet spot' keeping only that, while a commercial operator will usually want to squeeze as much as possible out of the wash. A homey may kick it up a little with addition of white processed sugar, a commercial guy may not be able to do this for legal reasons (legal stipulations on what can be IN the mash, to make a specific named product). A commercial shop may acquire GNS from some outside source to clean up and then flavor up, while the homey would not have the connections to do that, and will usually build up his supply by quickly producing sugar washes, and column stilling to get his neutral base product. A homey is usually not overly concerned about issues such as waste management/disposal, about power efficiency or power reclamation, etc, etc. However, in a commercial setting, the above type issues are pretty darn important.

Good luck in your endeavor. Sorry I can not directly answer a lot of your questions. I simply do not have personal experience going legit.

H.

[Bushman]

Not sure where you are located and it sounds like you have a busy schedule, but if you are thinking about spending that type of money it might be wise to get a little more educated on the subject. In the state of Washington they have a one week school that is one-on-one training that takes you through the complete process. I looked into it but as a hobby it was more info than I needed. A lot of small micro distilleries got started by people going through their training. Here is the link to the distillery and school, it is located in the state of Washington.
http://www.dryflydistilling.com/school.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

[creativemind]

Thanks everyone for the replies. Ive been reading everything I can find from blogs to the mountains of federal gooberment regs as well as state. They are at times inconsistent, and usually not specific. Its difficult to determine specifics like UJ ran into on hydrometers needing to be certified by a particular place. The overall cost isnt too frightening, as we stress the micro in micro-distillery, but the scale is just to get off the ground, we can amend paperwork later to add larger equipment if we can generate Demand! We are located in Texas, a 3 tier frontier.

[wildrover]

Mods -- Any chance we could get a forum underneath "Other Information" that would be called "Going legit" or something of the likes? This is information that a decent number of people would be interested in. That way the information could be here on the site but since it's listed under "other info" the main point of the site is still to talk about home distilling.

[Husker]

Rover, the mods will have a chat about this.

Now back to on-topic:

[LWTCS]

In many instances, there is little language in the statutes that deals with some of the creative "exceptions" to the rule that micros are looking to exploit.
Abc lawyer in my state said to try and find similar examples from other states that may be most similar to your plan.

Just not a mature mechanisms in place to help the little guy.
Abc also said i need a champion. Said the Abc only implements what the legislative body tells em to.