November 2024
Building
All nine concrete footings have been poured and are curing! This week, the permanent posts will be put back in place. We’re hoping to pour the slab for the manufacturing space before Christmas. It will take two weeks to cure.
This month, Northwestern Energy connected both electricity and natural gas back to the building. It’s been years since either has been active. To get power, we needed new transformers installed on our pole, new service lines run underground to the meter, and Cody Hansen from Beaverhead Electric installed a new meter and ran power into the building itself.
Locals, this coming week you might see R.E. Miller outside our building, pulling off the old loading docks and trenching in our new water main. A 2” water line will give us what we need to fill our 500 gallon tanks as well as provide water for the rest of the building as we get started.
Business / Community
We attended the fall Montana Distiller’s Guild meeting and Distiller’s Festival. Dacia English, a representative from the Montana Department of Revenue, reported that Montana distilleries are 4% of all spirit suppliers sold this last fiscal year. If you’re interested in more statistics, check out the Alcohol Bureau Control Division (ABCD) annual report. We also discussed potential initiatives for the upcoming legislative session, two of which we were particularly interested in.
The first was instituting a practice called ‘warehouse receipts,’ which would allow customers to purchase a barrel of aging spirits before it is ready to bottle (currently, making this kind of purchase is considered an investment in the business inventory and means that the purchaser has an ownership stake and thus everyone has to do a lot of complicated paperwork).
The second was regarding Catering Licenses for Tasting Rooms. A catering endorsement on an alcoholic beverage license allows “the catering and the sale of alcohol to people attending a catered event at a place not licensed to sell alcohol. This may happen at a special event.” Special events include farmer’s markets. So, anyone who is interested in our presence at the Dillon Farmer’s Market including Bloody Marys and Montana Mules (alcoholic or non-alcoholic) might support this initiative.
Distillery
We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. As we head into the holidays, we are crafting recipes on two fronts: shrubs and eggnog.
Fall and winter shrubs tend towards comforting and familiar flavor profiles. Apple cinnamon cardamom, plum pear spice, and cranberry citrus are all melding in bottles right now. Lovely to sip on straight or with some sparkling water, they are also nice to combine with some applejack, pear brandy, vodka, or any number of whiskies.
As we decorated our tree, freshly cut from the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, we opened the first bottles of our small batch aged eggnog that we make for our family and close friends. It is exactly the kind of slow-sipping, ‘worth the wait’ eggnog we hope to make for everyone someday. Katrina has started experimenting with recipes for pasteurizing non-alcoholic eggnog so that in future years we can offer a rich, creamy, and smooth drink to keep you warm during the holiday season.
Thanks for reading! Do you know anyone who would want to subscribe to this end-of-month newsletter? Forward this along and they can click HERE (where you can also find previous newsletters).