Engineered Spirits. Hand-crafted for your enjoyment. Sit a spell.
Prospect, Tennessee
Joined July 2020
- Tweets1.1K
- Following38
- Followers46
- Likes644
Do you know what's in your whiskey? Well, we know exactly what goes into ours. The farm's corn, the farm's springwater and Middle Tennessee-grown wheat and barley. And, in just over three more years, you'll be able to taste that difference too!
There's wild beauty to appreciate everywhere #downonthefarm so, when we need a break from our work, we just step a few feet away to enjoy it. This patch of native Goldenrod and Helenium is just below the orchard and right beside our springhouse.
We've let the pectin do its work on our persimmon fruit and juice, what winemakers refer to as "must", for the last 24 hours. Now, we're ready to see how much alcohol potential it has before we add our yeast.
A few years ago, we harvested native elderflowers and elderberries #downonthefarm. After those first experiments, we were eager to use them again, but we need to plant a whole lot more if we're going to harvest enough for wine! We'll grow these on for a year before planting them.
ALT Dark purple elderberries are wonderful for making wine, but we're going to need to grow a whole lot more of them!
ALT Every year we plant a few more Elderberries at the farm. These three will be potted up and grown on for a year before we plant them near those we planted last year.
Our highest priority has always been to use the farm's limestone spring water as the main ingredient for our products. We've been waiting for weeks and, finally, we've received the latest water test results. But we still haven’t heard if the State will let us use it or not!
This statuesque #wildflower is native Helianthus maximiliani, Maximilian's Sunflower, which loves full sun and thrives in prairies with infertile soils. This clump will expand in time, filling the limestone outcrops beside the distillery with golden flowers each October.
Pectin has proven to be extremely useful when making wine from these fibrous persimmons. We want to get as much sugar out of them as possible to make the best quality wine. Then, after we've left it for 24 hours to work its magic, we'll add our yeast.
We've found that using pectin helps us make better wine, in the same way it helps you make better jams or jellies. But we have to use it at just the right temperature if we want it to be effective.
Our third batch of homemade, native persimmon wine this year commences! But no matter how many times we do this, we never fail to learn something new! And that's why we practice. Each attempt helps us hone our craft.
Here in the U.S., most of the ingredients used in gin are imported from other continents. We plan to make our gin from more locally sourced ingredients. One of those are these Aronia berries, produced by the Red Chokeberry, a small native tree that grows throughout Tennessee.
ALT Red Chokeberries are one of a number of interesting native botanicals we hope to use in our distillery's gin products.