This past weekend, the family came in town to help us with our 4th bottling! We had a whole sherry casks’ worth to hand bottle. My father-in-law, Gene, was a machine pushing in 875 corks by hand (4 Advil, some ointment, plus a good night’s sleep and he was better come morning). It’s exciting for us after all these years to see the whiskey aging and more being set back. It feels like were growing a tradition.
Our bottles have a taper to them, so Amanda was having a heck of a time with the labeler. It seemed every third bottle she was having to place by hand, only to then handwrite the date. By the way, that distillation date on the bottle indicates the day we ran our polishing still and poured each bucket of through a copper funnel into a bourbon barrel.
Last on the assembly line is our “Floor Manager,” and my mother-in-law, Janet. Besides organizing the whole operation, she helps Amanda write dates, stamps our boxes, and arranges the cases on our palettes. She even has a weightlifting belt!
To get the distillery off the ground without any investors requires a lot of sweat equity from family, friends and the community. Amanda & I greatly appreciate when we hear you like what we’re trying to do and enjoy our single malt. We’ve come to enjoy the hard work out here in the Hill Country, and promise to keep trying to make the best single malt we can for y’all.
–Nick