CRESCENT Places: Dark Corner Distillery — Bringing Moonshine to the Sunshine (Part 2)
JUMPING THROUGH HOOPS TO MAKE SHINE
It’s a long process. You’ve got all the good red tape if you’re going to make weapons or anything else like that — that’s what I compare it to – that we were going to make weapons, because it is a very big deal.
The government wants their money off of what you’re making and they’re going to get it whether you like it of nor unless you’re out shining in the woods. Going into that, it was sort of overwhelming to think that the day after we conceived the idea, we were tasked with…to sum it up, we had to get a building and get it completely ready. We had to get all the local permits satisfied. We had to get a state permit to be a micro-distillery, and we had to get a federal permit to distill spirits.
When you sit back and look at that and you look at your budget which I call a string budget, it’s very daunting. It’s painful to think how bad you want to do this, but you’re got so much red tape and hoops to jump through that there’s no way you’re going to be able to do it in under a year. For us, we wrote the business plan right at October and here we are opening on September 21st. We did it within a year, which was phenomenal. Yeah, there are a lot of hoops to jump through but, honestly, for me, I did most of the paperwork, if you will, and as scary as it is up front, if you stay on the government, don’t pester them, but stay with them, constantly follow up, you can get it done pretty quick. If you have a hiccup or snag, that’s what your local politicians are for.
So I had to call on Senator DeMint’s office at one point, because I knew the government was dragging their feet. We were coming up on tourist season and I knew we needed to open before tourist season got here. Not just for us so we can survive but this is a big historical draw for the area. Not to include that we’re providing jobs. We’ve already hired 2 new people on our staff recently. I had to call on Jim DeMint to have him pull strings and say, “Get it in gear for these guys. They’re trying to do something good, if you’ll just let them open.”
CALL YOUR SENATOR AND SAY, “HEY, I’M JOE, I’M MAKING SHINE.”
You know what? Sometimes, I found that while I’m a phone guy or an in-person guy, I like talking, electronic doesn’t usually work for me very well to get the point across. With that one, I had a lot of thoughts that I needed to put out on the table. I pretty much knew that I had one shot to do it to do it. If I blew it, if I said the wrong thing that could possibly turn them away, I’d ruin it so I wrong them a 2-page letter, a really, really nice letter and hand-delivered it and let him read the letter so I actually didn’t have a conversation. But there were certain points that I needed to get off to where when you get in front of someone that’s used to hear talking all day. You know, if you get lost or you start rambling, you’re going to lose him and he’s going to lose focus on what you really need. That’s why I started the letter off with our problem, that we need to open to stay afloat and the solution, I gave him the solution, was to just call the federal government, the TTB, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, call them and ask them to pick my application up off the desk and sign it, and believe it or not, within 24 hours of talking to Jim DeMint’s office, we had permit in hand.
It’s amazing and it just showed me not to knock the government. It just showed me there are a lot of applications sitting around in Ohio on the federal government’s desk from people that want to do exactly what I’m doing and they’re not going to get them approved until they just pick them up and sign them.
WHISKEY ≠ LEMONADE
A lot of people don’t understand, and it’s not anything bad, but a lot of people don’t understand drinking a glass of lemonade or a neat whiskey is not the same thing. You can’t drink whiskey the way you drink lemonade. A lot of people don’t understand that. I had a guy come in last night from Hawaii and he had a taste of our Bourbon, our 7-day Bourbon, it is 135 proof. It is going to have a little sting to it. He drank it like it was a shooter, like it was a shot. All of a sudden, he’s coughing and leaned over and his eyes are red and he said “Who can drink that stuff?” I said, “You drank it wrong.” You know, it’s all about sipping and about preparing your throat and esophagus for what’s about to go down because if you drink it like lemonade, you’re going to end up letting it go down to your esophagus and you’ll be dying over there.
DECIDING HOW STRONG TO MAKE IT
The government has set up classes and types of what you can make.
Rum is a class. Whiskey is a class.
A type would be corn whiskey. Bourbon whiskey.
So you’ve got classes and types.
They pretty much define out what some of the proofs can be for each class. Really, you can make whatever you proof you want. It’s very difficult to get above 195 proof but if you’re at 195 proof, you’re neutral grain spirits, that’s one of the classifications that specifies a proof. I think to be neutral grain, you have to be at least 165 proof. Anything above 165 is no longer whiskey. It’s neutral grain. They make that in a different type still than what we’ve got. They’ve got a column still which produces higher proof alcohol, what have you. But we can make whatever proof we want.
The reason we chose 100 proof is 2-fold. One, we want you to feel a little bit of a kick because whiskey or moonshine for hundreds of years has had kick to it. People enjoy a little bit of kick, but at the same time, we want to limit it to a kick that does not desensitize your taste buds. Because if you drink 120 or 130 proof, your taste buds are going to be gone the first time the spirit hits it. For us 100 proof is good. 80 proof is typically expected in the spirits industry. A lot of people claim that’s the best proof for tasting it. I personally like a little bit stronger and when I drink an 80 proof, a lot of times, it’s a little watery for me. You’ve got copper pots out there that can put 80 proof out but no real distilleries in the world are cranking out 80 proof which means they’re putting a lot of water in the spirit after the fact.
Our still naturally pumps out anywhere from 130 down to about 95 proof. By the time we blend together, if we have to add water, it’s very, very minimal. If you’re pumping out, like most of the big distilleries are, if you’re cranking out 165, 180 proof alcohol and you’re adding half water to get it down to 80. It’s not natural for half water and half whiskey to be mixed together. The less water you have to add the better off you are. Cause you’ve taken a beautiful process of taking a good water, great alcohol and you’re distilling it and extracting the alcohol off, you really don’t want to go back and add more water to it. You just did a good job of taking the water out. You just don’t add it right back in and expect it to be OK. We’ve tasted other whiskeys after ours, it tends to taste watery.
FLAVORED VARIETIES?
We get that question every day, probably 40 times a day. E-mail, phone and in person. And my first response to that would be, if I were not from the South…I ask you, would you go into Glenlivet or Glenmorangie and ask them if they have peach or “apple pie” scotch, they would ask you to leave and not come back. That’s my first answer, but being from the South, my answer is, “We’re creating awareness through this product but we want you to appreciate the settlers’ moonshine the way they drank it. Down the road, we would like to introduce some flavored products.”
We don’t want to alienate anyone, but at the same time, why is it that the first thing everyone thinks is that, “Where are your flavors at? Where’s your peach? Where’s your apple pie?” Because I have to come back to the guy asking that and ask him “Well, what did the moonshine taste like?” He says “It tastes like apples and peaches.” And I have to tell him that if you take water with apples and cinnamon and brown sugar, it’s going to taste pretty good. It’s going to taste really good, actually, so anything you mask with apples, cinnamon and sugar is going to taste really, really good. So you’re asking me to take a product that it takes me a week to make, work 80 hours a week on, to put sugar, cinnamon, apples on it to cover up the beautiful natural flavor. That it’s just hard to do right now.
NOTE: Joe did say that he plans to introduce flavored varieties, but he wants to do it correctly and not take shortcuts like some do to add peach schnapps to his whiskey to create peach moonshine.
BUILDING DISTRIBUTION OUTSIDE OF THE STORE
Well, we pretty much put Dark Corner Distillery together off of a local concept knowing that we wanted to provide spirits to local people. Moonshine in general, was the local drink of the Dark Corner, so our first objective was to let everyone local sample what we called real moonshine. With that, you have huge demand for it to the point that you could be spreading the word. You could be spreading the product much further if you could just get it out of the store. The fact that you have one place to get it at can sometimes limit people. So the only reason we cannot move outside the store today is because of production capacity. We’re running 24/7 right now and this is the first week our shelves have been full. We sold out the first 3 weeks we were open. We’re bottling batch 6 tonight and we’re pretty much out of batches 1-3 the second they hit the shelf. So to distribute locally, it is quite a process because we have to sell the product to a distributor, let’s say Southern Wine, and the distributor would then make his mark-up, make his money off it and he would sell it to the packaging stores, let’s say Green’s. They would get their price out of it, what have you, and then the packaging store would actually have to let the restaurant know or the restaurant would have to request it and if all worked out well, the restaurant would buy it from the packing store and they would sell it. So, really it has to go through quite a process from here to Columbia and back to Green’s then to the restaurant for us to be able to distribute there. We’re going to hopefully have that set up by Halloween. It’s going to be very small quantities.
It’s very, very ambitious but we’re running 24/7, around the clock, 7 days a week to produce 10 cases. Right now, today, we’re in line to have 10 cases ready the week of Halloween and hoping to have it in the Main Street bars and restaurants by Halloween. That’s what we’re shooting for and then, after that, if that does well and the demand is still high, which we hope it is, we should be able to invest more capital in to capital equipment actually expand into the basement and do a second operation like we’re doing upstairs. And at that point, if we doubled our capacity, that would allow us to distribute in South Carolina. We’d still be very small. We’re still talking very small quantities, but we would like to be in every county in South Carolina.
NOTE: Joe met his Halloween goal. Dark Corner’s moonshine was featured in seasonal cocktails at Blue Ridge Brewery, also on Main Street.
Stay Tuned for Part 3 Next Week. For Part 1, Click HERE.
