CRESCENT Places: Dark Corner Distillery — Bringing Moonshine to the Sunshine (Part 4)

HOW YOUR WIFE DEALS WITH THE IDEA OF YOU MOVING FROM ELECTRICAL ENGINEER TO MOONSHINER

When I went home to tell her, she knows my passion, my drive.  She’s seen it her whole life because everything I do I try to be the best at, like all of us.  Student body president, captain of the baseball, basketball team.  Started an engineering company 4 years out of college and then I had this idea of this distillery.  So she’s definitely on board with it, loves it, and what made it even sweeter deal was I told her that if we got our ducks in a row, I’d like for her to be at the distillery while I’m working my full-time job and carry out my portion of the vision here (at the retail store) on a daily basis, which she is doing a good job of.

She’s one of the people that I can rest assured is doing what I want done.  She’s treating the customer the way I think they should be treated. I’m a jack-of-all-trades.  I’m not really good at anything, but I love people.  I know how to take care of people.  I’m passionate about taking care of people and that’s what I want her to do out there.  I asked her if she would help me make this happen and she’s done a great job.  She left her job after 4 years of being the production manager and now she runs our store and the distillery during the day.  Yes, she was really receptive of it.  Really liked the idea because none of us want to work for corporate America. That’s why I sort of have an entrepreneur attitude and it doesn’t matter what I’m doing.

NOW THAT THE DISTILLERY IS IN OPERATION

We’re very proud of what we’ve done.  It’s beautiful, but it takes a long time to make money with something like this because it’s funded out-of-pocket, which means we don’t owe the bank any money, but our 401Ks have been tapped a long time ago.  There are no savings.  The paychecks go back into the business.

I’ll leave here at 6:30 in the morning, and I’ll be back opening at 10.  I’ll do a 20 hour shift on Saturday and can easily work 40 hours here on the weekend.  It’s beautiful.  It’s not work for me.  It’s bettering the industry.  It’s providing jobs.  It’s being environmental.

Obviously, our historical preservation efforts have gained us attention.  I think that’s a lot of word the BBC, the CBC, the Times-News interviews come into play, but you’ve also got this idea where we’re trying to be environmentally sustainable, and I’d like to mention that because with environmental sustainability, we go back to the idea of promoting strong relationships with local organizations and small businesses.

The first thing that we did, we got a partnership with Native Meats, which is a local meat processing company that sources everything between Columbia and here.  They don’t go outside that little radius.  What they’re doing, they’ve offered to come by and pick up our grains because we have to get rid of them, hundreds of pounds of it a day we have to get rid of.   They pick it up in buckets and feed it to the hogs and, in return, they donate us boloney from the hogs, which is really neat.  It is just a complete little process.  So rather than throwing the grains out, we give them to the Native Meats guys and the grain, at that point is detached of starch. and it’s full of protein. It’s very good grain.  The other thing we’re doing is that my 9^th grade teacher, Ms. Tawana Weicker, who actually had me suspended in 9^th grade, which is really kind of funny.  I wish she’d hear that, she gets a kick of that, but she actually has her own biodiesel distillery now and makes her own biofuels. One of her big things also is soap.

She started making WARHORSE soap out of a barbecue restaurant’s left over fat and it has been phenomenal.  We use it in our still area to clean our equipment.  It’s the only thing that will get the black off of out soda kegs.  That’s a really big product so she and I had this idea, well, why doesn’t she try to take some of our methanol, a byproduct that we can’t do anything with because it is pretty dangerous to drink, and she can actually put it in a biodiesel distillery and make glycerin soap out of it.  So now, in the store, we carry shine glycerine body gel in men’s and women’s flavors.  She takes our methanol and makes a gel body soap which is free of phosphates and sulfates.  It is even pet friendly.  So that’s pretty cool.  Rather than pouring this stuff down the drain, she’s actually using it to make a more environmentally sustainable soap.  We’ve got things like that.   We even have a project right now to pitch to BMW, as well.  So we’ve got a lot of really cool ideas from an environmental standpoint.

For Part 1, click HERE. For Part 2, click HERE. For Part 3, click HERE.