Distilleries /Breweries in Ireland and England
As part of a college entrepreneurship program, I'll be traveling with a group of college students to Ireland and England this May. As part of the trip I hope to arrange some visits to various distilleries and selected breweries. If you have any industry contacts in the region that you could put me in touch with, I'd certainly appreciate it.

Dr. Tom Lix
Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship
Lake Erie College
440-375-7130
tlix@lec.edu
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LONG ISLAND'S wine country has long had a reputation for its homegrown and locally fermented grapes like cabernet franc and merlot. Rich Stabile and Dan Pollicino are trying to get some attention for potato juice - the 80-proof variety.
Two tons of Long Island spuds were recently delivered to Long Island Spirits, their upstart microdistillery, as they revved up its 1,170-gallon mashing kettle to crush the first batch.
"You can get from a potato to a bottle of vodka in about 10 days," Mr. Stabile said.
For the past 18 months, Mr. Stabile, 46, and Mr. Pollicino, 42, childhood friends who live in Fort Salonga, have been retrofitting a leased 1920s twin-cupola barn here into a craft distillery with two copper stills for a new premium vodka they're calling LiV (rhymes with five).
Theirs is not the first attempt at bringing East End cachet to vodka. Hamptons Vodka, which started production in 1999, is made in Minnesota from yellow corn, according to the owner, Ronné Bonder, a businessman from Westhampton Beach; about 10,000 cases a year are sold, he said. Peconika, another vodka introduced around the same time, is no longer being made.
The barn's loft, which Mr. Stabile and Mr. Pollicino hope will be licensed eventually as a tasting room, has a deck overlooking 80 acres of potato fields (which are farmed by someone else). The distillery operates under a separate license.
Bill Crowley, a spokesman for the New York State Liquor Authority, said that to obtain a Class D distiller's license, which would allow a tasting room and retail sales, the distillery would be restricted to using primarily products from local farms.
Hand-bottling six at a clip, the partners hope to sell 60,000 bottles during their inaugural year, concentrating on restaurants, liquor stores, bars and catering halls in Nassau and Suffolk Counties and Manhattan, Mr. Stabile said.
The French glass bottles with a painted blue stripe will cost $38 for 750 milliliters and $44 for a liter. The vodka is expected to be in stores next month.
The recipe includes a dry Long Island potato variety known as Marcy, which was originally developed for making potato chips, according to Dale Moyer, agricultural program director for the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County.
During the distilling process, the partners plan to "cut the heads," or the low-boiling-point alcohols, and keep the "heart," which is "the best tasting part of the vodka," Mr. Stabile said.
Michael Hall, a distilling consultant based in Saratoga Springs, who worked with Mr. Stabile and Mr. Pollicino, said they "went for the top equipment." The partners have invested more than $1 million in the distillery.
There are 144 licensed craft distilleries in the United States, according to Bill Owens, owner of the American Distilling Institute, which publishes a newsletter for the industry.
Growing up, Mr. Stabile spent summers on Nassau Point and helped his family crush grapes for homemade wine. He and his wife, Joyce, visited wineries and distilleries in Kentucky, the Caribbean and Japan, while traveling for his work in the semiconductor industry. Mr. Pollicino, a former New York City police officer and firefighter who said he recently sold his used-car business in St. James, frequents East End wineries with his wife, Julie.
"We like to drink," Mr. Stabile said.
They opted to open a distillery rather than a winery because of the ability to see the results of their work "a lot faster than waiting for the wine to mature," Mr. Stabile said.
The fledgling distillers took a weeklong Artisan Distilling Workshop last March at Cornell's agricultural experiment station in Geneva, N.Y.
To make the vodka, unpeeled potatoes are dumped into a hopper and move along a conveyor belt into a meat grinder, where they are crushed into a mash cooker and boiled to hydrolyze the starch. "Certain proprietary enzymes" are added, Mr. Stabile said.
The potato soup, or wort, is transferred to one of two 2,000-gallon fermentation tanks, where yeast is added. It ferments for three days before being transferred to the stills. The distilling process is repeated at least three times, and the liquid is filtered to remove any impurities. The alcohol is accumulated in a bulk storage tank and diluted to 80 proof.
Martin Sidor, owner of Martin Sidor Farms, who grows about 450,000 pounds of potatoes on 150 acres in Mattituck and Cutchogue, is selling his surplus to Mr. Stabile and Mr. Pollicino (he uses most of them in his North Fork Potato Chips).
The distillers may have to scramble for spuds this time of year, Mr. Sidor said. Potatoes are mainly marketed from October to January, he said, with the surplus from last year's harvest usually gone by April. New crops won't be ready before June.
E-mail: lijournal@nytimes.com
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The still was built in 1960
It will make continuously 1500Liter/hour mash with 10%Vol to a 85%Vol distillate, using 300-400 kg/hour steam.
You can see a the view of the column in the file attached to this email. It has 12 mash trays (B) build as "bell-trays" and 8 rectification trays (C) , 5 build as "sieve-trays"and 3 as bell- trays, and a dephlegmator (backflow condenser) (D). The system is quite simple. Once on temperature the cold mash from the fermentation (via a) will be heatet up in the dephlegmator (D) then pass down to the Mash column (via b) into the column. The alcohol vapours will rise into the rectification column, the stillage will be stripped while rinsing down through the bell trays.

Dimensions:
Height: 8 m
Diameter mash column 0,6 m
Diameter rectification column 0,5m
Weight approx. 2500 kg
Price 9900,- Euros in my facility, dismounting costs depend on the shipping system. If it can be shipped in one piece it will be 500 Euros if it has to be dismounted into several barrels it will be 1500Euros.

If you are interested you can call me on my mobile phone +49 172 5810267

. Thanks,
Georg Honsel
georg.honsel@gmx.de
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To introduce myself I begin by saying I was named after a famous Tennessee Whiskey. At least that's what I think, my family denies it; but my father was intoxicated with his favorite drink the night I was born, and he had the honors of naming me while he was in fact drunk.
This is what led me to do research on distilling. My question to you is, do you know anyone in the southeast, or in the Georgia area who has a lot of knowledge and experience in various spirits, whiskies, and American beer, and willing to meet and teach me a few things. I'm presently a distilling virgin, though I have many ideas that I would like to try as far as business. I do have a degree in accounting, but not in use at the moment.
If anyone comes to mind please, somehow let me know, maybe name and email address. I appreciate the time for reading this email. To let you know I have gain a lot of knowledge by reading your newsletter on the internet, though lack the actual physical experience. Please respond.
Thank you for your time.
And, this really is my name.
J D
culbersonj@bellsouth.net
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ADIforums.com
To join (click above) and sign in
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ADI form manger is:
Guy Rehorst
He can also be reached at
vodkaguy@greatlakesdistillery.com
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University. MSU and LTU (Luleå University of Technology). have a new website- Artisan Distilling
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The first stop on the ADI Scotland whiskey tour will be Forysth (Left) The tour isMay 6-10th. 2008.
--To request a schedule e-mail Bill@distilling.com
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To print out the Beverag Alcohol Manual click (Manual)
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http://distilling.com/backissues.html
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The link to DSP permits is: http://ttb.gov/foia/fri.shtml
Over 300 DSP licenses with 127 being craft distilleries. The rest are industrial distilleries and importers. Check their websites to see if they really distill.
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--To obtain a distilled spirits permit go to:
">http://www.ttb.gov/spirits/index.shtml

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--To obtain TTB list of DSPs go to: http://www.ttb.gov/foia//err.shtml

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--To obtain TTB statistics on distilling go to: www.ttb.gov then scroll down to "spirits" and then the "year".
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--To obtain Distilled Spirits Laws and Regulations go to: http://www.ttb.gov/spirits/spirits_regs.shtml

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--To obtain label regulations go to: http://www.ttb.gov/spirits/bam.shtml distilled spirits manual circular.
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