Our new label

Here is a copy of our recently TTB approved gin label.

Voyager Single-Batch Distilled Gin

With our Federal and Washington State licensing behind us we have turned our attention to getting TTB (Federal government) formula approval for our Voyager Gin and Pacifique Absinthe. I spoke to our formulation agent this morning and he states that our gin formula is in the final stage of approval and we should have our hard copy by the end of this week. If all goes well we plan on distilling our first batch of gin by the September 27th. The absinthe is going to take a little more work for the approval process. We plan on submitting our absinthe laboratory sample and formula to the TTB next week. Our original aim was to have our gin ready for market by the end of October, but it appears that we are probably looking more towards the end of November.

New happenings

Well, we've been busy as of late harvesting the herbs for our absinthe from our family-operated herb garden. This weekend we've completed harvesting the common wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), the Roman wormwood (Artemisia pontica), and our hyssop (Hyssopus officinalis) which is in beautiful bloom. All the herbs are now hanging to dry and season. The wormwoods will hang for a year to be ready for next year's absinthe production, and the hyssop will be used for this year's production.

Federal Permitting

Good news everyone, the TTB has just informed me that our federal "Distilled Spirits Plant" (DSP) has been approved and our permit has been mailed to us a couple of days ago. Next step is waiting for the State of Washington license.

Our still, some tanks, and our new bottle filler.

Well the work keeps moving forward. We've recently taken delivery of our new bottle filling machine, had our State of Washington inspection, and our federal paperwork is in the final waiting stages. Here's a picture of how the distillery is shaping up. We've been in discussion with suppliers from bottle companies, label printers, and a whole lot more. We recently had the news team from NWCN (Northwest Cable News, a Washington, Oregon, and Idaho TV news organization) come by and feature us in one of their newscasts last week. Unfortunately they did not post the video of it on their website.

Thanks to all our volunteers.

I must give a huge "Thank you" to my brother Paul. Paul has donated much of his time and talent in the past few weeks to help bring Pacific Distillery up to speed. His talents as a carpenter, plumber, and all-around worker have endeared him to the distillery. As of today we have added more water outlets, upgraded the electrical, installed our water filtration systems, and have made our upstairs herb storage/office area much more usable. We would also like to thank the volunteers who showed up to help us paint and make the place look more spiffy. A big thanks to Steve, Mike, Noel, and my bother-in-law Bruce. And a thanks to my Mom for the lunches and cleanup/organizing. You guys rock!

Alambic stills

A couple of days ago we finished installing our new hand-made copper alambic (it's also called "alembic") in our distillery. Ours is a 500 liter alambic hand-crafted out of solid copper with brass fittings. Since all of our products will be single-batch, hand-made premium spirits, it only made sense for us to obtain an alambic still that was made with those goals in mind. We've been asked several times why we don't use one of those high-tech modern stills from Germany that look so nice and shiny with stainless steel tubes all over. We have several reasons. One is our approach to spirits making. We are committed to the methods of spirit-making as practised by the craft distilllers of the 19th Century. To this day, fine whiskeys, gins, cognacs and many other fine liquors are manufactured using the same methods, and often the exact same stills that have been in use for well over 100 years. Another reason for choosing a copper alambic is the chemical properties of copper during the process of distillation itself. Copper has excellent heat transfer capabilities, resistance to corrosion from wine being distilled into brandy, and copper helps strip out some of the unwanted flavors that can ruin a liquor. We hope to be able to show off our new copper alambic still to visitors in the near future.