Local distiller gets in the spirits
Robbie Delaney had a crowd covering the plank floors of his one-man distillery.
They were waiting, joking, having fun while his stainless steel machine churned, turning sugar, molasses and yeast into what Delaney hoped would be a batch of rum.
He was sweating it out.
With an entire year and untold thousands already invested, Delaney had no idea whether his still would work properly, or what it would produce.
Muddy River Distillery had the still. It had a pile of paperwork to secure federal and state permits. It had a legal, bonded location in Belmont’s Riverside Complex.
What it needed was a product.
Dollars and distilleries
Delaney is among a growing breed of craft distillers in North Carolina, a group hoping for a spot on the ground floor of an industry poised to proliferate in the shadow of the state’s craft-beer brewing craze.
Independent makers of moonshine and gin, brandy and vodka and other stout spirits have multiplied across the state.
At the end of 2011, four distillers had state permits for producing liquor. Today they number nine.
That’s a far cry from the 540 registered distillers operating in North Carolina 100 years ago during pre-Prohibition days. Back then, the Tar Heel state led the nation on the liquor front, according to the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission.
The agency can’t help but wonder whether those happy days are here again.
Happy?
The nearly giddy tone with which the N.C. ABC’s annual report deals with distilleries would suggest it.
“Could history repeat itself?” the report asks.
And it answers, “If North Carolina’s distilleries see the strong popularity experienced by the state’s craft brewers and local wineries in recent years, ABC stores across the state will need to get some additional space ready on the North Carolina shelf.”
From 2008 to 2011 the state collected nearly $500 million on beer and wine sales. And North Carolina’s beer and wine revenue grew by more than $20 million between 2008 and 2011.
Native spirits, quality, choices
Distillers say there are other good reasons to like homegrown liquor.
“We don’t get a big yield but it’s a really good-quality product,” says Cody Bradford, the CEO of moonshine-making Howling Moon Distillery in Asheville.
The company is preparing to add a second still and expects to soon produce 160 cases a month of its mason-jar fifths.
Part of the draw for buyers is also about choices, according Charlie Mauney, manager and distiller at Kings Mountain’s Southern Artisan Spirits, home to Cardinal Gin.
Go into the ABC store and you’ll see almost everything on the shelf is owned by a large, often multinational, company, he says.
“When people see something on the shelf made in North Carolina or close by, they really take an interest in it. We’re using local grains and whatnot to produce our spirits.”
Cardinal Gin helps prove his point. Southern Artisan started producing in August 2011. The first of its batches went into a dozen stores in North Carolina.
It is now in more than 300. Last year, ABC stores ordered more than 240 cases, according to the commission.
And that’s not counting the Cardinal Gin distributors in Virginia and South Carolina or online sales in New Jersey.
The Kings Mountain distillery also has a license to sell in Georgia, mostly because a store owner there called to ask for the gin, Mauney said. Maryland is next on the list.
By the end of the summer, Southern Artisan expects to be making rye whiskey and bourbon as well as the signature gin.
Still waiting — and spending
Delaney shares in the optimism.
His goal in founding Muddy River Distillery was to grow it into a large enough operation to make distilling his full-time gig.
A 27-year-old who works full time in the construction business, he lives in Charlotte but works in Durham. The position has him regularly flying out of state for major jobs and an in-flight magazine gave him the idea about craft distilling.
Delaney is a beer drinker. Liquor has never been his thing. But he has a friend who is a fan of rum and the two decided to partner on the project.
That friend bailed about four months later.
Determined to follow through, Delaney built the original still himself.
He started with a 32-gallon stainless steel tub and put together the most manual machine he could envision, from the tall column to the copper tubing to the customary coil, familiar to anyone who ever watched a movie about moonshiners.
Before he has sold even a drop of Muddy River rum — that’s a different set of permits and he’s waiting now to have his label approved — Delaney has plans for a second still that is five times the size of his original.
“The new tank is insane,” he said. “I could crawl inside it.”
It will also represent an estimated $5,000 to $7,000 investment.
That’s a drop in the bucket compared to what Delaney has spent so far. He doesn’t want to disclose a dollar amount but he’s using the money he and his Gaston-native fiancée, Caroline Burnet, saved to build a house.
“I figured I could do this for around 25 (thousand),” he said. “Let’s just say I’m close.”
A maze of regulation
The process consumes as much time as money.
And the real time-killer is the regulations.
Delaney and Mauney both say it took about a year to get permits just to make liquor.
For Bradford, it was more like a year and a half. His words on the subject of federal licensing are as heated as his still. He says he spent that time submitting and re-submitting paperwork, waiting for never-returned calls, seeing the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau miss the deadlines it imposes on itself and generally boiling over for more than 12 months.
Bradford finally called his congressman for help and says the process moved more swiftly afterward.
The bureau recently announced it would streamline at least one of its permitting processes.
Approving labels, the process for which Delaney is waiting now, will be simpler after the changes, according to the TTB. It will stop considering type size and issues related to the types of image files distillers are using, as well as publicize turnaround times and make other changes to speed up the process.
Different steps left Delaney scratching his head when it came to permitting. The 78-page application for a federal distilling permit could only be approved after the still was installed.
But in North Carolina it’s illegal to even possess a still before possessing a permit.
The distillery has to be bonded, similar to being insured, so that the taxes are covered even if something happens to keep the rum from selling.
But Delaney has to have a special, non-bonded space, with a door and a lock, where he must store any returns.
The first sweet sip
Only after all the red tape can he get to the white rum.
Then it takes from eight to nine days for the ingredients to fully ferment. The resulting “mash” goes into the still and, in a short seven hours, Delaney has the result, a whole couple gallons of it.
That’s what he got from that first batch from the first still he ever tried. It poured, clear as water, out of the copper spiral into a waiting mason jar.
He took the first sweet sip and sighed in relief.
“Thank God,” Delaney said to himself. “It works.”
Now it’s time for him to.
You can reach Business Editor Ragan Robinson at 704-869-1833 | Gazette_Ragan on Twitter.
