Pure Heart by Troylyn Ball

Author:Troylyn Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2016-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

THE THUMPER

I kept my promise to John McEntire and sent away to the United States government for the requirements to become a legal distiller. A manual arrived six weeks later. It was three hundred pages long.

I lugged the manual around for months, trying to make sense of it. I read it on my little fold-out white table during my breaks between cooking mash and distilling, and I read it in bed at night. I asked advice from John McEntire, a man who could probably build a working tractor out of toothpicks, and he couldn’t make anything out of it, either. I called the TTB (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) and was put through to Lang Guenther, the official who processed permits for my region.

His advice helped. Barely. There were so many rules for sites, equipment, supplies, inventory, warehousing, waste, fire, health, security, marketing . . . It was so overwhelming that, basically, I called Lang for advice on every step. After a few weeks, I was spending as much time trying to figure out how to get legal as I was cooking whiskey.

The first thing I figured out was that John’s shed wasn’t up to code. There must have been a hundred rules about the distilling building, and I think the shed failed all of them. The place didn’t even have electricity, unless you counted the extension cord. So about a month into the process, I went to Marion, North Carolina, and bought a building.

Actually, it was just an eighteen-by-twenty-one-foot backyard storage shed delivered off the back lot of the local hardware store, but it was the biggest single purchase for my business that entire year. It was like a small barn, red with white trim and two fancy roll-up doors, one in the front and one in the back. John built a level gravel pad and installed it halfway up his hill of mismatched sheds, across from the chicken coop and lamb pen. I’d be giving the shed to him as payment when I left, so it was nice to know he’d have at least one level building.

It took us a few days to move everything in and set it up, but when we did, the new “distillery” seemed like paradise. There was a ventilation fan (thank you, electricity!), and the big doors allowed us to control the airflow and temperature, not to mention the cleanliness. In the old shed, I’d had to cover everything when John was grinding corn, because the breeze would bring corn dust through the slats in the walls.

I had other practical matters to attend to as well. I had to adhere to the fire code, so the burners and heaters needed to be situated correctly. I had to inventory every night and invest in special locks for the doors. Whiskey is a valuable commodity, and one that naturally attracts the interest of ne’er-do-wells. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (emphasis on tax!) wanted to make sure no product was misappropriated into the gullets of local inebriates before the government got its slice.

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