The first time we fired up the still, it was a Thursday morning in early 2025, the light through the north windows of the warehouse the cool, raking light that distillers in this hemisphere learn to recognize. Four people. The mash had been fermenting for five days in our 1,875-gallon stainless tanks. We loaded the still, sealed the manhole, opened the steam jacket, and waited.
The wait
Distillation is a slow art, especially in a pot still. Mass-market column stills run continuously, twenty-four hours a day. A pot still is a batch — you load it, heat it, take what you want, dump the rest. The waiting is the work. The first run, that morning, we waited about ninety minutes for the still to come up to temperature, which felt like four hours. The mash heats slowly. The lower portion warms first; convection moves it up; alcohol vapor begins to rise into the swan-neck.
The first sign that distillation has begun is a smell. The condenser starts to drip, and the air around the still gets sharp. Foreshots — the first compounds to vaporize — are aggressive: methanol, acetone, harsh aldehydes. You can't drink them. You collect them in a small steel bucket and you set them aside. The first hundred milliliters of every batch get discarded. This is the easiest cut to make.
The heart cut
What follows the foreshots is the heads, then the heart, then the tails. Heads are still rough — high acetone, high ester — but they're getting closer. The heart is the spirit you're making. The tails are what comes after the heart, lower in alcohol, higher in fusel oils, sometimes recycled into the next batch.
Knowing where the heads stop and the heart begins is the entire skill of pot-still distillation. There's no clock. There's a hydrometer that gives you proof, a thermometer that tells you what's vaporizing now, and there's your nose. Distillers smell the spirit at the parrot — the small glass collection vessel where the condensate drips into a graduated cylinder — and they make cuts based on what they smell.
For our first batch, our master distiller, who had been doing this for eighteen years before we hired her, made the cuts. The first heart-cut sample came around 175 proof, which we dilute later. We tasted it. It was floral, slightly sweet, distinctly date — in our case, because the base ingredient was California Medjool dates from the Coachella Valley.
The result
That first run produced about thirty gallons of high-proof distillate, which we cut to bottle strength over the following week with clean water and a brief charcoal filtration. About 200 bottles total. Most of them went to staff and friends and the people who'd helped us build the room. A few went into a barrel for aging into something else. We kept three on a shelf in the staff room as a reference: this is what the first run looked like.
Most of those bottles are gone now. The few we have left we don't drink. We pour them into a tasting glass once a year and we taste against the current production to see how we've changed.
What we've learned
Pot-still distillation is one of the oldest crafts in human history — the basic process hasn't changed in eight hundred years — and yet every batch teaches you something new. The mash from one fermentation behaves slightly different from the next. The seasonal temperature in the warehouse changes how the still warms. The yeast strain we use varies. Every variable shifts the cut you make.
The thing nobody tells you when you start a craft distillery is how much of the work is patience. You wait for fermentation to finish. You wait for the still to come up to temperature. You wait for the heads to clear. You wait for the cut. You wait for aging, in the case of whiskey, for years. The actual distilling part — the steam in the column, the spirit running off the parrot — is the smallest fraction of the time. The rest is just being there, paying attention, making decisions slowly.
If you want to see the still in person, book a tour. We run distillation runs most weekends, which means there's a good chance you'll catch part of one. The smell alone is worth the trip.
Book a tour — Thursday through Sunday, $30 per guest, all ages welcome.