How Are You Paying For Your Craft Distillery?

Some people fund their craft distillery by sourcing and selling whiskey made by somebody else. Others do it with white spirits. Cardinal Spirits, in Bloomington, Indiana, is doing it by selling a proprietary whiskey glass.

As you can see, it's pretty similar to a Glencairn and works pretty much the same way too. They have some sciencey-sounding stuff you can read here, but really it's just a nice alternative to the Glencairn if you feel like trying something different. It's not as radical as the Neat glass, which may be a good thing. I like the Neat glass and it works well, but it somehow doesn't seem like a glass, more like something you float tea candles in. I rarely grab for it. The Blasadh (yes, that's what it's called) is different but not too different.

Blasadh, the literature says, is Scots Gaelic for "to taste."

There isn't much else going on at Cardinal, as they're just getting started, but they intend to make whiskey, gin, liqueurs, cordials, and vodka. I guess Cardinal's motto is, "Buy the glass so we can make something to put in it."

This is not aimed at Cardinal but at all craft distilleries. Don't make vodka. Really. And if you want to make gin, cordials, liqueurs, flavored vodka, 'moonshine,' or what have you, buy the GNS, don't make it. Why? Because GNS is the one thing a big industrial distillery can make better. It's not worth knocking yourself out for. There's really no point. There's no creativity involved, no real craft. There's craft in flavoring GNS, or there can be, but not in making it. You're just pulling out as much water as you can. That's an industrial process, not a craft.

I expect to hear a lot of hooey about artisan vodka and I'm not buying any of it. Vodka is flavorless. If it's not, it's not vodka and that's good, because not vodka is what we're looking for, not vodka.