How does Finger Lakes Distilling make whiskey?
We bring in the raw whole grains from local farms. We then mill them into a fine meal. After milling, we cook the grain in our mash cooker to produce a thick, starchy mash. As the temperature falls in the mash, we add barley malt, to turn the starch into sugar. Once the mash has cooled, we pump it into our fermentation tanks. After about 3-5 days of fermentation we pump it into our pot still, where it is distilled, making unaged whiskey or “white dog” as they say in Kentucky. We then cut it with deionized water and age it in oak barrels. What sets your whiskey apart from other microdistilled whiskies? There are a lot of whiskies being produced by microdistilleries today. We believe ours will be distinctive for several reasons. We intend to control all of the process ourselves by taking it from raw grain to finished whiskey here at the distillery. We will avoid using commercial enzymes. We have also designed our still so that we can distill our whiskey in small batches using a true old-
