Although new local malting facilities, such as Valley Malt in Hadley, Massachusetts, have begun to emerge, we decided to begin our own malting program to retain control over this critical step in the grain treatment process. Malting our own grains will enable us to experiment with unusual flavors, and allows us to expand into smoking our malt at the kilning stage.

Rye straight from the field.

We took as much as we could handle!

Our First Floor Malting.

Sprouting Rye with Acrospires

Although it sounds simple, better grain and better water make better whiskey.

We are sourcing our Rye, Corn, and Barley from nearby farms whose philosophies and practices around sustainability mirror ours. We have some farms growing specific grain varietals directly for us, and when we have found organic supplies, we have jumped to bring them in.

Corn Fields in late Summer

Corn drying on the stalk

Rich, meaty kernels!

An old-fashioned shelling machine

In the bag & ready to go.

These initial efforts paid off with some amazing Peach Eau de Vie, and recipes for our initial New York Raw Rye unaged whiskey.

Angus monitoring the still & condenser

Collecting Spirits from the first run for proofing.

Coverage has included industry and trade press, such as Modern Distillery Age, Whisky-Drinker.com and Dowd’s Spirits Notebook, and mass-market media such as Time Business online and, most recently, MSNBC/Today. While all of the coverage I could link to is available on our Press page, I would like to draw particular attention to the interview on Damon Boelte’s internet radio show, The Speakeasy. Damon was an excellent, informed host, and I encourage listening to other episodes as well.

What has captured the imagination of many in the paper is the uncanny similarity between the growth path of the Craft Distilling market, and that of the Craft Brewers 20 years prior. That chart is below…

We were very pleased to lay in enough for aging quite a bit of whiskey. And we hope to start doing so soon!

Barrels for Aging

The site, on a bluff above the Hudson River, has a feature that makes it uniquely qualified to house a distillery: an 80,000-Gallon cistern, fed directly from an on-site well, sitting slightly uphill from the distillery house itself.

The prior owners of the site, the Holy Cross Monastery nearby, had constructed the building to use as a print shop. It has ample space for us to build out our “traditional-methods” production facility, a large barreling loft, and separated space for the “front of the house,” where we’ll greet visitors, and have Coppersea products available for sale.

I began speaking with potential investors again in late-2010, and by mid-March, I felt confident that we would be able to raise enough initial capital to make the business a reality.

We formally incorporated the company in February, and spent the next several months going through terms and conditions of the financing, and, then, the glorious legal root canal of finalizing the documents.  We officially “closed” the initial financing in late-July, 2011.

And three days later I gave notice at work to devote myself full-time to Coppersea.

–Michael

So began the journey that brought us to where we are today.

Although we had a solid business plan and were starting to have conversations with potential investors as early as mid-Summer, 2008, our desire to move ahead came head-to-head with the reality of the global financial crisis that hit in Autumn. Angus and I continued to maintain contact &, but kept active development on the back burner until the funding environment opened up.

By late-2010 the time felt right to make a move. Revising the business plan showed no slow-down in the rapid growth of the Craft Distilling market, and I knew Angus’ distilling knowledge and my business & operations background would be a strong combination…

–Michael