Time for a Drink

I don’t put a lot of stock in the rumor of small-town hospitality. I’m from a small town and most of the time it seemed the only people they disliked more than each other was everybody else. When traveling to a small town we are always happy to be treated indifferently. Big cities aren’t friendlier, but there is a herdlike solidarity from the flowing masses. I can walk the same sidewalks everyday after lunch and never recognize a face.

Our son and his girlfriend gave my wife a coupon for distillery tour. The distillery is in Galion, a small town in north central Ohio. Despite several trips to Louisville and a couple to Tennessee we had never visited a distillery. It sounded fun, the day was chilly and the rain that had been here forever was still here. We hopped in the car and an hour later we were there.

The Iron Vault Distillery is in an old building downtown. It has a glow, a familiar warmth that old, well-loved buildings radiate, a deep sense of humanity, history, as if the walls were made from more than bricks and masonry cement, the wood begins to shimmer with more than stain and wax. Over enough time buildings and their inhabitants begin to evolve together, and if there is enough respect for the history, enough love for the present, and hope for the future both, people and buildings become stronger, better. It is almost spiritual, a symbiotic exchange of sharing a space in time.

Everybody, almost everybody, anyway, knows somebody, or a group of somebodies who decided to make a hobby into a business. Normally, not always, but often, it fails because if you take something you love and turn it into a labor, even a labor of love it loses all the luster and fun. Hobbies and business are the strangest bedfellows.

Our tour started in the lobby. A narrow, deep room that resonate with planning and design. We learned a bit of the history, of the building, and business. Three people, friends for a long time, wanted to find something to do when they retired. It led them to a few well-traveled destinations. They brewed their own beer, and that was a thought. Of course, they realized the market is filled with micro-breweries, and carving out a share was going to be an uphill battle.

I’m not sure of the sequence, there were a lot of details and a small, copper still, that was so beautiful I got lost looking at it, they decided to try their hand at opening a distillery.

Next stop, the lab, a small room, right off the lobby. They tested the proof of the various whiskeys here. Plus, they experimented with different formulations, and ingredients. It was filled with glass equipment, strangely beautiful and exotic in its precision. You couldn’t help but think of Trapper John and Hawkeye Pierce. I’m honestly ashamed of how little I know about math and science and simple chemical reactions, so I lost track of a lot of what our hostess was saying. I heard enough to know in distilling the equipment is not the only thing that has to be precise.

We moved onto was the distillery. A big room filled with tanks, tubes, tubs, and barrels. Our host here was one of the distillers. He walked us through the process of heat, steam, reclamation and recovery. Again, I got lost in a lot of the science. It was, however, a fascinating look into the process of conversion. A long, complicated process of turning corn and malted beverages into a variety of different alcohols. It was the physical processes, the movement, and motion, that fascinated me. Plus, the differences in alcohols, gin and vodka, rye and Scotch. And he answered every question, with patience and politeness. He walked us front to back at least three times, to point out some nuance of grinding corn, or storing barrels, or scraping the residue off heating elements. We looked at everything, and there was a lot of things in that room, it was filled, front to back, side to side.

The tour was supposed to last an hour, I’m sure our curiosity and fascination lasted every minute, and possibly longer. He never seemed to lose patience or grow weary with our inquisitiveness.

At some point, some indefinable moment approximately halfway through the tour, something odd happened. Everybody there, and I think there were five people, but the room was full of tubes and barrels and bins demanding my attention, started treating us like one of them. We weren’t customers anymore, we were friends. They joked and laughed with us. We felt welcomed. I started to rethink my small-town hospitality opinion.

When the tour was over, we had a tasting. I’m not going to bore you with flowery, inflated, alcohol snobbery, for one thing, I’m anything but a connoisseur. I will say, the gin was wonderful, normally I’m not a big fan of gin but they diffuse it with other things, and it has a clean, crisp neatness. But the real surprise was, like changing my small-town hospitality opinion, I had to alter my “if it isn’t from Kentucky, it’s just whiskey” motto. The Iron Vault Distillery makes a wickedly tasty bourbon.

If you have a chance take the tour, you’ll be glad you did. And if you find any alcohol with the Iron Vault Distillery label and buy it.

As I mentioned in my previous column, I don’t have the gift of precognizance, the future is as murky and unattainable as the past. However, I think Iron Vault is a business that is going to make it. They are serious about distilling, and customer service, and that should be more than enough.

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