Our dream started with the idea to revitalize the old orchard on our family farm and make a calvados style apple brandy. Then the research on how to reach this goal began. How much will this all cost? What kind of apples should we use? Where do we buy apples? Is anyone else doing this? The list goes on and on but it led us to a few answers on where to get started.
Corn. It is a plant that grows well in our area and would be great to use to make a base spirit. We want to keep everything as local, organic and gluten free as possible. And that's as local as we could possibly get. Thankfully the farmer leasing our land also had an interest in transitioning his farming into organic and wanted to use our small areas as test plots.
Over the winter these amazing farmers helped clear about 8 acres of land... or forest really, that had grown up over the last 30 years. Then in the spring they began prepping the land at the bottom of the hill for another small patch of corn that they thought would be optimal.
In these two small areas we have about 5.8 acres of Rebellion Corn planted. This is not the type of sweet corn you see in the grocery store. It is a type of corn that dries on the cob and is used for feed or can be ground for cornmeal. Then we will use this cornmeal to turn into alcohol.
Since we are still working on building the distillery we are working on different ways to use this corn. Some options are to store the corn until it can be used, find a co-packer to bag cornmeal, or sell to farmers for feed.
It is amazing how little ideas and asking the right questions can lead you to other amazing ideas and discoveries. As we learn more about what the possibilities are the more the original plan and timeline evolves. Stay tuned here for more!