We inherited a barn. Nobody told us it was a distillery.
My grandfather bought the property in 1953 to store hay. He also, without ever mentioning it to my grandmother, spent the next thirty-one years quietly filling the loft with sixty oak barrels that he did not open, did not sell, and did not tell anyone about.
We found them in the summer of 2018 while cleaning out the barn to sell the land. Fifty-nine of the sixty barrels were still full. Two of us tasted the first one on the barn floor in the July heat and stood there in silence for what my brother later swore was a full four minutes. Then we cancelled the sale.
We do not have my grandfather's mash bill. We do not have his still. We do not have any record of how he did it. What we do have is his patience — his willingness to leave a barrel alone through fifteen Missouri summers without opening it once — and that is the only thing we have tried to copy.
Every bottle we ship carries a date in the founder's handwriting. That is the day the barrel was tasted and approved. If the handwriting looks a little tired, it is because the barrel took a little longer.