Reddit reviews Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining

In case anybody was wondering, the chart is from this book. I was recently given a copy as a gift and it's been a pretty good read so far.

I know the guys who wrote this. It goes pretty in depth regarding their startup procedure.

If there is no craft size license, you may be looking at $20k in distilling license fees. Also, you cannot run this out of a residence. So you have to set up the stills in a commercial/manufacturing property and submit a floor plan to have it inspected. Then wait 6 months while the paperwork goes through.

Basically, year one costs would be something like this.

License - $300-22,000 in NY, depending on size. This includes an insurance bond with the state, which will run a couple of grand

Commercial Real estate Lease - $24k-40k/year. You'll be paying this with your equipment all in place while you wait for the license to get approved. Also, you may have some zoning issues or need to go through a local approval situation.

Stills and other equipment- you already have some, but you will need to scale up from hobbyist size if you want to be able to produce enough quantity, I'd put a minimum of $5k in for a larger still/tanks. And thats still something you will ideally outgrow. But a new still could mean more licensing approvals in your state.

Ingredients- Use your current input cost to product yield and imagine running your current setup every day, all day. Your current still size will determine how much volume you can put out to start. Say you're running a 10 Gal still, yielding about 2.5gal of good proofed product per run, with a mash bill around $40/run, your raw materials cost is around $4/liter. Couple dollars for bottling, your just over $5 per 750ml of product, before aging. 2.5 gal/day for about the 120 days you'll be able to legally run after the permit comes in gives you 300 gallons of product you can make during your first year.

Storage/Aging- Depending on the product you're putting out, you're either barreling or selling moonshine. Good thing about moonshine, you can start selling right away. Bad thing, people don't want to pay craft distiller prices for moonshine. What you barrel is going away for a while, and you'll need a place to store it. Plus the cost of barrels if you can get them. Say you're aging everything for 1 year in 5gallon new oak barrels running you $80 each, thats 60 barells, or $4800. And you'll get about 250 gallons out of the barrels if you are lucky.

So 1.5 yrs after you start the process, you could possibly start bottling your product. You'll want to wait until you have several barells that have matured before you start blending. In your first year, you made 100 cases of whiskey, which can come to market around the end of year 2, during which you've been running that still like crazy. You even bought another small still to double production to almost 1000 gal of whiskey in year 2.

My rough math puts you at around $2000k with the excise tax on the whiskey that comes off the still for the first 2 years. You'll need to put this out before you can really bring something to market, and thats assuming you do everything. Bring in outside labor will cost you another $20k/year for some part time help. Then you gotta figure out the sales part. Thats a whole other ball game. You could easily spend $250-300k before you start getting a solid revenue stream. Then, assuming sales are good and you sell 80% of your 5000 bottles produced/year at around $30/750ml wholesale, you're looking at around $120k revenue. Assuming sales and production scale up equally and steadily, you'll be turning a profit around year 4.

That might be a nice time to take your first paycheck.

Obviously, there are ways to do it cheaper, maybe you have a line on cheaper commercial rent, maybe you can get materials cheaper, maybe there is a farm distiller license in your state that brings your licensing costs way down.

But if you want to start one up with just $15k, I would find 10 other people with similar dreams, each of which have $15k to put in, and build a company together. Give yourself a fighting chance to fight through the taxes and beuracracy in order to bring your sweet sweet firewater to those of us who thirst.

TL:DR, I need some rich alcoholic friends.

I enjoyed the heck out of this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Kings-County-Distillery-Guide-Moonshining/dp/1419709909

Credit to Kings County Distillery. Here is their graph of a "typical" run. I know there are a million variables that can change this but it's an interesting way to gauge what you are measuring off your own still.

I too am a scotch drinker. Here are some of my favorite books on the subject:
Guide to Urban Moonshining

How to make whiskey

The Complete guide to single malt scotch

Some of them are about making whiskey but they go into details on the history and background of different whiskeys which i found very interesting. My favorite of the 3 is the urban moonshining one.

I haven't used one before but you could also get him a nice water dropper for whiskey and/or a glencairn glass.

http://whitemulepress.com/

heres a list of ADI books which most you can buy off of amazon


http://www.amazon.com/Home-Distillers-Workbook-Making-Moonshine/dp/1469989395/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1450201049&sr=8-2&keywords=home+distilling

this is a pretty basic one. I would ignore the advice he gives to make a still. youll outgrow it pretty quickly and want to advance to something bigger

http://www.amazon.com/Kings-County-Distillery-Guide-Moonshining/dp/1419709909/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1450201049&sr=8-6&keywords=home+distilling

this book really basic and doesnt get into the science too much but is instead a real basic intro. sort of a cliff notes version. also doesnt get too much into distilling itself but is a decent starting place.


edit: added a different link to a website that has good books.