These Distillery Problems Could Cost Us $400,000

追加: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Just kind of bad news after bad news after bad news. Beautiful day in Alabama. That's why I keep Monroe around. General pessimist. We got to move on to other projects. I'm not looking for the cheapest quotes in the world. But I'm also not looking to buy a beach house for everybody that works on this project.

[00:00:15]>> Not the right place.

[00:00:17]>> Unfortunately, you are in the right place. It's been a few weeks probably since I've filmed anything here at the distillery. And my luck right now is uh is continuing.

[00:00:30]My bad luck is continuing. My lack of luck, it's probably not lack of luck.

[00:00:34]It's lack of skill and execution. But uh things are not going wonderfully so far.

[00:00:40]Like this is this is the bottom. It's going to We're going to hit this rut.

[00:00:44]We're going to work our way up. I promised we were not going to put this out until we have something positive.

[00:00:49]Hopefully, we get a little something positive today. We we've got the folks here working on getting the paint off the outside of the building. Right now, it looks like we might have to paint the building. We're trying to work with these new banks to fund the project. To do that, I'm getting firm quotes on all of the work, and that's that's not going it's not going wonderfully. Um, you know, our plumbing quote is mighty close to six figures. uh air air conditioning.

[00:01:18]If I replaced my furnace and air conditioner at the house, I had a rough ballpark quote about 8 grand to replace a furnace and air conditioner at my house. Now, that's not running new duck work. That's just replacing the freaking pieces to do that same exact setup in that building next door.

[00:01:37]$45,000 a piece.

[00:01:40]Why? Like, why why is it like five times the cost? I like I don't I don't know. I just because it's commercial, just because, you know, they can just charge whatever they want to charge. So, we're getting more quotes on that. We had quote when we were doing just doing this one building, we had an electrical quote. That electrical quote was $38,000. We've already paid eight of that because we had the new service and the new breaker box and everything installed. We added this building and we're just moving the same equipment over here. Now, we're going to have to do some outlets and stuff, right? So, it's going to be more. Okay. At most double, cuz we're not we're not doubling the work. Like, we're going to do the same thing to this building we did to that building. But the big equipment, we don't have to double. We're just moving it over here. So, that quote went from $38,000 to do the electrical on one building to Put your guesses in right now. Think about it. Let's go. I'm I'm going to come back. I'm going to tell you what that quote is and but let's put it down in the comments. I'm pretty sure you can feel my frustrations beginning to grow in this video because this distillery project is not going particularly smoothly and honestly it's just taking way way too long and things are moving although it's really slow and a lot of people are asking why do it this way. We could have easily rented a warehouse, got a license, just started sourcing whiskey and bottling it up like that.

[00:03:07]That would have been an easy process for us and by now we would have been licensed eight 10 months from the time we started working on these buildings.

[00:03:16]Bought hundreds of barrels of whiskey for what we spent on the building renovations and have been much further along building the Oak By whiskey brand than we currently are right now. So this doesn't make sense to most people. And honestly, they're right. If the whole plan were to just make as much money as quickly as we possibly can, then this is definitely not the path to go down.

[00:03:41]However, the shortest path to success is not always the best path or the one that leads to long-term success. And what I'm trying to do here is build a solid foundation that allows us to build a truly unique spirits brand. Like I'm a firm believer that the only way you're actually going to build something truly unique that no one can replicate is if you distill your own whiskey. Whiskey is really cheap right now, but that's always changing. What was expensive a couple of years ago is cheap now. And at some point in the future, those barrels will be expensive again. And so if your goal is to grow really fast and sell that brand to somebody, the quickest path to success is going to be trying to source a bunch of really cool barrels.

[00:04:30]But it is my opinion that you're much stronger as a business if you control your own supply chain, especially if you're trying to do this for the long term. So we are doing it this way for multiple reasons. One is to lower our debt so that it doesn't get us in trouble. A lot of the distilleries you're seeing closed are taking on a bunch of debt. That debt gets really expensive. Commercial debt is usually a variable interest rate. It might be fixed for a certain time period, but banks don't like to lock in commercial interest rates for very long, right? And so sooner or later that's going to come back to bite you. Now, with real estate, we can kind of take that on, but with renovations, we want to cash flow those so that we don't end up with just a ton of debt. Now, with that, it's a trade-off. You can either get it done fast and end up with more debt or get it done slow and end up with something that long-term is manageable. We also want to control our own supply chain and production to build something truly unique. And that hopefully will give us the foundation of a sustainable business that I can actually work on with my family for a long time. And now that you hopefully understand why, let's jump back into that frustration. They came and chemically stripped all of this. Put put some stripper on all of this last night, let it set, and hopefully it softened it up. The problem we have is that the front of this building has been painted for a long time. So, this this awful green here that was on the side of the building comes off.

[00:06:10]Like, y'all can see that we've pressure washed this off. That white up there is going to come off. And that green and white on the front is going to come off.

[00:06:20]But this green down here is a whole different animal. That is stuck. It's on there. Now, they chemically stripped it.

[00:06:31]We're trying two or three different things. I'm not sure they're going to get that off. We've got a lift rented.

[00:06:37]Super expensive. I hope they can get the top of the building done in the next 2 days. And if not, then, you know, we spent a lot of money on a lift for nothing. This stuff right here, this deand, which we showed in an earlier video, works like a freaking champ. Like this this thing eats everything off. like it. You might have to do multiple coats, but it it eats.

[00:07:03]So, I'm hopeful that this will get it off. And the worst case is we have to do this, which is fairly expensive and takes a while for us to get. We'll just have to do it across the bottom to get rid of the grain. These guys over here are getting started this morning. Any particular reason y'all chose to use that pressure washer?

[00:07:20]>> No gas in the other one.

[00:07:22]>> Okay. He'll be here with gas in just a second. That one is 4,400 PSI.

[00:07:28]>> That one's 7,000 PSI.

[00:07:30]>> All right.

[00:07:30]>> So, >> well, this one isn't wanting the crank.

[00:07:33]>> H. There's your gas right there.

[00:07:36]>> Sweet.

[00:07:38]>> Yeah. I can barely pull this thing. I don't know what it is.

[00:07:41]>> Really?

[00:07:43]>> Yeah. It's a little tight.

[00:07:53]H.

[00:07:57]Wind up tight, huh?

[00:08:04]>> I was going to let him do it for a while longer there. Monroe, why? Why you got to ruin it? I was going to show them how to do it here in a second.

[00:08:11]>> I like watching other people learn.

[00:08:20]Uh, youngans, right?

[00:08:26]>> Beautiful day in Alabama.

[00:08:28]>> Let's see how far they get, which I'm assuming it's not far with that light green. But he used something different here. You see where it's chalky white?

[00:08:36]He used that aerosol can of like this right here.

[00:08:40]This Jasco.

[00:08:42]>> That's the same thing, man.

[00:08:43]>> Epoxy remover. I >> It's the same thing we use.

[00:08:45]>> Okay.

[00:08:46]>> Except that's aerosol.

[00:08:47]>> Yeah. I don't know. He seemed to be hopeful that it was going to work.

[00:08:51]>> Yeah, >> optimism.

[00:08:55]That's why I keep Monroe around. General pessimist. Need some optimism, Monroe.

[00:09:01]Bring it. Well, >> we're both alive.

[00:09:08]>> We are both alive. I've known since the beginning that we were probably going to have to paint this building. I just have a vision for what I wanted this place to look like and that wasn't painted. And I just have to make sure before I give up on that vision, we can get all of this paint off the outside of this building, but at what cost to time, money, you know, just effort in general. We needed to remove all of the loose paint anyway.

[00:09:35]A lot of the paint on this building you just could not paint over or you were just going to create a nightmare uh maintaining the paint as the base layer continues to peel away. So, we've known all along paint is probably in our future, but a man can stay hopeful, can't he? So far, this is going about as expected. The bright green and the white are coming off over here, but that kind of more What's the color for that there? olive green. Some more olive green. Not really coming off.

[00:10:10]We haven't really played too much with that uh heavy chemical stripper there or whatever he sprayed, which is the same stuff that we're using. That's good paint. Whatever that is, good paint.

[00:10:23]But the white over here is coming off.

[00:10:26]So, this is more modern paint.

[00:10:30]So, it's making slow and steady progress. Now, we've been doing some research and uh talking to historians and trying to find out more about the history of distilling in the state of Alabama. The problem is is there's not a lot of history and nobody's really put in the work to try to figure it out.

[00:10:48]I've been doing a little research and I found out that see Alabama's kind of weird cuz Alabama actually enacted prohibition a long time before the feds did. So Alabama actually started trying to enact prohibition in 1906. Got it passed in 1907. It got repealed in like 1910, 1912, something like that. And then they brought it back in 1915. Uh and it stuck until the feds did it in uh in 1920. So Alabama kind of destroyed their whole distilling industry well before the federal government did it for the rest of the country. But in 1896, there were actually 32 registered distilleries in the state of Alabama.

[00:11:34]Five of them right here in Opaikica. The most of any city in the entire state. So we had more distilleries than all the big cities. Montgomery, Birmingham, all of them. There were more distilleries right here in Opaikica. So literally 32 in the whole state. Five of them here.

[00:11:52]One of them was actually in my tiny little hometown of Davidston, Alabama, which only had like 200 people. They had a freaking distillery. The town I where I went to high school, New Sight, Alabama, had a distillery. Some cool history there. I'm trying to do a little research on the names. All of the names of those distilleries are just the names of people, right? Whoever owned the distillery. And so, we're just starting to do some research. I have found one of them, some family history. I don't know if he has any living descendants at this point. Actually, I think he doesn't. But also, all of his kids moved off long time ago. So, probably not a lot of family history for them in this area. That's just one.

[00:12:33]We're going to research all of them. The ones that are in my, you know, my hometowns and the ones that are in my uh in Opaikica. So, we're going to see if we can find any sort of history. Where were they? Can we find addresses? Can we figure out where they lived, where their warehouses were? Any of that stuff would be really cool to have. So, got a lot of data and statistics on whiskey in different states around that time. So, starting to find some really cool stuff that I don't think many people knew existed or at least they haven't really evaluated it. Don't know what we're going to do with that information. But here, we really want to try to have a section where we tell the history of distilling in Alabama. I think it's fascinating and I don't think anybody really has it. So, can we help be a part of, you know, telling that story and surfacing some of the names of people that were that were making whiskey? I mean, obviously, there no real breakout successes. I mean, Mlo Lim Mlo actually had a distillery in Birmingham, so he moved some of Jack Daniels production down to Birmingham. Alabama started messing around with prohibition and stuff, so he moved it back to to Tennessee. Other than that, no real breakout successes in distilling. You know, you don't have those Jack Daniels or Brown Foremans or anything like that obviously for a reason. Most of the guys around here were probably they were not making bourbon. They would have been making probably moonshine corn whiskey stuff like that. Brandy production in Alabama was actually higher than whiskey. I do have some numbers on bourbon production. Um, I haven't gone through all of them just to see like if was anybody in Alabama making trying to make bourbon, but I haven't gone through all those numbers yet to really understand how this state stacked up.

[00:14:19]Anyway, I'm going to get through this and I'll uh check back in with y'all tomorrow to see how the paint comes off.

[00:14:25]Well, yesterday I uh reached our objective of getting paper on the front of this building. So, we've got paint stripper all the way down it. We got this paper over it that keeps it from drying out. So, about to have a little moment of truth here as to whether or not this actually got any of the paint loose.

[00:14:51]Now, if it's thick paint, it'll often times peel off with this, but it's definitely soft. I mean, you can see there, that paint is soft. So, the white is coming off no problem.

[00:15:05]This right here, not sure about. Peeled the paper off. There's places where like this paint is obviously bubbling up and ready to come right off, but there are places like this green down here that is just stuck. Now, every time we go over it, it gets lighter. And places where there was a lot of paint stripper, there's no paint. Like I spilt a little paint stripper right here. Ate right through it. So this paint stripper will take this off. But as soon as we roll it thin, places where it's thick, come right off. Places where it's thin, do not. We're going to have to apply three or four coats to get this stuff off. We could have it sand blasted. That was the original quote we got for over 20 grand was sandlasted. I didn't go with it. I mean, it was expensive. I didn't want to go with it because of the cost, but I also didn't go with it because it's going to destroy the brick. So, we're going to have to paint the building. I guess the question now is what color are we going to paint the building? I was thinking a lime wash, but we can't even lime wash with this cuz you're going to see a lot of these colors through. Now, that might be cool where you got lime wash, you can see a little green, you see a little white, you can see whatever, you know, something like that that breathes that doesn't make the brick a whole lot less maintenance. But I I think realistically we are just going to have to paint her.

[00:16:31]Let me know what color you think we should go. If you if you've got a building that looks great, brick building, looks great painted. Let me know what color you went with. We got to move on to other projects. We're starting to make some progress. I want to get these windows in and I want to have all this done before we put those windows in. Well, I guess that decision's been made, right? The building will have to be painted. I've done everything I can. On the side, we could get all that paint off on the front. Like, it's just not worth the effort. it's going to take. Right. So, the painters are already scheduled.

[00:17:02]They're going to come out. We're going to repoint all the brick, fix all the mortar, and then they're going to paint the building. So, you'll see updates to that in the next video. Hopefully, you've guessed what the electrical quote is if you were in Damn.

[00:17:20]>> What is it?

[00:17:20]>> Nomad. That is a 56 Nomad.

[00:17:27]I mean, I say it's a Nomad. It is a twodoor wagon. Nomad trim level. Was it all twodoor wagons? I don't think they were all um nomads. But anyway, 56 wagon.

[00:17:37]>> Uh the electrical quote. This building 38 grand. Already spent eight of that.

[00:17:43]Moving it to two buildings. Doing pretty much the exact same in the other build.

[00:17:47]Actually less in the other building because we're just putting up some cheap LED lights and there are not a lot of walls. So le less it just say about the same. We're taking the equipment that was over here and moving over there. So theoretically that would just be the same to wire up.

[00:18:02]And the quote went from $38,000 to $326,000.

[00:18:10]Now if you can explain that to me. So here's what I'm going to do. Next week I'm enrolling in a trade school and I'm going to go get my electrical certificate. And soon as I'm done with that, I'm going to come wire this building. Then I'm going to go get my master plumbers certificate. We're going to do the plumbing on this building. And then I'm going to get my heating and AC certifications and we're going to do that one. That's That's how we're going to pull this off. What do you think?

[00:18:36]>> I'm going to do that and he's going to sign a piece of paper saying he did.

[00:18:39]That's the way that works.

[00:18:40]>> I'm going to get my certification. You going to do all the work? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:44]Yeah. Yeah. Of course. I'm glad you How about you start on the heating and AC?

[00:18:48]I'll start on the electrical.

[00:18:50]>> I don't want you I don't want you wiring nothing though. I don't know how wires go.

[00:18:54]>> Look, I get it. You can get online and you can read.

[00:18:58]>> I'm I'm a YouTube certified mechanic right here.

[00:19:01]>> Hey, you can find anything on YouTube.

[00:19:03]>> Back in the day, man. We just had We just had to not know stuff back in the day.

[00:19:07]>> I lost my set of encyclopedias.

[00:19:10]>> I bet there's a set on Facebook Marketplace right now.

[00:19:12]>> What's the first word in encyclopedia?

[00:19:15]>> The >> No, the first Arvar canon or something like that.

[00:19:20]>> You talking about the dictionary? No, it's the encyclopedia is the same way. I think >> I don't know something talk about it. I guess >> we haven't started out this video in the best way possible. It's just kind of bad news after bad news after bad news.

[00:19:33]Every time I think we've kind of scraped the bottom and we're headed back up.

[00:19:36]Well, proves to not be the case. Couple of issues we're dealing with here um that have come up in the last week or so. Real big hold up now is just getting enough quotes to go to the bank to try to get them to approve the loan. We have since got another electrical quote that was higher than I wanted it to be, but at least in the realm of feasibility.

[00:19:57]All the quotes, AC quote, three times what it should be. So, we're having to go through multiple folks to come out and quote these. And we're not like I don't want to cut any corners. We want everything to be done right. I'm not looking for the cheapest quotes in the world, but I'm also not looking to buy a beach house for everybody that works on this project. So, you know, having to go through a bunch of contractors to find the ones that have the level of experience, will do the work to the level that we require, but aren't trying to take all the equity out of the building. We're close on that. And then got hit with more bad news yesterday.

[00:20:32]Here's a little video of what Monroe found yesterday. And you can't have nothing up there getting wires down. And there it is. Termites. Reminds me of a joke. Termite walks into a bar, says, "Knock knock."

[00:20:48]Bartender says, "Who's there?" He says, "Clint." Clint who? Well, Clint eats wood.

[00:20:55]Yeah, I know. Not really funny. And so, obviously, these little creatures are not what you want to see in the wood structure of your building. Looks like it's fairly isolated at this point, but we have professionals coming here in just a minute to uh take a look at it and tell us how bad it actually is. cuz our our expectations of that building is that it did not need near as much repair. We did not need to put a roof on it. That roof's supposedly only 5ish years old from what I've been told. So, this may raise our cost even more. And we may have to do the same thing we did to this one. It sucks to have a new roof. It sucks to have to pay for it, but a lot of peace of mind. And I got a brand new roof, right? So, let's uh let's see what the exterminators say.

[00:21:37]They should be here in just a few minutes. Look at this little guy.

[00:21:42]What are you doing?

[00:21:45]How's he handling you uh mowing grass?

[00:21:48]>> I give him like >> he didn't like it.

[00:21:52]>> Not at all. Stay away from road.

[00:21:54]>> Monroe wanted a dog. Got the exact dog he wants. How's it going so far?

[00:21:58]>> I don't like it.

[00:22:00]He's puppies, man.

[00:22:02]>> Too much responsibility.

[00:22:03]>> Well, >> he can't be more than like a foot away from him at all times. Separation anxiety, I guess. How do you like termites? How do I like termites?

[00:22:12]>> Not at all.

[00:22:13]>> Maybe you need to quit poking things.

[00:22:15]>> That's good.

[00:22:16]>> Most of your troubles in life have come from you poking things.

[00:22:19]>> Let's not get into that.

[00:22:22]>> I put him in the building next door. Put him in the bathroom.

[00:22:25]>> Yeah.

[00:22:26]>> I was up here we for 15 20 minutes. I turned around this thing was right behind me.

[00:22:31]>> He got out of the building in the bathroom.

[00:22:33]>> Little Houdini.

[00:22:36]>> I don't know. I mean the door was open on the bathroom. He been out 15, 20 minutes like I did sitting on his own.

[00:22:42]>> He found you though.

[00:22:44]>> He is a retriever. So he retrieves bird dog.

[00:22:51]I'm a good pup.

[00:22:53]>> Now if I just teach you to rate leader in the right place.

[00:22:58]>> Yes, you are.

[00:22:58]>> All right.

[00:22:59]>> Unfortunately, you were in the right place.

[00:23:02]>> So what y'all got going on?

[00:23:03]>> Oh, we're uh well, we bought this building. We're working on buying that building and we're doing a little little clean up of some old electrical stuff and >> you know found some critters. Okay.

[00:23:14]>> So, we need to have a look and see how bad it is and and what the remedy is.

[00:23:19]But it is active like they were there.

[00:23:21]>> Gotcha. What y'all going to be putting in?

[00:23:23]>> Uh distillery.

[00:23:24]>> Oh, good.

[00:23:26]>> We have the lift there you can use if you want to up there where the uh dirt spots are.

[00:23:36]Oh yeah.

[00:23:40]>> Are these attached?

[00:23:42]>> Do what?

[00:23:43]>> Are they attached?

[00:23:44]>> These two are. They're not attached on the other side. So there's an air gap between this and the neighboring building. These two are basically one building. There's one wall in between them.

[00:23:55]>> What else did you find? Just those up there. Didn't you say you you saw Didn't you say you saw something somewhere else?

[00:24:03]>> Termites. was this right there.

[00:24:05]>> Okay, >> I tell you what, let me I'm going to see if I can't get me another set of eyes down here. This will be a good >> learning point. Well, the termite guy is now gone and uh he came in and he looked and he's like, "Yep, termites." And uh then he left. He a lot of buildings have termites. This is one of those buildings. But we got to get with the owner of this building. We don't own this building yet. And just kind of see what he wants to do. Make sure he doesn't have a termite bond. those kind of things. He's aware he was supposed to be here, but they came early. So, we'll figure that out. I'll update y'all on our termite situation when I know more.

[00:24:41]It's been a couple of weeks since I've talked to y'all. Actually, not even a week and a half or so. They are working on treating our termites, which I wanted to put a roof on that building anyway, but it was in good shape. I was hoping to have some years before I had to do that, but looks like we're going to have to put a roof on it now. Got Monroe in here extending our ceiling. So, this ceiling structure you see here is the tasting room, but we're going to have bathrooms and things and so they're going to need a roof structure. So, we could have left it. There was a roof structure here when we bought the building, but a lot of it was in bad shape anyway. So, we decided to get rid of it. And now we're bringing it back because when we tore all this out, we were only going to have the one building and all this was going to be production.

[00:25:27]you know, it's going to go all the way to the top. Now that we may have the other building, it looks like this is going to be, you know, more more infrastructure with a ceiling. It's going to be, you know, restrooms and things. So, the lift seems to have been a pretty solid investment. And it's these types of projects as to why we actually bought that lift used instead of renting one. Uh, a lot cheaper to rent it than it is to buy it. But like, if we rented it for, you know, 6 or 7 weeks, then it's about the same as just buying the thing used. We got a good deal on that one. You know, just keeping an eye on Facebook Marketplace. We can have it for things like this. We can have it for decorating. We have it for painting. A lot of projects around here.

[00:26:06]We use that lift for. Been cleaning out electrical in the other building. Just getting rid of a lot of old add-on electrical lines that kind of go to nowhere that are just kind of deadended somewhere. Just trying to get that building cleaned up a little bit, but we can't do too much to it until we actually own it. So, up. I interrupted your video.

[00:26:24]>> I'm voicing.

[00:26:26]He's trying to start his own channel.

[00:26:28]We'll link it down below. But, uh, I think he's going to be doing just distillery updates on him working here.

[00:26:34]Is that what you is that what you're leaning towards right now?

[00:26:36]>> Yeah.

[00:26:36]>> At least to start with all the things I do.

[00:26:39]>> You know, I thought we were kind of at the bottom of that kind of downhill despair and bad news and that uh we were going to be back on the uphill tick, but we're still kind of working our way downhill here. Um, in the state of Alabama, if you own a distillery and you want to sell anything that has alcohol in it, you have to have made that thing.

[00:27:01]So, if we want to make a fuzzy navl, we have to have peach knobs and we had to make it. Makes it very difficult to have a bar that serves cocktails. You're very limited in what you can do cocktail-wise. And so, they wrote a law last year and they passed it through, but it's written in such a way to where it only applies to Clyde May's new facility. And so, not real helpful to us. So, we are having one written. We the Distiller Alabama Distillers Guild, we have joined the Distillers Guild.

[00:27:26]They are having one written. I've been on the road and it's, you know, throughout this process, I haven't been able to keep up with all the details of it. But they said they can only pass one alcohol bill, right? Two alcohol bills, not going to get it through. One alcohol bill, cool. So, they're like three bills, one for wine, one for uh beer, one for distillers, and they just squished them all together and sent them through. And I haven't been able to read the new squished together version. I'm I read the version that was just for distilleries and it's halfway through its process. It looks like it's going to get passed. I read it last night and it's got language in there that basically says for this to apply to you, you have to be in a historically significant building or a historic district, which we are not. We're right outside the historic district. So, this law we were hoping would make it easier for us to have a taster room. I just found out it's not going to apply to us as it's written. So, we'll we'll see. I brought that attent to the attention of the Distillers Guild last night. We'll see if they're able to have that tweaked or changed. It's halfway through its process. I don't know what that means.

[00:28:29]The the whole process of passing a bill is just Yeah, I understand it's got to pass through two houses, but there's committees, there's meetings. This is what's funny about alcohol laws. There's literally folks that just oppose every alcohol law. Every one of them. The Distillers Guild is really worried that the beer lobby in the state of Alabama will actually oppose the bill. Now, now that it's got brew pub stuff in there, okay, I understand maybe why. But when it was just our bill, like it literally allowed us to sell their beer. Like, it kept us from having to make beer. Like, why would you just oppose? Like, there are people that don't have any it negative impacts of the bill that just oppose any change because this system is designed for them. The system is built to help them win. They're winning. They got plenty of money. They can get laws written for them. They've got all the power and any change in that system and that infrastructure is a risk to them.

[00:29:26]So far, we haven't seen any opposition.

[00:29:28]It hasn't been a problem. But that's the concern. That's the problem with some of the bills they've tried to introduce in the past is that you just got people that get paid to oppose any change. So, so far so good though. It's been a smooth process. It's been great working with the state of Alabama. The distiller guild has done a great job of trying to get this pushed through. It's just very complex and very complicated and there's a lot of moving pieces. So hopefully it gets through. I you know, if it doesn't apply to us, so be it. We'll deal with it. You know, the city of Opaikica would possibly like the historic district already extends this way outside of downtown like a block. We could probably have them extended another block, but then I like there's no reason to other than this, right? And so what are the consequences? Being in a historic district comes with more guidelines and restrictions and you know things that you got to adhere to and why have those when there's no other need other than this bill says we can't serve beer unless we're in a historic district.

[00:30:28]Like what does that have to do with anything? So don't know. This video may be 6 hours long. And I'm not going to end this video till we've got some positivity and some movement. So, I'll uh I'll check back in as we move forward until we get to that positivity. Seems like that's starting to happen. The law that allows us to sell other types of alcohol in our distillery actually passed yesterday. It hasn't been signed by the governor yet, but it's passed all hurdles. It It's going to get passed.

[00:30:54]So, we'll see how it's actually interpreted by the Alabama ABC. We reached out. They said you don't have to be in a historic building. all the things I was worried about with some of the language. They said that's not the case. I don't know what those words are in there for then, but we'll No need to panic. We'll wait and see.

[00:31:11]We've got a while before we're going to have this tasting room open anyway. So, we'll uh we'll just deal with that at that point. Two, we now have a federal DSP at this address. DSP 200068, I believe, from memory. So, it is no longer a federal crime for us to have alcohol here and to distill it. is still a state crime. So, we got to get a state license, but we've passed the first hurdle there as well. If you've been following along this whole time we've been working on this building, uh hopefully you're starting to see the progress, right? But it's really about time for us to pick up steam and you should start seeing more distillery videos coming out soon. And in the next video, we'll actually get a lot of the big visual things done. So, it'll seem like a tremendous amount of progress and maybe, just maybe, we'll actually finish our licensing so we can actually start distilling whiskey. And that milestone is where this will start to feel like it's actually worth all the effort. So, we've got a little update right here.

[00:32:11]Monroe has been busy. We have torn out the door on the side of the building. We had put a door in the Quanet hut up there on the other end before we had determined that it just wasn't going to be salvageable. So, we are going to rebuild this and move the door here.

[00:32:25]Now, this is not the plan for longterm.

[00:32:27]We want a nice glass door or something fancy here. Like, we want to really This is going to be the main entrance to the building. So, we want something fancy, but we are working on our license for the building next door for our DSP.

[00:32:41]And we could use this as a warehouse space, you know, make it something useful, have it on that license. And so, we need to get it secured. So, the rotten door has to go. We have to get windows in the front of this building soon. We're going to start cleaning up the outside and just painting it. I've got to decide on a color. So, he's just kind of temporarily making it nicer right here so that uh this could be used as a warehouse so we can store barrels, do whatever we have until this project is finished.

[00:33:10]>> I can tear anything up. I mean, there's nothing in this world I couldn't care.

[00:33:13]But building it back. That's why I'm just sitting here.

[00:33:17]>> That's how we lost our VCR. We had We finally got a VCR as a kid. We've already discussed that.

[00:33:24]>> It's just a permanent memory that's just burned in your brain. And >> yeah, it's it's like Monro could take stuff apart.

[00:33:30]>> Seriously, it's like Hiroshima. Like you see the mushroom on a smaller scale, of course.

[00:33:39]>> It was awesome.

[00:33:40]>> You connected something it wasn't supposed to be.

[00:33:42]>> Yeah, I I crossed something. Needless to say, it never worked again. So, talking about this roof extension, this area right here is where the tastaster room's going to be. It's going to end right there on that truss. But underneath here is going to be a merch area. It's going to be a closet. The restrooms are going to be on this side. They need a ceiling structure. We don't want those to go all the way up. And we also want to build this um so that we can put all of our air conditioning infrastructure and stuff up there. So, you know, to feed this room and to feed the tasting room.

[00:34:17]And so, we wanted to build it kind of similar to that, like pretty much. I mean, you could you could put a floor on that and walk around if it were taller.

[00:34:24]Should be able to handle the weight of all of that infrastructure. Um, so we've made progress there. And we've started rebuilding the small steel setup. We've got a little mash cooker. We've started rebuilding those and ordering the parts and things that it's going to take um so that we can start cooking whiskey as soon as we get our license. So hopefully in the next video we're actually going to have that license. So appreciate y'all watching all the way to the end of this one. Let us know what you think of the distillery updates down in the comments. We'll see y'all in the next one.

[00:35:17]Heat.

[00:35:19]Heat.