Malt Kiln Destroyed by Fire

Through this blog, we've shared a lot of the exciting milestones in our quest to start Finger Lakes Distilling over the past year or so. As with any business, we've also had our rough spots and this weekend marked one of those moments.

Many of you may have noticed the small black and white structure on our property when driving down Rte 414. This 4 x 8 building was our malt kiln that we designed and built ourselves last summer. The kiln was used to dry and smoke grains that we were malting by hand in the distillery. We were very proud of our efforts, as it was one-of-a-kind, and up until this weekend was doing a fine job.

We're not sure exactly what happened, but on Sunday we learned that the kiln had gone up in flames. Thanks to the Burdett Fire Dept for dealing with this unfortunate circumstance and not allowing it to create any further damage.

We are committed to continuing our malting operation. We have done a fair amount of malting for our whiskies and have had luck with grinding the malt green, or without drying. We are also planning to rebuild the kiln sometime in the near future.

The pictures below show the remains of the malt kiln and what it looked like upon completion last fall.