Distiller's Log: How We Distill Different

Location: Connecticut Distilling, Waterbury, CT 

The air is thick with vapor and oak. You can smell it before you even open the door. Steel hisses, pumps kick, and there’s always the low hum of something working harder than it should.

We’re running both stills today — one stripping, one finishing — and pushing every corner of this 7,000-square-foot space to the limit. Every tank, every tote, every inch of hose has been re-used, re-rigged, and re-thought a hundred times. And yet, somehow, the spirits keep getting better.

Most distilleries start with grain. They order it by the pallet, mill it down, mash it out.  We start with liquid — finished beer, to be exact. We’ve built real relationships with local breweries and repurpose their beers into our base material.

Charred, for instance, is distilled straight from rich, unfiltered malt-forward craft beer. And when you do that right, the final product carries over every ounce of flavor those brewers worked so hard to coax out.

The flavor? Unmistakable. You can't fake that kind of depth. The process isnt efficient, nor is it easy. But it’s what makes our spirits unique.

Right now, we’ve got a top-secret gin in development that’s got the whole team buzzing. It has a name — but we’re not saying it yet.

The base? It’s not your typical neutral grain spirit. We’re distilling it from real IPAs — hoppy, bitter, complex beer sourced from our local brewery partners. That decision changed everything. It gave the gin a backbone. A depth. Layers you don’t usually get in clear spirits. It’s earthy, resinous, and citrus-laced before we even add a single botanical.

And once we do — that’s where it gets dangerous.

It’s bright and wild on the nose, with bursts of citrus peel, pine, cracked pepper, and something herbaceous that none of us have been able to pin down — which we kind of love. There’s this raw, almost mischievous energy to it. It doesn’t behave like other gins, and it definitely doesn’t taste like anything else on the planet.

We're blending science with instinct. We taste constantly. Adjust constantly. This isn’t a factory. It’s an ongoing experiment. A controlled chaos.

– Connecticut Distilling