A Few Days at ADI—and a Lot of New Ideas

Sometimes the best way to figure out what's next is to get out of the distillery for a few days.

This year, Grove & Grain headed south to Miami Beach for the American Distilling Institute's annual conference—a few days surrounded by distillers, equipment makers, cooperages, farmers, suppliers, and plenty of people who understand exactly how crazy it is to build a craft distillery.

We came home with new friends, new ideas, new Florida connections...

and somehow, a barrel.

Learning From the Distilling Community

One of the best parts of attending ADI was simply being around other people in the industry.

Craft distilling involves a constant stream of decisions—equipment, ingredients, fermentation, barrels, packaging, production, sales—and there's always someone who has tried something you haven't.

We spent the conference asking questions, looking at equipment, talking shop, and probably adding considerably more ideas to our list than we crossed off.

And that's exactly what we hoped would happen.

Bringing More Florida Into the Bottle

One of the most valuable things we brought home wasn't something we could put in the truck.

Connections.

We met local Florida growers and farms that opened up new possibilities for sourcing ingredients closer to home.

That's important to us.

As Grove & Grain grows, we want the ingredients in our spirits to have just as much connection to Florida as the stories on our labels. Meeting the people actually growing those ingredients gave us some exciting ideas about what we might be able to create next.

We aren't giving all of those away just yet.

But the wheels are definitely turning.

And Then There Was the Barrel...

We also came home with a pretty great souvenir from Speyside Cooperage:

a barrel.

For a distillery that's continuing to experiment with aging and finishing spirits, that's considerably more useful than a Miami Beach T-shirt.

What eventually goes into it—and what comes back out—is a story for another day.

We Came Home Inspired

ADI was a reminder of one of our favorite things about this industry: even though every distillery is trying to create something uniquely its own, there's an incredible community behind it.

We left Miami Beach with more knowledge, new friendships, potential relationships with Florida farms and suppliers, and enough new ideas to keep us busy for quite a while.

Now it's time to bring all of that home to Brooksville and see what happens.

Old Florida, Rediscovered.

Drink Like a Floridian!