The Birthday Gift That Made Us a Distillery

Some birthdays come with cake.

This one came with a DSP.

After all the planning, paperwork, equipment, recipes, waiting, and dreaming, this was the day Grove & Grain received our Distilled Spirits Plant permit and officially became a federally permitted distillery.

And somehow, it happened on my birthday.

I'd say that's a pretty hard gift to top.

From an Idea to a Real Distillery

Up until this moment, Grove & Grain was something we were building toward.

We had equipment. We had plans. We had a name. We had spent countless hours figuring out what we wanted this distillery to become.

But distilling spirits commercially in the United States requires approval from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) to operate as a Distilled Spirits Plant—or DSP.

Getting that approval was one of those milestones we'd been waiting a long time to reach.

And there it finally was.

Grove & Grain was officially a distillery.

One Birthday We'll Remember

There are plenty of dates we'll probably forget as the years go by.

This won't be one of them.

Not only did receiving our DSP mark the official beginning of Grove & Grain as a distillery, but the approval arriving on my birthday gave us one more reason to remember exactly when this crazy idea became something very real.

The photo isn't glamorous.

There's no beautiful bottle shot, finished tasting room, or polished copper still in the background.

It's just me standing outside an office, holding a piece of paper and grinning.

But that piece of paper represented years of work—and everything that could finally come next.

Looking back now at how much has happened since that day, it's pretty incredible to remember that there was once a moment when all we wanted was permission to begin.

We got it.

And we got to work.

Old Florida, Rediscovered.

Drink Like a Floridian!