Mohawk Spirits Distillery is located in the heart of the scenic Mohawk Valley of upstate New York. They source their fruit and spring water from New York. MSD is a private business and does not offer tours at this time. All of our distilling operations occur in glass under vacuum, and our largest pot is 200 liters.
The distillery is built upon the purported foundation of the first black A.M.E. church in Canajoharie. In 1857, five African American men, representing African Americans who had been meeting for some time in a local church assembled to incorporate the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church at our site. Rev. Richard Eastup, a freedom seeker himself, was appointed to oversee the Canajoharie mission church in 1862.
Although no church minutes or congregational records have been found, the indigenous period limestone block for our building, quarried from the Shaper Quarry in Canajoharie, dates to this period. The same limestone from the same quarry was used to construct the Brooklyn Bridge.
They use clean and genuine pieces of Canajoharie limestone from the historic Shaper Quarry as the boiling stone in each of their pots to provide nucleation.
All distillation occurs in glass. Although most distillers use copper metal to remove organosulfur compounds, simply incorporating copper metal and certain special metals into the process is also effective.
The conventional wisdom is that small pots are not profitable to operate. The MSD advantage is that there is no warmup time for the wash. Once the vacuum is pulled, boiling begins immediately. They operate in semi-batch mode, so that each pot is distilled and refilled quickly, as opposed to hours of heating and cooling in conventional pots.
