Corsair Artisan Distillery

WKYU, the local PBS affiliate spent many hours in July filming the inner workings of Corsair.  Here is the 6 minute video they produced, which will be featured on the program Mainstreet

Corsair means ‘gentleman pirate.’ Corsair is sometimes used to mean pirate or a type of pirate ship. They were essentially privateers, licensed pirates by their home country to do acts of piracy as long as they were against rival countries.

Micro distilleries are, as the name suggests, small scale. Our facility is 2600 square feet, gift shop included. We chose to set up at the historic town square in Bowling Green, Kentucky so we’re easy to visit and so that, once you visit us, you can do more things in the immediate area. Downtown Bowling Green has wonderful restaurants, shops, galleries, theater, parks that host many events, and Bowling Green’s new minor league baseball stadium.

We use two copper pot stills in production, our 50 gallon hybrid pot still and our 240 gallon antique still.

Our 240 gallon still is a circa 1920 classic pot still that survived prohibition. Originally a gin still, we use it for the first or “wash” pass when making whiskey. The unfinished whiskey spirit resulting from the first distillation, called low wines, is finished in our 50 gallon still.

In addition to being our spirit still for whiskey, where we do a second distillation on the low wines and cut the heart of the distillate as clear whiskey (“white dog”), our 50 gallon still makes most of our other distilled spirits. Four plates in the still’s column, each of which can be disabled, give us the flexibility to distill various spirits. We disable this column and shunt spirit vapors to still’s vapor basket to make our gin-head style gin. Extracting the flavors of gin’s botanicals via vapor, rather than soaking the juniper and other herbs in liquid alcohol, yields less bitterness and, we think, a brighter, fresher gin.

Craft Distilling: An emerging movement, craft distilleries are small scale operations similar to a microbrewery. Also called micro-distilleries, these hands-on operations make spirits in small batches, often producing less in a year than larger distilleries bottle in an hour. The large continuous stills used by major producers are eschewed for hand-operated pot stills. Pot stills require more labor but allow the craft distiller fine control over flavors and give broad room for experimentation. This allows craft distillers to focus on local ingredients and unusual techniques to make small volume batches of high-quality spirits.