THE PROCESS

Getting alcohol from A to B is what distilling is all about.  Every distillery, regardless of size, location, or history, starts at A and ends at B.  There are no shortcuts the path is the same of the distillery.  What separates distilleries is what they do between A and B.  What is different for Tuition is our equipment.  We designed and built our equipment to be to be unique to our distillery, from our Marble Plate Column for making vodka to our Triple Tier Inline Thumper column for whiskey, each piece is unique to TDC.   

TDC is an all grain distillery.  We start with grains grown in NY’s Finger Lakes Region.  Our grains are cooked with steam injection and converted to a sugar rich mash.  Using select yeast strains we start the fermentation process. 

– Yeast is the true workhorse of the distillery and it is the only member of the team that actually makes alcohol!  

Our yeast eats the sugars in the mash producing alcohol.  When our yeast is finished we have “Distiller’s Beer” with an alcohol content around 9%.  Using steam injection the beer is heated and distillation begins, the alcohol vapors are condensed and “low wine” spirits (30-40% alcohol) are collected.  We distill the low wines again creating the final spirit, whiskey is collected between 55-80% alcohol and vodka is distilled at 95%.  These “high wines” are diluted with reverse osmosis water to the desired bottling, or barreling, strength.   By the time our spirits are bottled we have tended to every aspect of their creation by hand.