Distiller Brian Sammons is a do-it-yourself kind of guy. As founder of Twisted Path Distillery in Bay View, Sammons has taken his own twisted path to the profession and an equally unorthodox approach to his craft. When he was first starting to create the distillery, he says, “My approach was just to research how [a commercial distillery] would do any particular thing… but then for each of those things I would sort of re-evaluate and look at, ‘Okay, that’s how a normal commercial distillery does something, but why do they do it that way? Is there some good reason for that?'" He continues, “What I’ve found in this industry is that conventional wisdom is not necessarily conventional wisdom because it’s the best way to do something." One of the first examples he sites is the water heater he designed for the distillery. Sammons explains, “The conventional way to heat up water for mashing is called a hot liquor tank, it’s a big stainless steel thing… The vessel itself is very expensive, the
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