Home Is Where We Park It: Suwannee River State Park
Date: April 30, 2019
Back To St. Augustine: St. Augustine Distillery
Today was just another one of those wonderful days that makes you glad to be alive. Picture perfect in every way, moderate temperatures again, clear blue skies, not a hint of rain in the forecast. What more could one ask for.
Not much on the agenda today. We had some wash to do. Since we were moving in a couple of days tire pressure needed to be checked, and the windshield washed. I had already scrubbed the front of Graybeard which by the time we arrived here was covered with dead bugs of all kinds.
Lets go back to St. Augustine, specifically to the St. Augustine Distillery. Wave Hi to Barbara.
The distillery began as a dream with a small group of individuals. They wanted to bring the national movement of distilling super premium, small batch spirits to their community. And they wanted to do it better than anyone in the world. They knew that if they could bring some of the world’s best distilling experts to St. Augustine with access to locally grown sugar cane, wheat, corn, and citrus, they could develop a finer quality spirit than just about any other place in the world. That original small group shared their dream with others and found 28 brave, beautiful local people who signed on to help bring the dream to reality.
But where to house the distillery? There was one building that had everything needed: The Historic FP&L Ice Plant. Built as part of St. Augustine’s first power and ice complex in
1907 it has been lovingly restored and brought back into service so she can serve the community for the next century. The Ice Plant is the first of it’s kind to make commercial block ice in Florida over 100 years ago. Want to take a guess who had it built? Henry Flagler who wanted ice to cool the drinks of his wealthy guests.
Today tours of the Distillery are offered on a daily basis. Oh yes, tastings too!
This is Tim the guide for our tour. He was an absolute blast mixing humor with facts which made for a fantastic tour. His opening line, A tour guide in a distillery, this is the result of my being raised in a Catholic school.
After about 15 minutes of history we moved into the actual distilling room.
I always wondered how they cleaned the inside of the large tanks. Take a close look, notice the guy dropping down inside of the one.
We then moved into the tasting room. The featured drinks of the day were listed on the blackboard.
Time to belly up to the bar. That’s Tim mixing up one of the three drinks we sampled. Of the three we both agreed that the first two were our favorites, but the third you could keep.
From here we moved to the next tasting room, yes, there was another. Time now to taste a real Old Fashioned. Ann was in charge here.
Here she is mixing up a pitcher of Old Fashioned for all. It went down real smooth.
At the end of the tour, as with all of them, you end up in the gift shop.
The prices were a bit too high for us.
I’ll end with this. Some wise words to live by and grow a business.
This ends our tour of The Distillery. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Sorry you couldn’t have a taste.
Our day on The Road of Retirement has come to an end. We hope your day was as good as ours. We made the most of it and enjoyed every minute that the good Lord gave us. Thanks again for coming along with us. Join us again tomorrow as we continue to travel along.
These are the voyages of Graybeard and it’s occupants, four paws and two humans. Our continuing mission: to explore as many new states as possible, to seek out new acquaintances and make new friends, to boldly go where we have not been before
See you on down the road
"On The Road of Retirement" 
Very interesting. Now, was Barbara holding up the post or was the post holding up Barbara?
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