If you head over the 75 Canal Street in Salem, Massachusetts, you’ll find a car transmission place and a day care center. Not very exciting stuff, I’ll admit. However, if you pop your head around the Gardner Street corner, you’ll find that the building also houses the upcoming Deacon Giles Distillery.
I got the opportunity to check out the distillery as construction is still being finished. Simply put, I think wonderful things are in store for its future.
One of the walls of the tasting room features an illustration from The Dream, or, The True History of Deacon Giles’ Distillery and Deacon Jones’ Brewery: Reported for the Benefit of Posterity, which is the inspiration for the distillery name.
And the tasting room is very cozy! Co-founders Ian and Jesse have worked really hard on it. It features a lot of gorgeous salvaged wood.
If you look very hard, you can see that we got to taste samples of the gin which had been made in a small tester batch. The still hasn’t made its way to Salem yet (but it’s en route!) so mass production is on hold. I don’t even drink, and I have to say that it was a pretty fantastic gin. I can also tell you that the other product is rum, and it’ll be made with molasses. 100% molasses. No cane sugar.
The distillery hopes to open in October, and I hope so too! Ian and Jesse are a couple of really nice guys with a dream and a whole lot of determination. I plan to have a follow post when everything is open to the public.
While we were in Salem, we had lunch at Naumkeag on Ian’s recommendation. My table had the bacon jam burger while I had the smoked chicken BLT sandwich. The chicken was very smokey at all, but I forgave it since it was still delicious (and a very generous serving of food). The bacon jam burger had raving reviews. Apparently part of the delight was that the jam had been served under the melted cheese. The cheese kept the jam from squishing out.
Also, the people working there were super nice. (We felt so bad for them! The ceiling was leaking water badly near our table while we were there. No fault of the restaurant, but they kept apologizing for it.)
If you’re ever in Salem and hankering for a good meal, head to Naumkeag. (Rumor has it that they’ll be carrying Deacon Giles gin and rum at the bar in the near future.)
Reference Links:
https://www.facebook.com/deacongiles (Note – you will need to be logged into FB to see the page. Also, most of the updates are here.)
Awesomesauce Eats 