
		" I heard it through the AgLine"

January 28, 2011

· USDA will allow planting of GM alfalfa

· How green is my biobased ecolabel?

· DuPont reports 4Q earnings decline

· World food prices too low – opinion

· Designer booze: Just don’t call it moonshine

USDA will allow planting of GM alfalfa

(Reuters via AlertNet.org) KANSAS CITY/WASHINGTON – The United States said on Thursday farmers could proceed with planting genetically altered alfalfa without any of the restrictions that opponents say are crucial to protect organic and conventional farm fields from contamination.

The decision, closely watched by supporters and protesters around the world for its potential implications on biotech crop regulation, was seen as a boon to biotech crop developers and comes as research into additional biotech crops accelerates.

But opponents of biotech crops were disappointed.

The U.S. Agriculture Department had signaled last month that it might forge a first-ever compromise approval with a range of restrictions for planting, but there were no such conditions in the plan announced Thursday.

The USDA said the decision, made by its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, was made after analysis of various economic and environmental factors, and allows GMO farmers to get their crop in the ground this spring.

"After conducting a thorough and transparent examination of alfalfa ... APHIS has determined that Roundup Ready alfalfa is as safe as traditionally bred alfalfa," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said.

Alfalfa is the fourth-largest U.S. field crop grown, worth roughly $8 billion to $10 billion and grown on about 20 million acres as food for dairy cattle and other livestock.

The decision Thursday to allow planting of genetically altered version comes after years of court battles with opponents.

Developed by biotech leader Monsanto Co <MON.N> to tolerate treatments of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, "Roundup Ready" alfalfa is preferred by many farmers because it makes killing weeds easier.

But opponents, including conventional and organic farmers, say the biotech alfalfa can easily contaminate their crops because alfalfa is pollinated largely by honey bees, making it difficult to isolate GMO fields from non-GMO strains.

Organic dairy farmers who feed their cows alfalfa say the biotech crop can kill their business.

Opponents also say increased use of herbicide is translating to increased weed resistance, and the rise of "super weeds."

A consortium of opponents led by the Center for Food Safety previously won a court decision against USDA for the government's failure to thoroughly account for the environmental and economic implications of the biotech alfalfa when it approved the crop for the first time in 2005.

A federal court ordered USDA to rescind its approval until the government thoroughly evaluated the impact of the crop.

Vilsack said Thursday the government has now done so, but opponents said they will sue again.

"It is very disappointing. It appears they just capitulated to the demands of the corporations," said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, which has led litigation efforts against USDA. "They really are throwing conventional farmers under the bus."

Kimbrell said his group would immediately seek a court order vacating the government's approval.

VILSACK CITES CHOICE

While he acknowledged the concerns, Vilsack said U.S. farmers must have the "choice" to plant GMO alfalfa as well as conventional and organic varieties, and he said USDA would implement a series of measures to encourage trust between all the parties.

"I'm trying to bring people together," he said. "This set of actions, it seems to me, provides opportunities for preservation of choice in agriculture, creates a set of forms for building trusting relationships that could lead us to better policy in the future," said Vilsack.

Vilsack said USDA would promote research into how genetics might prevent contamination along with research designed to improve detection of any contamination that does occur.

He said USDA would also set up two advisory committees to try to help ensure availability of high-quality seed, as well as set up programs to try to protect the purity of alfalfa germplasm.

USDA will encourage voluntary, third-party audits and verification of "industry-led stewardship initiatives," Vilsack said.

"We welcome the Secretary's commitment to expand U.S. agriculture, to keep pace with the latest scientific developments, and to take into account the needs of all producers and all types of production," said Jim Greenwood, chief executive of the Biotechnology Industry Organization.

Opponents said the studies and advisory groups were a good step, but should be done before approval of the crop, not after.

"The USDA has also announced a series of measures to try to understand the way that GE alfalfa could contaminate other crops," said Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter. "This is the first time the agency has acknowledged these issues, and, unfortunately, these steps should have been taken before the agency decided to release this crop into the food supply, not after."

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How green is my biobased ecolabel?

(WalletPop.com via Fox News) – Coming soon to a store near you: Lip balms, cleaning supplies and other products bearing a new green stamp of approval from the federal government. The U.S. Department of Agriculture hopes its awkwardly-termed new ecolabel -- "USDA Certified Biobased Product" -- will steer you to buy these products just as "Energy Star" stickers help spur sales of energy-efficient appliances.

But don't assume the new logo means what you'd expect, starting with this fact: Guess how much of a given product must be green to qualify for this voluntary label? You probably figure nearly 100% -- but rules require a minimum of just 25%.

"Why would the USDA confuse the market by allowing a general 'biobased' claim on a product of anything less than 95% biobased material?" asked Andrew Beauchamp of Green Seal, which itself is a private certifier of green products, in his comments submitted to the USDA. He noted that the same federal agency requires organic products to contain at least 95% organic material, so this new program "will mislead consumers."

Requiring at least 51% -- as the USDA originally proposed, before some industry concerns complained -- makes sense to Benjamin Locke of Metabolix, a biotechnology company that makes plastic from plants. It would "bring credibility to the label and prevent potential 'greenwashing,'" he wrote to the USDA.

Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan says the new label, which should start appearing in stores in the spring, is "not meaningless. You have to have a 25% threshold to achieve this label, which is not insignificant."

That's just one of many consumer surprises posed by the new label. Check it out:

An ordinary paper plate made almost totally from trees can't bear the "biobased" logo, but a disposable plate made of 25% corn-derived plastic would qualify, as Greenwire points out in this good story laying out the issue. "Not only is this unfair, but it is arbitary and capricious," wrote John Wissmann, of Lincoln Paper and Tissue, to the USDA, echoing the sentiment of the American Forest & Paper Association's Paul Noe.

You might think the main point of the new ecolabel is to make it easier for consumers to recognize which products are mostly made of biological materials -- but no. The USDA says the goal is to encourage increased use of newer agricultural products, such as plastic made from corn or towels made from eucalyptus fibers.

To the USDA, expanding agricultural markets is part of its reason for being. So the new label can't be slapped on paper plates or wood furniture or other products that already significantly penetrated the national market back in the specified year of 1972.

This makes little sense to Laura A. Rowell, director of sustainable packaging for MeadWestvaco, who wrote to the USDA that a consumer looking at an older product "will have no idea why it is not (or cannot be) USDA certified as biobased."

Keep in mind as well:

Just because a lip balm or household cleaner is "biobased" doesn't mean it's eco-friendly, argues Rita Schenck, secretary of the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment.

The new label doesn't follow international consensus standards on ecolabels, she says. That's because it doesn't take into consideration a particular product's impact on the environment from its creation to its grave, eventually, in a landfill or waste incinerator. Even Walmart recently announced plans to require such life-cycle assessments from its vendors, with the intent to provide a label for everything it sells, Schenck points out.

The forerunner of the new logo is the USDA's in-house federal purchasing program, which for a decade has encouraged government buying of products with significant biological content. They were known as "BioPreferred," and were required to have a life-cycle assessment. With the new label, that requirement is going by the wayside.

Schenck is troubled. She notes the biggest source of environmental impact on Earth is agriculture: Nearly 40% of land globally is devoted to agriculture, including crops, range and pastureland, while 30% is forested. Every year, more forest is cut to create farmland.

"If we use agricultural land to make stuff like oil or biofuels, that means we don't have enough land for food, so we cut down forests to grow more food," Schenck says. She fears the new label to some extent will help create demand to cut forests for agriculture.

In announcing the new label on Jan. 19, Merrigan said: "Today's consumers are increasingly interested in making educated purchasing choices for their families. This label will make those decisions easier by identifying products as biobased. These products have enormous potential to create green jobs in rural communities, add value to agricultural commodities, decrease environmental impacts, and reduce our dependence on imported oil." (Find more info and a database of BioPreferred products here.)

On the bright side, all labels are supposed to state the percentage of the product's biological content. And manufacturers are to submit proof that their products contain biological ingredients. So you'll be able to gauge if it meets your personal green standards.

Just don't mistake the new logo to mean your lip balm is "sustainable."

"If you're really serious about labeling for sustainability, you have to advocate for changes to the one label that matters most: the price tag," Clark Williams-Derry, a statistics guru at Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit sustainability think tank, told me.

"When we actually charge companies for the pollution they create, and for the environmental problems they cause, or for the full cost of the non-renewable resources they consume, those costs get incorporated into the price of what they sell -- and unsustainable products become more expensive than sustainable.

"Making the price tag tell the environmental truth is the best way to ensure that consumers pay attention to the impact of their purchases." Without that, "even the most environmentally conscious consumers can be lead astray by misreading labels."

In the end, I agree with James Dong of Berkeley, Calif., who wrote to the USDA about its new label: "I appreciate the effort ... but another eco term? No wonder green fatigue is becoming a problem." This creates "yet another ambiguous and vaguely defined" label.

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DuPont reports 4Q earnings decline

(AP via Yahoo! News) – DOVER, Del. – DuPont Co. on Tuesday reported a decline in fourth-quarter earnings as increased sales were offset by higher costs and the loss of pharmaceutical business from patent expirations.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., based in Wilmington, Del., reported net income of $376 million, or 40 cents per share, for the quarter, down from $441 million, or 48 cents per share, a year earlier.

Earnings excluding significant items totaled $463 million, or 50 cents per share, in the quarter, compared to $402 million, or 44 cents a share, in the fourth quarter of 2009.

The results beat analysts' consensus earnings estimate of 31 cents per share, according to FactSet.

DuPont shares closed Tuesday up 15 cents at $49.04.

The company boosted its full-year 2011 earnings guidance to a range of $3.45 to $3.75 per share, up from previous guidance of $3.30 to $3.60 per share. The company said the change reflects a lower base tax rate and reduced pension obligations, as well as continued global economic growth and industrial production.

"2011 will be the year of building on our momentum," Chairwoman and CEO Ellen Kullman told analysts, adding that the fourth quarter was a strong finish to a good year for the company.

Full year earnings totaled $3.05 billion, or $3.28 per share, up from $1.77 billion, or $1.92 per share, in 2009, as consolidated sales grew 20 percent, to $32.7 billion. Excluding significant items, full-year earnings increased 62 percent to $3.28 per share.

A recovery in the global automotive industry helped boost results for DuPont, whose products are used in a variety of automobile applications, including paint and plastics.

"We were prepared when auto builds recovered more than twice as fast as expected last year," Kullman said.

Sales for the quarter increased 14 percent to $7.74 billion, reflecting a 12 percent increase in volume and 6 percent pricing gains. Sales grew 26 percent in the Asia-Pacific region and 18 percent in Latin America, with U.S. sales up 15 percent.

DuPont's electronics and communications unit led the performance with a 33 increase in sales, including a 24 percent volume gain. The unit saw sales increase 44 percent for the year, as the company reported strong demand in most market segments, especially in photovoltaics, which accounted for sales of $1.1 billion in 2010, more than double the previous year.

Performance chemicals sales were up 26 percent on 13 percent higher volumes and 14 percent higher prices, reflecting better pricing for titanium dioxide, a whitening pigment used in products ranging from automotive and house paint to toothpaste.

"I think strength in automotive was a big part of the story for 2010," said Edward Jones analyst Jeff Windau.

Windau maintained his "hold" rating on DuPont, saying the company has done well emerging from the recession but still faces higher raw material costs, and stronger competition from rival Monsanto in its agriculture seed business.

"DuPont's done a great job of gaining market share, but that does prompt your competitors to get a little more aggressive," he said.

Chief Financial Officer Nick Fanandakis said raw material costs were up 6 percent last year compared to 2009, and that the company expects cost increases this year.

"We expect to see continued pressure on raw materials, energy and freight costs," he said.

Meanwhile, the company continues to try to re-energize its performance coatings unit, which produces automobile refinishing products, industrial coatings and commercial vehicle finishes. The unit continues to struggle, posting a sales gain of only 3 percent in the fourth quarter. But DuPont officials said they expect continued strengthening in the heavy duty truck markets in North America and Europe, and growth in global automotive markets as well.

"We believe this is a segment that can be a strong cash contributor to the company," Kullman said of performance coatings unit, which has a new management team in place.

DuPont saw pretax pharmaceutical income decline by $160 million in the quarter to $87 million, as it continued to feel the effects of April 2010 patent expirations for the blood pressure drugs Cozaar and Hyzaar, which previously had contributed millions of dollars in royalty payments and profit sharing to the company.

Fanandakis said the company expects pharmaceutical revenue of about $200 million this year, about $290 million less than last year.

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World food prices too low – opinion

(The Globe and Mail) – It is in the cities that the 2011 food crisis hits hardest. The revolution in Tunis began as a food riot. In recent weeks, markets in Algiers and Cairo have erupted, and malnutrition has reached 17 per cent in Agadez, the largest city in the Sahel. Reports from the UN and the World Bank put the blame on overpopulation and climate.

Last year’s La Niña blighted harvests in Canada, Russia and Ukraine, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture warns that an overcrowded earth is “putting unsustainable pressure on resources.” But in 2009, when the weather was good, things were not that much better. Prices get high-level attention in the odd years when they are high, not in the typical years when they are typically abysmal.

The year 2002 – the index year against which the current disaster is measured – was the bottom of a steep 50-year decline in prices. Food was cheaper by half than it is now, and there was no world crisis, only local misery. Bankrupted peasants abandoned Chinese villages for urban slums. Twenty thousand Punjabi farmers committed suicide. Sugar workers clashed with police in Mexico, and Nebraska farmers took jobs at Wal-Mart to stave off foreclosure.

Pinpointing high grain prices as a threat to recovery, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and World Bank President Robert Zoellick have urged stockpiles and “weather insurance or a rainfall index” as practical steps for dealing with nature’s limitations.

There may be another problem too, but it is hardly surprising that world leaders should overlook it. Since the 1950s, chronic underinvestment in agriculture has been considered a normal feature of a healthy, growing economy. A successful farm policy is one that delivers cheap food to urban consumers, whatever the cost at the producing end.

In the 1930s, German and Soviet planners first began to speak of an “agricultural sector,” a subordinate economy-within-the-economy whose profits could be diverted, by force if necessary, into industrial expansion. Émigré economists brought the concept to Washington, but Franklin Roosevelt initially went a different way.

New Dealers lifted food prices by creating artificial scarcities. In three years farm earnings rose to “parity” with 1916, the best year on record, and there they stayed. When the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the Agricultural Adjustment Act, policy shifted toward subsidies that held farm income steady while filling grocery shelves with low-cost staples. By the end of the 1930s, according to Rebecca West, all countries – communist, fascist, and capitalist – had accepted “the insane dispensation which pays the food-producer worst of all workers.”

Dual-economy theory soon entered the canon of development policy. Nobel economist W. Arthur Lewis realized in 1952 that the function of the rural sector was as a “reservoir of cheap labour” for the urban sector. Development models were built around the “zero value” doctrine, which held that non-industrial production had no measurable worth until liberated for use in manufacturing.

Newly independent regimes saw the potential. India’s five-year plans defined agriculture as “a bargain sector, which can produce the requisite surplus with relatively low investment and in a comparatively short time.” Taxes, price controls, duties and currency policies were subtly or overtly designed to siphon “waste” profits from rural producers. Enterprise was punished by anti-profiteering laws applied solely to the farm sector. Cheap food meant cheap labour, which gave emerging Asia its competitive edge. The Kennedy administration helped, depressing prices still further by flooding Asian markets with surplus wheat.

By 1965, India’s farmers had given up, and the country depended on an unsustainable 11 million tons of American grain. Policy had to change, and it did. The Green Revolution was hailed as the salvation of millions from drought and overpopulation, but it actually rescued Asia from its catastrophic disinvestment in agriculture. Dwarf wheat, Norman Borlaug explained, was only a “catalyst” for policies that returned resources to the countryside, especially price supports that gave peasants a rare chance to make a decent living.

Governments took the lesson and food production rose dramatically, but the 1980s debt crisis forced African and Latin American countries again to squeeze their rural sectors for cash. A neo-liberal consensus dismantled the remaining credit and subsidy programs, and when food prices spiked in the 1990s, experts discussed climate and overpopulation.

Agriculture is a transparent, responsive sector, and temporary profits led quickly to a production boom and the market collapse of 2002. The cycles have become sharper. The 2008 spike was followed by a 50 per cent plunge in soy prices and then this year’s surge.

The price of onions in India is up 80 per cent; South Korea and the Philippines face shortages of fish and powdered milk, and countries around the world are reaching for the standby solutions, cracking down on hoarders and adjusting quotas and duties to force down local food prices.

This month the World Economic Forum, in an uneasy forecast, questioned whether farmers could meet the twin challenges of demography and climate. If history is any guide, they can, as they have in the past, but not unless they get paid. A recent poll shows half of India’s farmers want to quit. Many who till high-risk lands on which the expansion of the food supply depends have already given up and left the losing sector to seek a place in the winning one. There, like the mobs in Tunis, they can demand food, instead of having to grow it.

A lasting fix will require more than an adjustment to allow cultivators to survive. It will require unlearning a half century of dogma that relegates agriculture to a subordinate status. The global economy includes the global countryside, and the return of prosperity will have to begin there.

Nick Cullather is the author of The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia, a finalist for this year’s Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on global affairs

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Designer booze: Just don’t call it moonshine

(The New York Times) – IN an aluminum shed among postcard orchards in Columbia County in New York, Derek Grout inspected a collecting tank of his state-of-the-art copper-pot still. A blocked vent had caused the tank to buckle. “I’m just kind of glad we didn’t kill ourselves,” he said with a laugh. “Got to bang that out.”

He has been working with it for only two years, but the products his Harvest Spirits distillery sells are accomplished. From the fruit of orchards that his grandfather bought from a descendant of Martin Van Buren, he has made one of the first serious new applejacks in decades, a beautifully soft pear brandy and what he calls a “silly labor of love,” a himbeergeist — apple vodka laced with his own wild black raspberries.

Mr. Grout left his family’s farm for Cornell and spent eight years as a graphic designer in Boston. His return runs a similar arc to that of many Northeast distillers. “This is my way to maximize my family’s agricultural heritage,” he said. “From the farmer’s perspective, the only way to increase the value of an apple is to make it into spirit and put that in oak.”

Stills once thrived in the Northeast, with rum in colonial Massachusetts, applejack that made Jersey Lightning an everyday term and Monongahela ryes from Pennsylvania and Delaware that were a staple before bourbon existed. Now distilling is proliferating again, not just with farmers like Mr. Grout adding value to their crops, but with disgruntled professionals abandoning desk duty to make gin and whiskey, craft brewers and small winemakers branching out into spirits, and young urbanites setting up stills the way their peers have set up apiaries and charcuteries.

After Prohibition, laws made production feasible for only a few huge distilleries. A craft distilling movement began on the West Coast about 20 years ago, but restrictive state regulations kept it from spreading. In the last few years, though, as states sought new forms of revenue, they cut astronomic licensing fees and gave incentives to producers who got the bulk of their raw materials in-state, as with New York State’s Farm Distillery Law in 2007.

Frank Coleman, senior vice president of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a trade group, said the number of distilleries nationwide has grown to 220, from 24 in 2001, and is expanding.

Like Mr. Grout, virtually all craft distillers use small pot stills rather than the huge column stills used by the industry giants. Though more labor-intensive, these more faithfully capture the essence of fruit and grain, and let a distiller precisely select what part of the distilling run to use to create the most nuanced styles and flavors.

“These smaller products are necessarily more expensive, and they may lack some refinement,” said Chris Gerling, an associate of enology at the Cornell Extension in Geneva, N.Y., who runs its increasingly popular introductory seminars on distilling. “But people get that they’re all handmade, local, often organic. That’s the tradeoff. They can show some rough edges and be more appealing for it.”

Being small also confers one inestimable advantage: freedom.

“We have the ability to diversify wildly,” said Chris Weld, whose Berkshire Mountain Distillers, near Great Barrington, Mass., puts out eight different spirits. “We can make a fruit brandy one day and a whiskey the next.”

“For us, all the fun is in playing with the ingredients, getting to tweak the formula for a gin,” Mr. Weld added. “Conversely, that also becomes a necessity for us to differentiate ourselves.”

Mr. Weld, 45, spent 17 hectic years as an emergency room physician’s assistant in Oakland, Calif., before returning East, where he grew up crushing apples that his father grew in Westchester County.

Given the 80-hour weeks he puts in, the hospital might look like a sinecure.

His still is unlovely, a secondhand cousin of the African Queen he bought online and drove up from Kentucky. But its output is a thing of beauty. He makes a molasses-based rum, a number of fruit brandies from his own orchards and two gins, one of which, Ethereal, changes formula every six months. For his aged corn whiskies he puts spirit he distills from local white corn into oak and cherry barrels that he has cut, milled and charred on the farm.

On the more lavish side of the craft, Brian McKenzie, 33, has built the Finger Lakes Region’s first stand-alone distillery, Finger Lakes Distilling, in Burdett, N.Y., which juts like a sleek white liner among 100-year-old vineyards on a hillside above Seneca Lake. Mr. McKenzie spent years in finance in Washington before coming home to help at his father’s small savings and loan in Elmira, N.Y. After trips to Scotland and Kentucky, he was bitten by the concept of introducing distilling to a region where hundreds of local wineries have created a solid base of alco-tourism.

His distillery is striking, housing a well-appointed tasting room and a custom-built 300-gallon German-made Holstein pot still, which vaults through the space like a burnished copper rocket. But his masterstroke was hiring Thomas Earl McKenzie, 34 (no relation), an experienced Alabaman stillman whose sly drawl is as surprising in these parts as is the accomplished breadth of his handiwork.

They have an astonishing 18 products, from fruit brandies and liqueurs to aged whiskies and musky grappa made from local grapes like gewürztraminer, muscat and Catawba. Their Seneca Drums is one of the better new London dry-style gins, but their double-distilled bourbon and rye are where Mr. McKenzie’s Southern pedigree shows up. The peppery rye is from fields one can see across the lake and aged in casks that held local fortified wine.

“See what you all think,” the stillman offered with breezy confidence. “I ain’t feeling too poetic today.”

In a more urban frame, Brooklyn now boasts two small distillers, with at least two more on the verge of being licensed.

It takes a rather squinty legal interpretation to see that Brad Estabrooke’s Breuckelen Distilling Company could hold a farm distillery license on a dicey commercial alley under the Gowanus Expressway. His roots in the business are long and extend far beyond the city; growing up in Maine, Mr. Estabrooke, 31, won the sixth grade science fair for distilling (water).

His route to his current profession also ran through finance. He was laid off in the downturn as a bond trader. Now, in an airy white industrial space that formerly housed a boiler to heat the block, he makes one product, gin. The process begins with his hauling sacks of winter wheat and ends with his delivering bottles to customers.

“It just never occurred to me to do it any other way than from scratch,” Mr. Estabrooke explained guilelessly. Most gins begin their life as rectified neutral grain spirit alcohol — or N.G.S. — bought in bulk. To watch the reed-thin Mr. Estabrooke and his young assistant, Gino Di Stefano, a Cobble Hill local, hauling pails of grain from a mill up a ladder to a small fermentation tank churned by a hand drill-powered concrete mixer, is to marvel at the blind audacity of the underdog.

“Bringing in N.G.S. and doctoring that and then calling yourself a craft distiller,” he said, “what’s that about?”

His gin is also an audacious animal, odd and thrilling. He infuses single-distilled spirit — a white whiskey — with botanicals, then redistills and blends those for a fuller-bodied, malty version of a gin, like a Dutch genever.

Small and plucky seems to define the borough’s distillers so far. One cannot help but root for two guys not too far from Breuckelen who met in an a cappella group at Yale, and now make moonshine in five tiny 8-gallon mail-order stills that look like stylized vacuum cleaners set on hotplates.

Working in a rented office in deepest Williamsburg, Colin Spoelman and David Haskell, both 31, of Kings County Distilling Company are the embodiment of flying-by-the-seat distilling. Shrugging off foibles — like subpar corn that led them to seek an organic grain from the Finger Lakes — they are content to gain their expertise as they go.

They both have day jobs, Mr. Haskell as an editor at New York magazine and Mr. Spoelman in an architecture firm. They distill at night and on weekends, with a staff of eager helpers and volunteers including local bartenders.

“It’s nothing like profitable at present,” Mr. Spoelman chuckled, adding hopes that that may change over time. They produce corn whiskey, flouting the traditional method of jump-starting cash flow by producing vodka or gin and then working up to aged whiskey, which ties up money and product in barrels for years. Until recently you could only have it as unaged moonshine in a glass pocket flask with a willfully plain, typed label. But the ironic wink comes to a halt with the whiskey, which is serious: vibrant with the evanescent slap of corn.

More impressive still are their fledgling releases of lightly barrel-aged whiskey, with the dill-like, almost piney tang of new American oak embracing the grain, rather than masking it. They sell only by hand to a very few accounts, mostly in Brooklyn, but have just opened a tasting and selling counter next door to their still room that they open “on selected weekends,” Mr. Spoelman said, “or whenever we can.”

Not making it easy to get, in certain circles, is the best marketing plan of all.

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