Woodstone Creek Winery & Distillery

09/11/2026

Pawpaw - America's Forgotten Tropical Fruit:

The latest incarnation of our paw paw melomel is ready for next Saturday. I tried Don's mini-cocktail last night. It's delicious!

Paw Paw is Ohio's state fruit, if you didn't know. A hint of pineapple drifting through the woods of the Midwest. Maybe you’ve heard about the wonderful pawpaw tree? Asimina triloba is our native North American pawpaw, with a range that extends from Michigan down to Alabama, and from Kansas City to the Chesapeake Bay. This understory tree commonly grows in wooded areas, along rivers and streams. It bears oblong-shaped, green fruits that are three to six inches long and the yellow-orange pulp has a marvelous tropical flavor, much like a banana, mango, or pineapple.

Fruit ripens for a long season, from mid-August to October, depending on the cultivar. Born singly or in clusters of up to 8 fruit, pawpaws are soft to the touch when ripe. If picked before they are soft, fruit will not ripen off the tree. Sometimes one fruit in the cluster is ripe when the others still need a bit longer to ripen, so pick carefully and test each fruit individually. Fruit also bruises easily. Pawpaws do not have a long shelf life when stored at room temperature - they will last 2-3 days on the counter, but if refrigerated, they can last more than two weeks.

The idiosyncrasies of this luscious fruit impede commercial success. In order to get enough for processing into w**e, fruits are picked individually, skinned, de-seeded, pureed and frozen. Fruit is added until the buckets are full. It takes a while.

Come try some.

08/11/2026

Sunday Shop Spot: Get to Know Woodstone Creek by Fred Minnick

With the craft wh***ey explosion, people talked about about Hudson, Balcones, Garrison Brothers, St. George, and many others, and rightly so, but they rarely discussed a small husband-and-wife operation in the Cincinnati area--Woodstone Creek.

Woodstone Creek is one of the best U.S. pot still wh***ey distilleries, but distiller Don Outterson and his fire heated 238-gallon pot still were ahead of their time.

Founded in the 1990s, Woodstone Creek is one of the few small distillers with wh***eys 8 years old and older. Don was distilling five grain mashbill bourbons long before it was cool, and today, they're available in their store at 10 years old. His distilling methods place grain on the pedestal, and you'll certainly taste the malt, which most bourbon distillers dismiss as a flavoring grain, offering rarely found grain-centric nuance. So, if you're looking for something that's certainly not in Kentucky's style and fun to try, I recommend getting on the Woodstone Creek train. (They make great mead and w**es, too.)

Woodstone Microspirit, 94 proof
5 grains, single barrel
Color: Deep amber
Nose: Floral, fruity, roasted almonds and hints of roasted corn and fresh-baked bread.
Palate: The taste is nuanced with beautiful notes of the grains, malty and roasted corn, meeting a sweet tones of caramel and vanilla with hints of fruit and red pepper. This is a great change-of-pace bourbon, delivering the complexities in its grains.
Finish: Extremely long with a pepper spice.

07/11/2026

https://www.localw**eevents.com/view/event/saturday-sips---herbs-and-honey-alchemy/1044968

Try our herbal infusions - Sage Gin or Rosemary Vodka. Honey liqueurs include Honey Bourbon or Gin with real Amish honey, herbal meads.Regular tastings available. Choose your own flight from our menu of

06/11/2026

Question from a reader:

They wanted to know what prompted the reformulation of our Paw Paw Melomel. Was it spoiled?

Answer: No, spoiled w**e is not salvageable. We can't even distill it. As I've mentioned in the past, w**e is not immortal. But, different fruits, when fermented with honey, change over time - even in the bottle. I'd compare it to a brown apple. You can eat it but you won't like it. The first bottling of Paw Paw sold quickly. Don took that to mean he should make a much larger batch the second time around. But, it dropped off the radar and, now, no one's even asking to taste it. Sometimes, I can move things around on the menu. Didn't work with the Paw Paw.

When fiddling with the menu doesn't work, we consider alterations. So, we carbonated it and sold a few in the beginning. But, again, customers stopped paying attention. Another thing to try is adding it to a regular tasting to encourage attention. Even so, customers are more inclined to buy what they already came for . . . we can't run the same special for months at a time unless we go down in price. We're already as low as we can go.

This change is yet another try to boost sales. The very last thing we could do is to distill it for fortification or make it into a brandy. That greatly decreased the volume, but it doesn't make any money. In fact, it would put us in the hole because it would cost more to make it and we'd be gambling that people would pay more.

The reformulation is aimed at creating an entirely new product. We're going to include it on our mini-cocktail list. If you like it, we'll tell you how to make it at home!
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Join us tomorrow for Herbs and Honey. 2-5, no reservations, free parking.

05/11/2026

Who says you can't teach an old dog?

One of our customers gifted me with a bottle of bitters. This customer is all into subtle differences in flavors. He's had everything on the menu. We're part of his own product research, I think.

First off, I got online and had a few discussions with AI. My goal was to see if bitters have flavors useful to us for various meads. I made some suggestions to Don. His wheels started turning. I could see it in his eyes. But, our current priority is reformulating some paw paw melomel and this type of bitters offered no solution there.

Don disappeared in his office and started his own discussions with AI. This allowed him to sort through a few thoughts instead of buying a bunch of ingredients and mixing untold numbers of experiments. This would be the first time Don went tech.

Yesterday, Don went to the w**ery and built a new flavor profile with the paw paw. Instead of a few days, it took only three hours. Today, he's gone to the w**ery to see how the flavors are melding. But, that's one thing we can't yield to AI. Could take at least two weeks to see how this new ideation evolves.

We're excited!

04/11/2026

What's happening at Woodstone:

I managed to nail down the speeding bullet, Don, to have a talk about production for the next few months. We're going into the family holidays, so a few promotions are in order.

We made too much Paw Paw Melomel. For starters, offering it as a taste on us, to be added to the anniversary tasting. Our first bottling did really well. Don took that to mean he should make another batch times three. That was pre-tariff. I doubt this can happen again. Luckily, we bought a boat-load of bottles. We have to get lucky once in a while - right?

After our last meeting, Don barreled mead in a bourbon barrel. The first batch hasn't run out yet, so he's not going to bottle it until then. UNLESS, he thinks it could get even better. Could well be that mead will be in the barrel for a whole year.

Speaking of bourbon barrels, the bochet is out of stock. Don wants to do another without barreling. The new bochet project will explore adding herbs for complexity.

Saturday's theme is Herbs & Honey. Customers can try some of our spirits with sage, rosemary, honey and pure Amish maple syrup. If that's not your jam, the rest of the menu awaits. Don't forget our mead triade of ginger and lemongrass: Taliesin (dry, aged 26 years), Ginger Honey (semi-sweet, easy drinking), and Crowne Amber (brandy fortified, barrel aged).
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I must keep thanking our hater. Our views continue to increase. Probably wasn't his "plan".

03/11/2026

I have a hater:

This fellow equates "followers" to success. I, on the other hand, am more interested in "views". Business pages are furnished with a dashboard that offers metrics such as number of views. Charts compare views by the month, how many are followers or non-followers, a breakdown in percentages of men vs women in various age groups, etc. Ours shows a discrepancy between views and the number of followers. I've noticed, but I can't control either. It's very apparent most of my readers are not followers.

Alan thinks I should be fired because he doesn't like my content . . . according to him, it hasn't earned enough followers considering how long we've been in business. Come January, we're up to 27 years. There's no relationship I can see, except, despite the follower count, we're still here. Alan's attack is not soul crushing.

Thank you Alan. Our views went up 9% after your "suggestion". I may have done Woodstone a disservice by blocking you.

02/11/2026

Display science:

For some reason, most people don't want to take the last bottle off the rack. Whenever we get down to the last few bottles, it's a balancing act as to how many bottles are kept in the cooler or on the display racks. Each stack holds 12 bottles. Keeping 2 or 3 bottles, for weeks at a time, is a waste of space. Many times I've heard "Oh, I don't want to take your last bottle". This is when I'm thinking "Puleeeeeeeez take the last bottle!" I very much want that bottle gone to make way for a new bottling - especially if it's a mead.

I've had a display awakening! For months now, I've been putting new bottlings at the ends of the bar to call attention to them. It occurred to me I should be taking those lonely last bottles off the rack and putting THEM on the bar. (duh) So, I did and we're ripping through all those odds and ends and sending them right out the door.

Pomegranate, Elderflower and Phantasm have departed for awhile. Come see the new stuff.

01/11/2026

Sunday Shop Spot:

Small business is told to differentiate themselves to potential customers. They can't win your business unless they stand out. This pressure to stand out causes some strange slogans. Being "first" is highly desired, even to the point of stretching the truth. But, beware, the truth is pretty inflexible.

Last night, I asked AI to find "firsts" in the craft distilling realm. I found more than I expected. Most unique was a claim their distillery sold the first bottle of liquor under the 2011 change in liquor law. It took a long time for liquor control to allow bottle sales, so it was sort of a big deal.

For one thing the slogan violated the fundamental syllable limit. A good slogan has to be easy to remember and a certain musicality makes it stick. Their slogan was cumbersome and very difficult to prove. How did they know they sold the first bottle? Did they call around to the other distilleries and ask if they'd sold a bottle yet? They certainly didn't call us! Overall, it was unlikely. Woodstone, the w**ery, already had a functioning tasting bar - no advance prep needed for liquor sales. All we had to do was take the liquor bottles from the back room to the front room.

Can't really prove it, but I'm guessing it wasn't them. But, they really needed some kind of slogan. I'll let 'em keep it.

31/10/2026

Halloween greetings!:

It is believed the origins of Halloween go back to an ancient Celltic festival, Samhain. Samhain (pronounced sow-in or sow-een) is an ancient Gaelic and Celtic festival that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, or the "dark half" of the year. It is considered to be a spiritual New Year in Gaelic traditions.

A reminder - show up in costume today and we'll offer you an extra taste on us. So, that would be 6 tastes for $15. We're also offering a piece of chocolate with a dessert w**e. Perfect for cool weather.