It’s been another busy time at Hopkins Street and, up until this weekend, we started to feel like we hadn’t made it out of the warehouse in weeks, let alone caught up with any friends.  Luckily that changed when, for the first time in over 2 weeks, we had no workers over the weekend and caught up with friends and family all weekend: we began to feel human once again!

The roofers spent over a week tinkering with the final stages of the warehouse roof and then eventually moved on to do the roof over the offices section (which will be our living accommodation).  It’s STILL not finished, however, and they return tomorrow for what we hope will be the final day.

As well as roofers, we’ve also had carpenters – the fantastic Mike Rule and his team from AllWood – working on balustrades on the mezzanine area of the warehouse.  They finished mid-week and Thursday was spent cleaning the warehouse from top to bottom.  Our poor new flooring and paintwork has taken a beating – but luckily both have stood up to the worst of it.

We also had a second visit from the guys at Distillique, Gert and Frits, who brought with them replacement parts and spent 3 days working full out to get our equipment up and running.  We fired up the ginning still for the first time and made some moonshine – very exciting!  In typical fashion, however, there are a couple of parts that needed changing and so they left us not quite up and running; but we’re nearly there.

Finally, and most importantly, SARS (the South African Revenue Service) paid us a visit in connection with licensing the stills.  They inspected the premises, collected a whole lot of paperwork and, we are really pleased to say, issued us the initial licences, to use each of the stills for our own use (for experimentation) at Hopkins Street.  The manufacturing licences will come a bit later – but for now we’re making history, as these are the first still licences to be issued by the City of Cape Town!  They are registered as CTN001, CTN002 and CTN003.