The Dose Dispatch No. 8

It Was Late Summer..

Sep 25, 2025

Field Notes

The peaches were ripe. Some recent Monday morning I picked up 1,000 lbs from Briermere Farms. I’d reached out on a Thursday when my skin prickled at the chill in the air. And suddenly peaches were on my mind. I got a mixture of white and yellow. I ate two on the way to the distillery, the juices running down my wrist and continuing down my forearm. Ripe, super fragrant peaches.

I also picked up roughly 25 lbs of peach leaves, which I’m distilling this morning. Peach leaf distillate is one of my favorite all time distillates. It’s rich with marzipan and cherry. I gently crush the leaves in my palm before adding them into the still, one handful at a time. This process initiates a cascade of chemical reactions that release an array of fruity and floral perfumes designed to attract its predators predator. One of the best examples of plant magic in the natural world. Check Things Worth Your Time at the bottom for a brilliantly written overview on these cascades.

Next week I’ll combine the fermented peach wine with the peach leaf distillate, blending in the fresh elderflower distillate I prepared from Briermere flowers in the Spring. I’ll love it so much, in a peach induced delusion, I text Clark and ask for another 1,000 lbs of peaches and another 25 lbs of leaves. I hope everyone loves it as much as I do, because I’ve just impulsively decided to double the production. I’m not ready to let late summer run through my fingers so quickly.

Estefany Molina for Matchbook Distilling

Rituals + Objects

All summer I’d been getting to the distillery around 6 in the morning, a somewhat futile attempt to beat the heat. The sun just lifting off the horizon, the building still quiet as the copper stills, pre-warmed by the summer night, glide right up to temperature. I spend the morning prepping fruit, blending tanks, cleaning stills and checking on ferments. By 3PM, I’m done, pushed out by the heat, hitting 120F.. and 125F in spots. I head straight for the beach.

I dive into the cold water. I swim, I read, I swim again. Sometimes I bring a bottle, sometimes a bag of cherries. Always a towel in the front seat of the truck. These days feel foundational—salt on skin, sugars still in my hair somehow, the satisfying ache of work dissolving in the water.

I head to Deep Roots, the farmstand that doesn’t close and is always stocked with my favorite varieties of tomatoes or root vegetables or summer squash or sweet potatoes. I fill my arms and head home to cook.

More herbs than you think you’ll need, lots of cultured butter with sea salt, excessive lemon zest, garlic, miso, anchovies, big flaky crunchy salt. A compound butter of lemon zest and anchovies to drench corn. Miso and butter worked into steaming sweet potatoes. Grilled (charred) eggplant doused with herby and garlicky olive oil, heaps of goat / sheep cheese haphazardly tossed on top and finished with a generous zest of lemon. A summer tomato and corn galette or fresh handmade pasta with a pile of clams and herbs and lemon, all ways / always.

Lore / Artifacts

There’s a long tradition of women who make alcohol and keep inns. I was reminded of it reading a piece in EATEN No. 20 — The Alewife is to Blame; The Making of England’s Female Foe. It traces how women moved from brewing at home to selling surplus to neighbors, to running small businesses — until they were pushed aside. Men arrived with brewing methods from the Low Countries, with malted barley and hops that kept better, scaled faster. The alewife, once an entrepreneur, became an employee. What stuck was the smear campaign: lore and woodcuts painting her as a seductress, a trickster, a witch with crooked teeth and a crooked pot, whose intoxicating potions could only come from the devil.

Her drinks were potent. Beguiling. Dangerous. Don’t go near her, they said.

Which makes me smile — because here I am, centuries later, named a finalist for Distiller/Blender of the Year by VinePair.

Innkeeper

It was a lively August at The Lin Beach House. Our good friend Kevin took over the property for a weekend for his bachelor party and man, did the house sing for them — and man, did they sing back to the house. They cooked, lounged in the garden, turned the dining room into a karaoke bar. I loved watching the photos stream through my feed. I was away for the weekend, tucked into a colonial-era home in the middle of a Pennsylvania cornfield. A little less raucous, but I welcomed the quiet — catching up on sleep between rounds of Rummikub, analytical chip tastings, and birthday Jeopardy.

After nearly a decade of running The Lin Beach House as an inn, we’ve decided to do something a little different next year. During the week, The Lin will be dedicated to the industry — a place to come learn more about Matchbook and immerse in the land and culture that shape so much of what we do. On weekends, the house will be available as a full takeover event space, with all six guest rooms upstairs included. Weddings, anniversaries, birthdays — we’ll be hosting them all, June through October 2026.

We can’t wait to celebrate with you.