In the northeastern corner of the Adirondack Park, white and yellow houses are turning gray, green metal roofs are turning brown and white gutters and fence posts are turning spotted black. It’s as if a five-o’clock shadow is growing over Grover Hills, a neigh-borhood in the hamlet of Mineville.
This sticky substance is new, some lifelong residents say. They point to about a half-mile northwest where rows of 14,000-square-foot, barn-red buildings hold thousands of barrels of aging whiskey. It is where WhistlePig Whiskey has stored products distilled in Vermont since approximately 2017.
State regulators have tested the moldy stuff and have concluded, in some cases, it is whiskey fungus, or Baudoinia compniacensis. Scientists first documented the soot-like sheen in the 1870s, outside the spirit warehouses of Cognac, France. More recently it plagued neighborhoods around a Jack Daniel’s plant in Tennessee and the Wiggly Bridge Distillery in Maine.
Mineville’s is the first case of whiskey fungus in New York, health and environmental officials said.
There are discrepancies between state and private labs over whether all instances of the black gummy substance are fungus caused by WhistlePig Whiskey and whether whiskey fungus can cause health impacts. It remains a nuisance for the dozens of homeowners in the path of the alcohol that evaporates in the aging process, a vapor known as “angel’s share.”
