Get ready to embark on an epic gin-ey

Green Hat -- DC's newest (... and only) gin distillery -- is taking a page out of Huck Finn's book, essentially asking you to paint their fence in the most fun possible way: by signing up to spend your Saturday "volunteering" in their small batch distillery, in the process becoming one of the few to see inside/drink inside their walls

The name's an ode to "The Man with the Green Hat" (way less cool actual name: George Cassidy), who served as Congress's go-to bootlegger, and the place looks fittingly old school: fermentors and copper pot stills in a 90yr old warehouse. Email them here, and you and 5-10 of your besties could become a "bottling party": the first part is all learning, as they take you through creating a mash via temp-controlled fermentation, vaporization, and the all-important adding of botanicals (in this case: juniper, coriander, and citrus), which'll become instantly more interesting to you at the next step, tasting ("an herbal whisper of celery"! A "rewarding complexity"!). Then they'll sit you all down at a large table to earn your keep booze: each person is one part of the assembly line as you guys pour, cork, scribble batch & proof numbers, and attach labels, but not "boozehound", as you've already dibsed that one by spending your Saturday at a gin distillery

And on the off chance that you don't have two hours of free Saturday, you can nab bottles of Green Hat at Schneider’s of Capitol Hill, Batch 13, and A.M. Wine Shoppe. Try it once, and there's no way you'll be on the fence.