Tasting Room Deck for Local Distillery

A local distillery, crafting whiskeys, gin, and rum, has a tasting room beside their warehouse. They reached out about building a small deck to extend the tasting room outside, complete with tables, chairs, and plenty of sunshine. A large roll up door can be opened during business hours leading from the inside bar area out to this deck, providing both more seating and an inviting entrance for prospective customers.

The challenge of this project was the sloping concrete slab that led away from the main tasting room floor, which would serve as the foundation for the deck. Our design required there to be no step from the floor to the deck and a naturally, a level surface across the deck. The sloping slab was not consistent nor uniform, and some carefully crafted sleepers would serve as the framing for the deck. Not your standard joists from ledger board to beam setup of a regularly designed residential deck. With use of a track saw and some custom planing, I was eventually able to get all the framing to go from zero thickness at the door to ~8” at the front, while staying consistently level from side-to-side and front-to-back.

After some blocking and joist tape for exposure protection, Trex decking boards with their hidden fastener system was installed. A piece of cake relative to the framing construction. For the last couple rows of decking material nearest to the main floor, I didn’t have adequate framing to hold fasteners before hitting the concrete slab, so I used a rotary hammer and concrete screws to secure the final boards into position. A little brown spray paint on the screw heads prior to install allowed them to be largely unnoticeable after installation.

One advantage of the sloping foundation below, is the ability for snow and rain water to fall through the cracks in the deck and flow out to the front and away from the building. We left a small gap below the decking fascia to allow this water to escape. The finishing touch was a simple railing system comprised of two black-painted aluminum posts connected with a retired climbing rope to keep the patrons within the allocated zone, and keep the alcohol control board happy.

Here’s to some tasty outdoor bourbon sampling. Cheers!