In the clinking of cocktail glasses, there are countless latent stories. Be it the crack of an oyster shell and the glug of Grey Goose on a sailboat off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard or the heavy-armed slosh of raised Stolichnaya shots inside a snow-buried Siberian cabin, the business of booze is the business of story-making. Drink the elixir and be transported.
Recently, a handful of Idaho-made craft vodkas have started appearing on cocktail menus and “buy local” shelves at liquor stores. Their labels advertise ingredients like “Idaho russet potatoes” and tout properties such as “four-column distillation” and “crystal-and-charcoal” filtration. Idaho’s state spud and scenic, mountainous landscape—think white linen-clad yacht parties and snowy Russian nights—are now part of liquor-branding iconography.
While this narrative marketing strategy is present in every industry, nowhere is it more successful than in the branding of vodkas. Unlike other liquors, prized for their complex flavor profiles and vintages, good vodkas are supposed to be innocuous and water-like—colorless, odorless and tasteless. Even the word “vodka” is a form of the Russian word for water, “voda.” So what separates Grey Goose from the rotgut? Is it ingredients, number of times distilled and fancy filtrations processes? Or just excellent marketing?
Myth and marketing aside, how much of the hype is actually valid? After touring a couple of Idaho vodka distilleries, talking to some Idaho vodka experts and hosting a highly technical Idaho vodka tasting, we found some intoxicating answers.
According to the Idaho State Liquor Dispensary (ISLD), liquor sales for the state totaled more than $128 million in 2008, with $26.5 million coming from Boise alone. Of the 9.8 million bottles of hooch hawked in the state, around 2.5 million of those were vodka—approximately 25.9 percent of the total, according to the ISLD. Although the state’s most popular vodka last year was the firewater Kamchatka, selling 102,000 of the 1.75-liter bottles, the most sought-after flavored vodka was the Idaho-made 44° North Huckleberry vodka, selling close to 48,000 bottles.
An infused liquor popular in martinis and shots, 44° North has dominated the flavored-vodka scene in Idaho since its launch in 2004. But one thing many drinkers don’t know is that while 44° North vodka is indeed distilled in Idaho—in the East Idaho town of Rigby—it is not an Idaho company.
“It’s probably a little disingenuous to say that 44° North is a 100 percent Idaho product,” explained Bill Applegate, product manager at the ISLD. “It’s produced in Idaho, hopefully using Idaho products and Idaho labor, but the reality is that the brand is owned by an out-of-state company.”
That company is owned by WyattZier LLC, out of Bedford, N.H., which also launched Zygo, the successful energy vodka, and Shango Rum. WyattZier contracts with Distilled Resources Inc. (DRinc) in Rigby to produce its neutral grain spirits, which are then blended and bottled in Rigby into 44° North’s three brands: Huckleberry, Magic Valley Wheat and Rainier Cherry.
“When we started our business, Idaho basically came first because we were looking for a place where we could produce small batches of extremely high-quality spirits,” explained Ken Wyatt, co-owner of Wyatt-Zier LLC. “So, actually we went to Distilled Resources first. Once we recognized that we had a great producing company to work with, the brainstorm just hit. Why not trumpet or herald the stuff that’s coming out of Idaho in terms of the great agricultural tradition of the state? Obviously, that led us to the state fruit, which is huckleberry.”
Even though the company is headquartered on the East Coast, Wyatt explained that Idaho is 44° North’s largest market, followed closely by Florida and New York (it is available in Syracuse, although your favorite liquor store may have to special order it). And with the recent releases of their Magic Valley Wheat unflavored vodka and Rainier Cherry vodka, 44° North is maintaining its commitment to showcasing Idaho’s “agricultural tradition.”
“Our clients don’t own warehouses, they are just businesses,” explained Gray Ottley, owner of DRinc. “They are brand builders.”
A handful of companies like Wyatt-Zier have found that the Idaho brand sells. All of the Idaho-made vodkas you’ll find on state liquor store shelves—except for Bardenay and Koenig—are distilled by DRinc at their plant in Rigby for companies based in other states. After the vodkas are bottled, they’re shipped directly from the plant to various liquor distributors throughout the United States, including the ISLD warehouse in Boise. DRinc distills 17 different products, which include the 44° North line, Zygo, Blue Ice American Vodka, Teton Glacier Potato Vodka, Square One Organic Rye and Cucumber vodkas, Orange V Vodka, Zodiac Vodka and a handful of others.
DRinc is a full-service, beverage-grade custom alcohol distillery, which means it offers production, blending and bottling for clients who either have their own alcohol brand concepts or want to develop branding for a recipe already concocted by master distiller Bill Scott in the DRinc labs. This means that DRinc doesn’t sell any of its own brands.
“We’re what I call a farmed-bottle company,” said Ottley. “We’re the largest distiller of beverage alcohol west of the Mississippi. We don’t own brands—we don’t own the Blue Ices or the 44° North Huckleberrys—that’s our business model and it’s very successful.”
In an industry drunk on image, DRinc cuts through the lingo with some straight talk and a little humor. Besides defining the company as “makers of the world’s only super-duper, triple stampies, no-erasies ultra premium luxury vodka,” DRinc’s Web site goes to great lengths to debunk some of the common myths that cloud the distillation process.
“We’re about truth in advertising and pretty much saying it the way it is,” explained Ottley. “There is a lot of one-upmanship in the vodka business, like, ‘If the last one was nine times distilled, ours is 10 times distilled.’ Or, ‘Five times filtered through crystal.’ Really that means nothing to me. From a manufacturing point of view and quality control point of view, that doesn’t do anything.”
So what does matter in the vodka distillation process? Overall, the answer seems to be quality ingredients and quality equipment.
GRAIN ALCOHOL
Vodka can be distilled from anything that can be broken down into a sugar: wheat, corn, rye, sugar beets, potatoes, grapes. Although a good number of vodkas produced in Idaho, naturally, are made from potatoes, potato vodkas comprise only 3 percent of the worldwide market.
“Most vodka is made out of grain: corn, wheat, rye. They yield much better, per pound of wheat, and for the cost of it, you can make a lot more money that way,” explained Andy Koenig, distiller and co-owner of the Koenig Distillery in Sunnyslope, Idaho. “Grain vodka is great to mix with because you don’t taste any of the impurities or anything. With potatoes, you get that nice, rich, oily kind of sweetness.”
Out at the Koenig Distillery, veiled in a just-budding forest of peach, plum, apricot and cherry trees, the Koenig brothers are vocal potato proponents. Although it would be easy to source their potatoes at a nearby Oregon-border farm, the Koenigs truck in tubers from East Idaho so they can slap the prized Idaho Potato Commission seal on their bottle.
Andy Koenig can see the eaux-de-vie for the trees. The spud, though, can be a tricky beast to ferment. At more than 70 percent water, it can take around nine pounds of potatoes to make a single bottle of vodka. Also, using potatoes as a base can be labor intensive because they are finicky to ferment, often requiring the addition of enzymes to turn the starch into sugar. That is why Bardenay Distillery, which claims to be the first restaurant distillery in the country post-Prohibition, goes straight to the sticky sweet source to make its spirits. Bardenay has three locations—downtown Boise, Eagle and Coeur d’Alene–where they make vodka, gin and rum all from the same base: 100 percent cane sugar.
“A lot of bigger companies use products that they have to ferment back down to a usable sugar. We actually use sugar from the get-go, so we kind of skip that process,” said Josh
Malone, one of Bardenay’s three distillers, as he stood next to a fermenting tank at the sun-drenched Eagle restaurant and distillery. “Plus, the fermentation of products like that in a restaurant or bar would be infeasible because if you’ve ever smelled fermenting potatoes, they don’t smell very good.”
But regardless of whether the base begins as a sugar, or must be cooked to break down starch chains and release the sugar, they all go through the same fermentation process. Yeast and water are added to the base mash in a fermentation tank, where it sits for varying amounts of time until it forms an approximately 16 percent alcohol “distiller’s beer”—the highest alcohol concentration that can be achieved through fermentation alone. To reach a higher booze level, the murky feed must then be run through a still until an almost-pure, 190-proof ethanol has been separated out.
But how does a still wring alcohol out of the distiller’s beer? Basic chemistry. While water has a boiling point of 100 degrees Celsius, ethanol evaporates at 78.3 degrees Celsius, which allows the booze to separate and rise through various porous plates in the still column while the water remains in liquid form at the bottom. Any water that does evaporate with the liquor hits the cool column top and re-condenses. The alcohol vapor then floats out of the column into a condenser, where it is stored.
Since Bardenay uses a pot still—a copper device with a bulbous bottom that looks like something from a Jules Verne novel—the distillation process has to be repeated multiple times for the liquor to purify and reach around 190 proof, or 95 percent to 96 percent alcohol. While Bardenay advocates the time-tested, small batch pot still method—running the alcohol through the still eight times before it’s bottled by distiller Ashley Scott at the Coeur d’Alene location–many in the industry are weary of over-distillation.
“Anytime you start distilling a lot of times, the alcohol gets a little harshness to it,” said Koenig. “It’s very traumatic to distill anything, so if you can distill nice and lightly and coax it through there, then you get a better, smoother product. Ours gets distilled twice.”
The Koenig Distillery uses a specialty German-made double copper pot still with dual 50-plate columns to distill its spirits, which include a collection of old-world fruit brandies, or eaux-de-vie, in addition to the award-winning potato vodka. With a mixed pot and column still, the vapor zig-zags up and down through the two columns until it reaches the condenser, where it is collected and then run back through the process one more time.
“First is the primary distillation, or the raw distillation, then it’s stored in a stainless steel tank. When we gather enough up, we use the other still to rectify it,” explained Koenig. “When it comes out of the first still, it’s very impure and hazy and not clean. It has a lot of mineral flavors. {The second} still cleans it.”
DRinc has gotten rid of multiple distillations all together with its industrial four-column, stainless steel setup, which includes a special Hydro-Pulse 8100B purge column. “We operate just a column still, which is the Ferrari of the industry,” explained Ottley.
Essentially, a column still is a continuous distillation method in which the alcohol vapor winds its way through the various columns and arrives at the end as nearly pure ethanol in a single run. Stainless steel column stills, like the ones used at DRinc, are often favored because they are able to efficiently remove all impurities in the alcohol, without imparting flavors like copper stills often do.
“It gives you an amazing amount of control in how you can literally design an alcohol,” Ottley said. “You can take flavors out, you can put them back in. It’s not just about dropping the impurities, it’s also just as much about creating a recipe.”
While Ottley acknowledged that some of his clients ask him to filter their products multiple times after distillation through carbon—or even fancy-pants crystals—”for marketing purposes only,” he explained that if the product is superiorly crafted, multiple filtrations are overkill. “I wouldn’t want somebody to tell me that their product wasn’t filtered at all,” said Ottley. “On the other hand, I wouldn’t want them to tell me it was 10 times filtered.”
Koenig and Bardenay also filter their product only lightly before bottling. Another step that takes place after distillation and filtration is the addition of flavorings. While DRinc concocts a wide variety of flavored spirits, Bardenay and Koenig are also grabbing a chunk of the exploding flavored-vodka market. Bardenay makes lemon vodka in addition to its popular gin—which is essentially juniper-flavored vodka—while Koenig has a new huckleberry vodka just hitting shelves.
“Most flavored vodkas, honestly, use vodka and then flavor them with artificial flavorings. But we wanted to go outside of that, so we buy real Idaho huckleberries that they pick up in the forest,” said Koenig. “Then they get soaked in the potato vodka for about three months and then we re-distill that.”
Once an Idaho vodka joins its peers on the mirrored tiers at local bars, it’s no longer about state taxes or filtration and distillation: It’s about image. “Marketing and status, or imagined status {are why people choose vodkas},” explained Michael Bowers, a bartender at the Modern Hotel Bar. “Grey Goose, over the past three months, we’ve done 425 pours, and the next closest competitor is Absolut at 151. Most of those, or a significant number, are in a greyhound or a vodka tonic or soda, where {the brand} really doesn’t matter. I think that in itself indicates why people are drinking it because it’s certainly not for the taste.”
