Vodka

Vodka Distilled from Grains

This vodka is made primarily from corn grown by good friends within 20 miles of our farm. Cowdery Farms out of Long Bottom, Ohio supply us with non-gmo, open pollinated varieties, and Starline Organics from Guysville, Ohio supply us with their 100% organic variety. These are the only two corn producers we use. Now, the problem with corn is it needs a “helper” grain to provide us with the enzymes we need to extract the sugar from corns’ starchy endosperm. For this we use Organic 2-Row Malted Barley from Briess, in Chilton WI.

These are the players, here is how they work to produce our crisp Vodka from Grains.

After cooking the corn in a slow controlled fashion we blend in a bit of the malted barley to start breaking down those pesky starches into fermentable sugars. Then, just like beer, we separate the liquids from the solids. This process is called Lautering. Our goal is to keep the sugar-rich liquid, while leaving behind the “spent grains” to feed our chickens, hogs, and some deer. Once we have collected around 200 gallons of this “beer” we cool it down to a happy ferment temperature and hold it there till our yeast has eaten all the sugar and magically transformed it into alcohol and CO2. Now it is time to start the distillation process. By law, to call our product “vodka” it must come off our still at >95% alcohol by volume. So this is a very pure alcohol! We must blend this down to a reasonable percentage to drink, so we have chosen 40%/80 Proof. The water we use is wonderful to taste, very light in minerals due to our reverse osmosis filtration and does our product justice.

Taste this next to our grape based vodka to compare the variation due to raw ingredients, you won’t be disappointed!

 

Vodka Distilled from Grapes (Seasonal)

Our mission is to use ingredients from growers we know, the closer to home the better. This Vodka is distilled from Vidal grapes, half of which were grown a few ridges over at Shade Winery. The other half were grown in Republic, Ohio at Dead Drop Vineyards.

This ultra smooth vodka is made from Vidal pomace to be exact. Pomace is the combination of pulp, skins, and seeds left over after the initial pressing of the grapes. We take the pomace from Shade Winery after their annual pressing and add fresh water back. We let this mixture sit overnight and press again. This juice is then fermented in our temperature controlled 200 gallon tanks to produce a notable “small wine”. We distill this wine first to 45% alcohol in our “stripping” still and then to 95% in our “rectification” still. The final touch is to bring this back to 80 proof, a “beverage” level of alcohol, by blending with our own pure reverse osmosis water. Grape fermentations produce such a wonderful, clean wine, it makes for an incredibly smooth vodka. It is not easy to pick out the grape character, though, but is fun to compare the differences with our Grain-based Vodka!