Two days after I returned from Finland, I was off again visiting the
Distilled Resources distillery in Rigby and Sun Valley, Idaho courtesy of
Blue Ice Vodka.
At DRinc (Distilled Resources, Inc.- pretty clever) they produce about 17 different potato and grain vodkas and liqueurs, and also organic alcohol for use in food goods and processing. But we focused on potato vodka and Blue Ice, since they were footing the bill.
There was a great, small group of writers on the trip, including New York wine and spirits educator Harriet Lembeck , Chicagoan Sean Ludord of
BevX.com, Louise Owens, booze writer from Dallas, and LA-based Meridith May, publisher/writer/co-owner of
The Tasting Panel Magazine and former monster truck driver. (When we learned this, we all pretty much bowed to her awesomeness forever more.) These were really smart people who know their booze. But my relative ignorance meant I was learning the most. Here are some fun facts I picked up.
Distilling:
- The DRinc distillery was a biofuel plant leftover from the Carter administration that they bought and turned in to the distillery.
- They use a four-column distillation process. Column distillation does not scale down so that you can have a small column still. Also, pot stills only scale up so far, so that if someone needs to produce mass-quantities of a pot-distilled product they need to buy a whole bunch of pot stills.
- After the raw material (potatoes in this case) is fermented into beer, they heat it up and distillation starts. The first distillation column just strips out all the solids from the beer. The rest break down the vapors into the desired components.
- You could have just one giant column instead of four or five or whatever, but this way is more compact. So booze that's x-times distilled should refer to pot distillation instead of number of columns, but you never know with the vodka marketing craziness what's really up. Blue Ice compromises and labels their bottles as "four column distillation."
Bottling- The bottling process isn't just taking finished booze and sticking it in bottles. Bottling is often diluting, blending, filtering, flavoring, and bottling at a "bottling facility." Thus, one could order up alcohol from a distillery and flavor it at a separate bottling facility where it becomes distinct products/flavors. (At DRinc they bottle on site.)
- Thus the water that brings the product to proof and the flavorings are added at the bottling facility. It is the bottling facility city that is legally required to be put on labels, not necessarily the distillery where the alcohol was first created.
- The filtering and treatment of water is a big factor in the finished product- vodka is 60% water, after all. The line between "treating the water" and "flavoring the vodka" isn't terribly clear to me.
- There are a lot of ways to filter the water and the final product. Many places run the vodka through a charcoal/carbon filter, but here they add carbon granules to the tanks then filter them out. They say their carbon filtering is actually a clarifying agent for the vodka rather than an important part of the flavoring (they use a "five stage filtration").
Waste Products (You know I love distillery waste products):
- The name for the grains or potatoes leftover after fermentation is stillage DDG, or distillers dried grains. Except at Blue Ice they're still wet and they're potatoes, so I guess they should be called DWP. Anyway, this gets sold off as animal feed.
- The heads and tails from the distilling process combined are called fusel oils, and are often sold off to be used in chemical processing and cosmetics. However, at DRinc they have to prove to the ATB (via purchase of testing equipment) that there is no more recoverable alcohol in the fusel oils before they do, and by "recoverable" they mean "taxable."
- I had the opportunity to smell a jar of fusel oils!
- Waste heat from the distillery (steam) is pumped under the floors of the storage warehouse in the winters to heat it.
Blue Ice- They have to get certified to say that they make the product from Idaho russet potatoes, as that term is trademarked, by proving that all their potatoes come from Idaho.
- They don't make a lot of organic potatoes in Idaho, which is why DRinc makes organic grain-based vodkas for other brands but not an organic potato vodka. It would be just too expensive on the shelf.
Call me a sucker, but I love distillery tours. At every one I learn more, and also how much more I need to learn. It's an ongoing study of booze, and these are the field trips that keep it exciting.
Labels: distillery_tour, vodka
