Our distillery is located on our farm here in Herefordshire, 30 miles North West of Cheltenham, where we grow all of the potatoes and apples to make our premium vodka and gin.

We Grow, Mash, Ferment, Strip, distil and hand-bottle
our spirits here on our farm in herefordshire

Potato Mashing

The first stage of the vodka making process is to convert the potatoes into sugars. The potatoes that we grow on the farm are old fashioned high starch varieties such as Lady Claire and Lady Rosetta. They are harvested in late summer and stored in wooden boxes for the rest of the year. Like me, they are kept in the dark.

Fermentation

This is one of my favourite bits. Not only are we making alcohol, but we don't actually have to do any work - the yeast does it all for us. The yeast starts to feed on the sugars that we have made out in the mash vessel and starts to reproduce.


This process has three waste products: firstly alcohol, which is a good thing and is what we are after, but also lots of carbon dioxide gas which makes the mash froth up and overflow if we're not careful, and lastly heat. We keep it cool at first to keep the rate of fermentation under control and after a week or so end up with a potato wine of between 8 and 10% alcohol. Even I admit that it does not look or taste nice, but if we have done a good job and not put the yeast under any stress, we will have produced lots of good quality alcohol. It takes me back to when I was growing up with my ginger beer plant bubbling away in the corner of my bedroom.

Stripping

When the fermentation has finished we then start the distilling process. Distilling does not actually produce any alcohol, but just concentrates what we have produced in fermentation. We rely on the fact that alcohol has a lower boiling point than water, so as we gently heat the fermented mash the alcohol will tend to boil off preferentially and we can condense it and collect it. By law vodka must be taken to 96% alcohol by volume (ABV) and then diluted with water back down to the bottling strength, which for us is 40%. In order to achieve this we have to distill the product five times.

The first distillation run is called a stripping run and we are not trying to do anything clever with the alcohol, but simply extract as much as possible from what we have fermented. Most vodka is stripped nowadays on a continuous stripper which is very efficient and can extract pretty much all the alcohol. We have gone back to using the more traditional batch pot still and although we can only extract 85-90% of the fermented alcohol, we are able to keep more of the character. The still, like our product, is handmade. It is completely copper which helps produce a smoother distillate by removing sulphates (and cyanide too if we ever start distilling cherries). It looks like something Jules Verne might have written about, especially when it's bubbling away and with the old fashioned hand controlled steam valves. It's more than just a machine, its got soul and a character of its own. We have to do several stripping runs to empty the fermentation vessels and we end up with what are called Low Wines at around 45-50% ABV.

Rectification

This is where it starts to get complicated. The Low Wines still don't taste very nice. This is because they are made up of lots of different substances in addition to the ethanol that we want. As well as not tasting good, some of the substances such as methanol can make you go blind so we need to remove these substances as well as concentrate the alcohol and we do it using our rectification column. This is over 70ft tall and extends up through the ceiling, up through the floor above and into a tower that we had to build on the roof of the distillery. Again it is all hand made from copper and looks stunning. We put the Low Wines back into the pot still and heat them up again.



The vapour then passes up the rectification column through 42 bubble plates all the way to the top where we have a condenser with lots of cold water running through it. This condenses the alcohol vapour making it trickle all the way back down to the bottom of the column leaving a thin layer of liquid on each bubble plate before it runs back into the still to be re-boiled, re-evaporated and sent back around the loop again. As the vapour passes up the rectification column again, this time it is forced into the layer of liquid on each bubble plate. As a vapour entering a liquid it will naturally condense, but because energy cannot be created or destroyed, something has to give, and so something also has to evaporate from the layer of liquid, and because alcohol has a lower boiling point than water, it tends to be the alcohol that evaporates preferentially. I told you it was complicated, but the result is that as the vapour passes up through these bubble plates it gets progressively purer and purer, in other words it is getting more concentrated.

We run this like this for a couple of hours, with a lot of reflux condensation at the top of the column. This has the effect of concentrating the methanol at the top of the column because it has the lowest boiling point of any of the alcohols, so when we eventually reduce the amount of reflux and allow the alcohol to escape from the top the column, the first bit that comes through is rich in methanol and can be separated off and collected in a tank. This has quite a strong chemical smell at first, but then when most of the methanol has come through it starts to be mixed with ethanol (the good alcohol that we want) and the smell reduces. We take samples here and sniff very carefully until we are certain that the methanol has all gone and at this point make a "cut" and send the product into a separate tank. If we have done a good job with the fermentation, this now makes up the bulk of the run and we can sit back for the next few hours just monitoring the process (or get on with some bottling or paperwork).

Through the windows at each bubble plate we can see the alcohol boiling away at around 80°C, and after quite some time, the first clue that we are nearing the end of the run comes when the temperature reading on the gauge at the bottom of the rectification column suddenly starts to increase. This shows that the ethanol has now all gone from the pot and higher alcohols, aldehydes, ketones and water are all starting to come through. We continue to monitor the process and watch as the temperature rises up the column as the ethanol escapes through the top and eventually we make a second "cut" collecting the last of the distillate in a third tank. We therefore have three different parts: the heads, which is basically methanol, the hearts, which is the ethanol we are after, and the tails which is everything else. The hearts are concentrated to above 90% ABV after this first rectification run.

For our second rectification run, our third distillation run in total, we take just the hearts component and repeat the entire process ending up with a pretty pure spirit at above 96% ABV. Again we take care to keep as much of the character of the product as possible.

Finishing

Our product is designed to be drunk neat, and usually straight from the freezer, although we like to drink it at room temperature as you can pick up more of the subtleties of the flavour. We therefore need to do a bit of work to finish the spirit. Firstly we dilute it with water to around 50% ABV.

The water comes from the aquifer underneath our orchard at the bottom of the valley.




From the borehole we run it through a reverse osmosis filter and de-ioniser column to purify it. Having diluted the spirit we add some very fine carbon powder to the tank and let it mix for 48 hours. After several trials, much tasting and a sore head, we have settled on a blend of three carbons which gives us a slightly smoother flavour without removing the character that we have struggled so hard to keep in. When we filter out the carbon it hangs on to, and therefore removes, some of the impurities that we are looking to remove. We need to be careful that we don't overdo this carbon treatment as the product could end up being too bland.

The next step is chill filtering. At low temperatures, long chain protein molecules can precipitate out of the spirit, in other words they change from being dissolved in the liquid into solids again. If we didn't remove these, the vodka could become hazy when stored in the freezer. So we chill the spirit down, allow the protein to precipitate out and can then filter it again. We then add a bit more of the pure water to adjust the product to 40% ABV and now start calling it vodka.

Bottling

This is all done by hand. The bottles come into us with the design already printed. We put them upside down onto a turntable which rinses them out. We then put them on a basic but accurate filler which fills the bottle to the required level. We put a cork in using a rubber mallet and a strip or capsule over the top. We have to put a little round duty stamp sticker on every bottle and then it's ready for despatch.

We hand pack every bottle into boxes, ready for our delivery vans.

Take a look at our gallery page to view a film the whole process.