Oliver’s Conversion

by Oliver Hughes

For a long while, I was a bit sceptical about vodka. Now that we’re making our own in Dingle, I’ve changed my mind. A bit.

Isn’t a bit weird that one of the biggest  vodka brands doesn’t even have it’s own factory? Sorry, I mean distillery. And what about those “super-premium” brands that taste just like a whole lot of much cheaper ones? They get their fanatical fans by sticking a huge price tag on something really ordinary.

Did I say sceptical? Cynical, more like. One of Lidl’s own-brand vodkas, Putinoff, beat a whole lot of expensive versions in a US blind tasting a while back. This has to mean that a lot of people don’t actually drink vodka. They drink labels.

Anyway, I used to think that vodka is vodka is vodka. Neutral grain spirit, however many times you distil it, is still neutral grain spirit. Or so I thought. I know better now.

You can make vodka from pretty much anything that ferments and that includes maize and molasses. Even spuds. There are some good Polish vodkas which start life as the starch in potatoes.

The best grain vodkas are made from spring wheat. Ours does.

When the our distillery was still in the planning stage we found lots of producers who will ship neutral grain spirit to wherever you want it. I wasn’t particularly bothered. And then I met an old mate of mine in London. He has a brewery and a couple of distilleries in Europe and, while we were chatting over a beer in The Porterhouse in Covent Garden I told him how Dingle was coming on.

When I mentioned vodka he said that the best base spirit I could get my hands on was from a distillery in… let’s just say Scandinavia. And it wasn’t one of his.

We got a sample and the quality was sensational. We put in our order and that’s the stuff that goes into our little vodka and gin still in Dingle. What comes out is DDV.

But before we got to actually making the vodka, we had to decide on the still. What kind of metal would be best?

You can have stainless steel or even glass. But we went with copper. This was after a chat with a distiller friend who, a long time ago, was running a continuous still making vodka in Glasgow.

The old copper still was replaced with a brand new stainless steel one and the spirit changed overnight. Well, it did and it didn’t. The chemical analysis was identical – they even did things like spectrometry to be sure – but it didn’t taste the same.

Our distiller mate thought long and hard about this. Everything was done the same way but the taste was different.  Why?

He decided that it might be the switch from copper to steel. So he went off to a friend in the shipyards and got a length of copper chain which he dropped into a vat of the new spirit and let it sit for a couple of weeks. Then they tasted. The old flavour was back.

I know it sounds a bit mystical, a bit like homeopathy but despite being chemically identical, the spirit that had formed some kind of weird relationship with copper was much, much better.

So, there was no question about it. Our pot still had to be made of copper. The taste would be better – and it is.

So what is the difference in taste? Vodka made in our copper still has a kind of creamy quality with a touch – just the faintest touch – of something like vanilla.

Our superb neutral grain spirit comes in to the distillery at 96% abv and we cut it with water from our own spring to 40% abv before it goes into the still. The quality of that water is vital. It comes from almost 300 feet below the ground and it’s as pure as an angel. The Dingle rain (which our friend John McDougall says is “whiskey in waiting”) filters through the mountains for hundreds of years and then we pump it up.

The spirit comes out of the still at 80% abv. We cut that back, again with water from our own well, to 40% abv and that’s what goes into the bottle.

We think the sheer quality, finesse, whatever you want to call it, is down to the fact that it’s made in a pot still. As in 100% of it.

We’ve seen so-called pot still vodkas but when you read the fine print, it turns out that only part of the spirit is from the pot still. But surely there must be some 100% pot still vodkas out there. We want to taste them and see how ours matches up so if anybody has any suggestions please let us know.

We love our pure pot still vodka. It’s a very honest vodka and it’s delicious. It’s one of the very few vodkas about which I’m not a little bit cynical. Or even sceptical.