Arizona High Spirits - Our Process
VODKA – From Grain to Glass
Quite possibly the smoothest, most luxurious vodka in the world. Made by hand at 7000' elevation. At our artisan distillery we painstakingly hand craft High Spirits vodka in very small batches. Using the finest available water, grain & yeast, our distillers meticulously create the highest quality vodka native to the Southwest. It is craftsmanship, care and scale that allow us to focus on the smoothness & subtle flavor of each and every bottle.
Ingredients
High Spirits Vodka is born of two ingredients: pure water and high quality grain. The water used throughout the process originates on the nearby San Francisco Peaks in the form of pure snow. It then slowly makes its way through limestone layers for many years before it reaches our facility.
The finest quality malted grains available are used to make High Spirits Vodka. Our vodka contains 75% American White Wheat and 25% American Sweet Rye. White Wheat gives the spirit its smooth, silky texture, while Sweet Rye lends subtle flavor.
Mashing
The whole grains are combined & milled gently just to expose the starchy germ. The grain is "mashed" or mixed with hot water and held at 148 degrees farenheiht for 90 minutes.
Mashing allows the grains own enzymes to convert the available starch to simple fermentable sugar.
Boiling
The resulting sweet liquid is drained and the grain bed rinsed in order to collect the delicious juice called "wort". While the spent grain stays behind, the wort is boiled for one hour.
Boiling eliminates any contaminates and reduces the wort even further.
Fermentation
After the wort has been boiled it is cooled to 65 degrees and transferred to a fermentation tank. At 65 degrees, pure, high quality distillers yeast is added. Yeast will feed on the sugar and bring about its transformation to alcohol.
Fermentation is much slower at this low temperature but, under these conditions off-flavors are not allowed to develop. No other sugars are added.
The yeast slowly consumes the malt sugar resulting in the final "wash". The wash, which now resembles beer, contains only 7% alcohol which is ready to become spirit.
Distillation
The finished wash is distilled 5 times in our
state of the art still. The first legal still in Arizona's history,
custom made by Arnold Holstien GmbH, is a bi-standing rectifying column still. The rectifying column forces distillate vapor to continuously condense and evaporate thousands of times before it is allowed to exit the still in the form of ultra-pure spirit.
At this point the product, by law, must be at least 190 proof. The process is very slow, but necessary to produce a spirit of unconventional quality.
Filtering
The finished spirit is saturated with powder carbon – the carbon derived from coconut palm. Through the process of adsorption any undesirable flavor or aroma compounds are removed.
This process is repeated 3 times to ensure absolute quality. The carbon is then removed to reveal Arizona's only ultra pure, ultra clean spirit.
Bottling
We then dilute the finished spirit using pure distilled water to the desired bottling proof. All of our products are bottled by hand.
It is an inefficient and painstaking process, but we believe we are producing one of the finest vodkas in the world.
