Gadgetory

welcome to the hangar 1 distillery in alameda california inside they are making vodka let's go and take a tour in 360 degrees i'm here with kaylee a head distiller now this doesn't look like your typical distillery what's going on in this room so this is our workshop and quality-control lab back here we do all of our quality control proof checks pretty much anything we would do at a typical distillery but we also use this space to innovate all of our new flavors and expressions at hangar so you've got my test still behind me here we can do everything from cool vodka distillations on this to flavor creation which will be working on a little bit this is where the magic happens kaylee takes dry Delta breeze infused in 190 proof vodka and separates them from the alcohol so these are like nice Lucy elderberries they've been absorbing that alcohol all week we're just going to throw these guys in here and then we'll add a little bit of water and still the rest of the flavor we're doing a pot distillation when you're making vodka you traditionally use a vodka column that's what this guy is we would use it if we were using you know wine or some sort of grain mash to make vodka but right now we've already got 190 proof vodka so we're just going to go straight to the top distillation hot distillation let's a little more water come through the water will bring through flavor which means we'll get a little bit of the flavor compounds out of the elderberries with the alcohol and the water as it comes through it should be very delicious so yeah I think we're ready to go by this little guy up and let it heat up and yeah we'll just have to wait for it to get hot enough so boom now it's just waiting watching the pot boil so we've just seen some small-scale distillation now let's take a look at how it's done on a really large scale take a spin around and I'll catch you on the flip side so this is very similar to the small still on this pot would be almost exactly like what we were using to make the flavors we make all of our core flavors on this big pot the two columns next to us help us achieve 190 proof which is what we need to make vodka vodka can be made from absolutely anything as long as it reaches that 190 proof which is ninety-five percent alcohol so right now we're distilling wine into vodka so we've got the wine running through the big column and or the big pot and it's starting to go into the first column where we are fortunate to go through evaporation condensation multiple times that we can separate the water from the alcohol a lot more efficiently inside the distiller chambers fill with boiling alcohol it vaporizes into the next chamber and the process repeats over and over again leaving behind impurities with each step bubbling away it is it is bubbling away where we're in about full reflux here on the bottom section of the column we're still in the process of heating up the the next few sections finally the finished vodka gets bottled along a conveyor line and packaged into boxes where it sent out to over 50 states in the US and internationally to the UK and Canada you