“Microdistilleriers are distilling booze with some offbeat ingredients,” reports Christopher Lawton in The Wall Street Journal. Duncan’s Spirits of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, www.vermontspirits.com “makes one vodka from 100 percent maple sap and another from milk sugar.” Its founder is “a former anthropologist … who studied Southeast Asian hill tribes.” That would explain it. Also in this mix are Bardenay Distilleries, makers of a sugar cane-based gin, and Essential Spirits Alambic Distilleries, www.essentialspirits.com, producers of “a beer-brandy hybrid called Bierschnaps.”
As quirky as these spirits sound, they command top-shelf prices: “Duncan’s maple vodka, for example, is tagged at $32 to $35 a bottle, which is pricier than even elite mass-marketed vodkas like Grey Goose or Belvedere.” A new microbrand of single-malt whisky called Notch, to be put on the market next year by Nantucket-based Triple Eight Distillery, will be priced at $88 — “more than double the price of top-shelf Scotch like Glenlivet and Glenfiddich.” Such “mom and pop” distillers basically want to do for spirits what the microbreweries did for beer, and cash in on “the consumer perception that booze produced in smaller quantities are more refined.” Just like the beer people, some the spirits folks are now also opening microdistillery-restaurants.
MOre on : https://reveries.com/cool_news/2004/may/may_5b.html
