MANUFACTURING PROCESS

At Gripsholm Distillery, we take pride in the efficient and ecologically friendly process we’ve created to bring you the best tasting vodka in the world. Everything we put into Kanon is locally grown, from the organic wheat we start out with down to the water we source from our private well close to the distillery.

We start by heating up a mix of the two and add liquefiying and saccharification enzymes that turn this starchy mix into sugars. Then we add yeast, regulate it all up to just the right temperature to eat away the sugars, and start producing alcohol. What we end up with is a batch of a little bit of everything: proteins, ethanol, methanol, propanol, and isobutanol and a lot of other “nols” with names too hard to pronounce even for us, all in the process of finding the Holy Grail of vodka: Ethanol. Once we’ve got that, all that other stuff? Well, you don’t want any of it in your vodka. Tasty they are not. In fact, they’re just a recipe for a very nasty hangover, which is why we distill the bad stuff away in four different columns leaving only the best.

See, the process of making vodka is a lot like us; the end result has a head, heart, and a tail. When we’re distilling vodka, the batch is divided into these three parts and the heads and tails are packed with the bad alcohols and separated from the hearts, the ‘filet’ of the distillation process. The hearts are then mixed with fresh spring water and bottled. That’s it! No additives, no sugar, just the full taste of grain and spring water.

There’s an old saying that suggests if you repeat a lie enough it’ll come true. Well, to us that’s just repeating a lie until it’s still just a lie. And the biggest Vodka lie of all? Multiple distillation = quality, luxury or better taste. It’s one those other vodkas have been toting around for some time now. Other brands keep distilling their product over and over, including the heads and tails we told you were unnecessary. Why? Because their products aren’t pure enough after the first distillation. This means they have to re-distill and use charcoal filtration to remove the impurities we scare off after a single distillation of Kanon. We only bottle our first run and our heart is all we will ever put into every Kanon bottle or expect you to drink.

But what happens to those byproducts we don’t put into our vodka? Well, we take our duty of disposing that stuff seriously. Fortunately, all of it can be recycled and turned into the biogas used to fuel eco-friendly cars. So our heads and tails get sent away to help cars and public transport vehicles keep rolling without carbon tire-tracks. And finally, to top it off (and contribute even more to the aforementioned lessening of carbon tire-tracks), our entire production process from wheat to bottle is done within a three-mile radius, the way it’s been for nearly 400 years, proving that a commitment to being green and providing a great tasting Vodka definitely go hand in hand.