Our Community = Our Terroir
At Vitae Spirits we aim to redefine “terroir”. What makes our products unique isn’t solely the influence of the region’s physical environment, but also their place within a community. In one way or another each liquor made by Vitae Spirits strives to reflect a unique combination of influences from those that call central Virginia their home. For examples, take a look at our Golden Rum or Coffee Liqueur, or Damson Gin, or Conifer, or even our collaboration with the award winning botanical artist Lara Call Gastinger. It is all of these small contributions from a community that added together make Vitae Spirits products unique, not just the physical makeup of the ingredients, and it is through this uniqueness that patrons are drawn to visit the community; the only way to begin to grasp what makes a community special is to bathe in it and absorb it first-hand.
Our Process
Vitae Spirits Distillery prides itself on taking basic raw ingredients and turning them into faithful expressions of their botanical origins. To do this we rely on our custom built copper pot still from Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Louisville, Kentucky and custom built temperature-controlled fermentation tanks from Custom Metalcraft of Springfield, Missouri. Additionally, we do not pass our spirits through fine filters or activated carbon that can strip delicate flavors nor are the spirits ever stored in plastic, only stainless steel, wood, and glass.
The Still
Our still was custom designed in collaboration with the engineers and artisans at Vendome Copper & Brass works, America’s premier still manufacturer. It is a 250 gal copper pot still with a rectifying column and a tapered alembic helmet that harkens back to the distilling traditions of Scotland and France. These features make our still ideal for fine-tuning the capture of the very best spirits from our small batch productions.
A Professor of Microbiology at the University Of Virginia School Of Medicine, Ian has had a profound fascination for over twenty-five years for microbes and how they sculpt our macroscopic world. An experienced brewer, winemaker, cheesemaker, meat curer, kefir culturer, veggie pickler, wild mushroom forager, and infectious disease specialist, anything having to do with microbes turns him on; having trained at the Pasteur Institute of Paris, founded by the father of modern fermentation Louis Pasteur.
