What Is a Craft Distillery?
- Jul 17, 2021
- 167
- tiantai
By now, most of us are familiar with craft beer and breweries, but the focus on transparency, quality, and personality that we see from this industry isn’t limited to beer. Craft distilled liquors are also surging in popularity. But what exactly does that mean?To start, let’s define distillation or distilling.
What is Distillation?
Distillation is the process of taking a fermented alcohol base and making it ‘harder’. During fermentation, yeast takes sugar and separates it into alcohol at CO2, but at a certain point, the yeast can’t survive very high amounts of alcohol. So, to make a hard liquor or spirit, a second step is necessary. Distilling takes it to that next level, separating additional alcohol out with evaporation and condensation.
What Is Craft Distilling?
So, what makes distilling ‘craft’? This word typically describes a food or drink which is made by a small company or an individual in a traditional or non-mechanized way.
Generally, to be considered a craft liquor, it should have at least a few of the following characteristics: smaller batch size, produced by a small independent business, high-quality products, associated with authentic values, and produced through relatively traditional methodologies.
Craft Distilling Today
The development of column distilling eventually led to the rise of commercial distilling, and later, to the renaissance of small-scale spirit distillation. This rise hasn’t looked much like the craft brewing boom, though. A couple of big reasons for this are that it’s still illegal to home-brew liquor and that startup costs are significantly higher than for breweries.
Today, craft distilling is an exciting, growing industry with new businesses popping up all over the place. With so many eager to latch onto the trend, some companies are more loyal to the ideals of craft production than others. For instance, some companies market their products as if they were produced grain-to-glass even when their products might be better described as ‘blended’, with the spirit being industrially produced and then infused or otherwise altered prior to sale. Many larger distilleries have also created “craft” entities and branches.
To keep things in check amidst all this excitement, groups like the American Distilling Institute and the American Craft Spirits association have formed. They have come up with their own definitions for what makes a craft liquor, including production limits as well as company values, and award certifications to producers that apply and meet the requirements.
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