The Vicar's Son Coffee Vodka

This smooth vodka has been distilled using Allpress Espresso Blend coffee beans. The coffee flavour is intense in this batch as it is reflecting the profile of the beans, despite the intensity of the flavour the spirit is perfectly clear. Beautifully presented bottle & wooden box, stunning! 

• Distillery: Vicar's Son
• Type: Vodka
  
• Region: Auckland, New Zealand
  
• Alcohol: 40%
  
• Volume: 700ml
• Goes with: Neat or over ice, premium soda, fresh garnish
  

"We took 80 Grams of Allpress Espresso Blend beans, gave them a coarse ground and then extracted the flavour via our vapour infused extraction process using six extraction cycles. Then distilled (for a fourth time) with the Vodka we made ourselves from Gladfield Barley." Vicar's Son

"Lucie is originally from Zurich and Stewart is from New Zealand and we enjoy trying different hand crafted, grain to glass, barley based gins and vodkas from around the world. We really admired what the smaller distilleries were able to produce when unconcerned about mass production techniques. We also really admired the Distillers that make their own Grain Neutral Spirit (GNS) as their barley base spirit as part of the grain to glass gin and vodka journey, there are only a few in New Zealand that do this and they always seem to be amongst the Gold Medal Winners in competitions.

 For several years we produced barley based gin and vodka for our own and friends' consumption and refined and refined our techniques. Then Covid-19 came along and gave us the impetus to get started commercially. After all, a good gin is more vital in a pandemic than not. So with a combination of Kiwi ingenuity and Swiss attention to detail we got going.

Our goal is simply to produce the highest quality gin and vodka we can. Early on we decided on a few guiding principles in order to get us started:

We will make our own grain neutral spirit and not buy-in mass produced base spirit from multi-national providers because we want to ensure the highest quality and traceability by controlling the entire production and distillation process. We only use Barley from Gladfield in Canterbury for the fermentation.

We would find the most advanced still we could, to aid in the extraction of the 15 botanicals to form the layers of flavour for our gin. Our still does this through a liquid infusion extraction process that involves circulating the GNS through the botanicals a minimum of thirteen times which extracts all the flavour – it’s why our gin packs such a multi-dimensional hit.

We also decided to use Antipodes water to cut the final spirit down to the desired alcohol percentage. We think Antipodes has one of the finest neutral profiles available and complements our gin and vodka. We use the same bottled water that you buy in restaurants.

We don’t use any filtering techniques to add clarity or flavour – what you see and taste is exactly what came from the still.

Finally, we decided that in order to be able to control the process and ensure the highest quality, we would only produce in very small numbers – most batches are a maximum of seven bottles. That’s why we sell by the batch, because of the hand crafted nature of what we do each batch is slightly different and you get to choose your preferred characteristics. Selling by the batch also gives us the freedom to try new combinations and techniques - sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't but we will have fun doing it."

Lucie & Stewart

• Bronze - 2021 NZ Spirits Award