I’m William Broder, I’m one of the employees here at Old Fourth Distillery.
And I’m Craig Moore, one of the founders and owners of Old Fourth Distillery.
Gin, kind of the way we look at it is the world’s first flavored vodka.
So we start with a base neutral spirit that we do from wheat.
Distill that to neutrality, you know 190 proof or 95% and we’ll actually put it back in
the still and vapor infuse our recipe, which you know, has quite a bit of juniper berries,
cardamon, coriander, a few other things and some fresh citrus.
We have our little gin head just above it, which we fill with our ingredients, vaporize
the spirit.
It’s like a really intense tea maceration where that vapor works through and sucks out
that gin flavor.
The pot on the far side is actually filled with our spirit.
Just above that is our gin head, which has our satchel of ingredients.
The spirit in the pot is being heated, we hit that 170, 180 mark, that sweet spot where
alcohol starts to boil, and that alcohol will start to vaporize in the pot, up through the
gin head where it kind of exposes to that satchel of ingredients.
It actually has a pipe up top that comes straight across and comes into a pipe at the bottom
of the first column, where that vapor will kind of travel through down into column one.
As it gets to the bottom it will actually raise to the top and hit a cooling element
right of the top of that top section and re-condense and trickled down as a liquid and move back
into the pot and it’ll actually kind of do this circular motion which we call reflux
which happens rather quickly for gin infusion.
And then as it gets to a certain strength or a certain proof, it’ll actually move
from that first column, and there’s a pipe that comes across in the back into our condenser,
you know, that gin-flavored vapor will then re-condense in our condenser and spitting
out as liquid really strong, really powerful gin.
Rather slowly and we’re here for about eight hours a day watching our spirit collect.
We actually have a really good relationship with Oakland Cemetery and in fact that last
distiller to close his doors back in 1906 was the R.M. Rose company R.M. Rose.
He’s buried in the Oakland Cemetery.
We went over there to check it out and we noticed that there were all these great juniper
bushes growing near his grave, and we thought it would be an interesting idea to do a fresh
juniper berry maceration.
What we use to vapor-infuse juniper into our spirit are your typical, dried juniper berries,
right, so we use that because when they dry, those oils inside the berry really get released
and that makes it available for you to vapor infuse.
We thought we would sort of take it to the next level and take freshly-picked juniper
berries, soak those berries in the finished spirt to give the gin a little bit of a fresh
juniper flavor as well, juniper being the number one ingredient.
That is the only ingredient you have to use to legally call gin, gin.
One of the things that we wanted to do was put forth more citrus notes.
Gin is enjoying a strong resurgence in the United States right now and the reason for
that is the variety of gins that you can get.
The craft distillation boom is creating variety and just bringing forth a lot of creativity.
We took all of 2015 to develop our gin recipe, where we would make four gins, we would take
it out into the market, talk with bartenders, mixologists, gin enthusiasts, just anyone
who had a plate for gin, sort of develop a consensus winner and a consensus feedback
on that gin and then we would come back and we would make four more and then take those
four into the market and overtime we were able to develop a recipe that we felt, umm,
was both unique but also still conveyed, you know, the true spirit of what gin is.
Hand-crafted fine southern spirit, that’s what we call it.
We’re the first distillery in the city of Atlanta since 1906.
We started with vodka and then just distilled it until we got to 190 and then gin was really
a passion.
We thought we’ve got a cool space in a cool neighborhood, we’ve got an opportunity to
bring Atlanta it hasn’t had in over at that point 105 years, so we thought it a good business
opportunity but just a fun thing to do for the city that we love.