#120 - Maxime Girardin

So the people listening to this podcast are usually well informed about the way of making wines, the fermentation and all the stuff.

How do you actually make spirits? So this is many distillation.

So I mean, I can talk about like the way we do it because unlike wine, there is like many different ways to doing spirits because it depends on what kind of spirits you make.

what kind of steel you use, what kind of ingredients you use in the first place.

Because even vodka, which may sound like it's the most standardized, almost basic, I mean, I disagree with that, but many people see it as a basic spirit, can be made from potatoes, from wheat, from cornstarch, from anything, really.

And this changes the way you actually process the product.

But essentially, it's about... turning the starch from products into sugar and then converting sugar into alcohol.

And then you concentrate alcohol through a first distillation.

And then you just add different distillations to either increase the ABV of your product or to refine the product, basically.

And that's for what you call the neutral grain distillation.

So neutral grain spirit.

In our case, if you use grain-based spirits.

And so that's for like the white alcohol, let's say.

And then there's a whole other part for gins and liquors.

So when you add flavor to it.

So the maceration process for each of the botanicals, then the distillation process because you want to have stable products.

So you have to distillate what you've macerated and then you blend your white spirit together with your flavored white spirit that you've done through the maceration and the distillation.

And then you blend that together and you can make gin or liquors if you add sugar on top.

So that's like the main thing.

So first you have to do your white spirit and then you can add water if you want to make vodka or add flavors if you want to make gins or liquors.

But I mean, there's a lot to be said about it because if you, I don't know if we have time to go into a lot more details.

But if you, in our case, I can explain like the main difference with the products.

First, can you just tell me what is distillation? Fermentation is sugar into alcohol plus CO2.

What is distillation?

Basically, the distillation is about separating and choosing the different molecules that you're going to keep after distillation.