Lifted Spirits

Liquor is booming nowadays. It seems like everybody is opening up a distillery making essentially craft liquor all over the country. And I love it. The first weekend in Kansas City I visited one called Lifted Spirits for a free tour.

Most distilleries do pretty much the same thing, starting with the process and ending with a taste of the product. How they do the stuff in the middle is as different as the people who are running the business. Lifted Spirits is in a small warehouse in Kansas City so they source grain and water locally and make some pretty unique products.

The scale is so different from the big places like Wild Turkey. They mash the grain in that small beige box with CME on the side. It’s slightly larger than a computer from the 1990s.

I really liked the behind the scenes view of the still, though. I’ve heard countless descriptions of the copper plates in a column still but this was the first time I’d ever seen what they really mean. Typical engineer, I loved the stuff taken apart.

Those stainless steel tubes above get stacked on top of each other and the alcohol journeys downward through them as it condenses.

Copper plates are installed inside the stainless steel tube sections and are vital to the chemical reaction that separates the different types of alcohol into something drinkable. The distillation process separates the awful tasting alcohols that will kill you or make you blind like acetone and methanol out first because they boil first. Then you get the “heart”, the ethanol that can be aged into really tasty stuff, and at the end you get stuff like butyl alcohol or “fusel” alcohol, which is German for “bad liquor”.

As the alcohol condenses into liquid it coats the copper plates which react with the the sulfur yeast creates when it ferments. Sulfur provides a foul taste, so copper traps it, creating copper sulfate which builds up and eventually has to be cleaned off. I’m told dirty plates smell like rotten eggs.

Anyway, the fermented grain that’s essentially turned into bad beer goes in that big tub and is heated up, boiling off all of the alcohol.  The column of stainless steel and copper gets installed to the left of the big pot where you can see all the valves. Different types of alcohol (this time I mean vodka, gin, absinth, whiskey…) required a different trip through the plates so they can use just one or all of them.

Eventually the distiller is satisfied with the liquor from the process and ages it in barrels. It still amazes me that the charring is required to do the magic.

Whiskey is pretty simple but other liquors use different grains. Lifted Spirits makes gins, vodkas, and absinth as well. The various plants are steeped in the liquor and examples are used show tasters what a little juniper or coriander or even jalapeño does to add a unique flavor to gin or vodka.

I was impressed with how good their whiskey was despite it’s very young age. I suspect that might be due to the relatively small size of the barrels.

For the gin lovers…

Of course I had a glass of their whiskey before walking home. I often wonder about tipping bartenders. I just want my stuff transferred from the bottle to a glass. It’s not an art like the cocktails that require mixing ingredients and ice and the correct amount of shaking and sprigs of plants or fruits and facing the judgment of hard to please customers. Should I get a break on my tip because I gave them a break? Although I have found that bigger tips get more generous pours for the second round.

~ Freddy