Craft methods on pot stills come from hundreds of years of experience. They come from small producers -- individual craftsmen working with local ingredients. Each distiller developed personal insights, little idiosyncracies. These skills were passed for centuries from master to apprentice.

Hangar One's production schedule isn't driven by a huge marketing organization. It's driven by the distilling material itself. Jorg Rupf and Lance Winters, our distillers, have to adjust to the seasonality of using fresh ingredients. If the fruit ripens two weeks early, that's when they get to work. Our tangerine flowers and other ingredients arrive fresh from the grower, and our distillers work with them right away.

Fine tuning comes from Jorg and Lance's long experience with distilling small batches of real ingredients. They can draw the best from something as unusual as Buddha's Hand Citrons because they know how to adjust their methods to suit the fruit they're actually working with: many fruits have wonderful attributes that are too subtle to capture easily. Big distillers have trouble working this way.

Craft methods attract people who really, really care about the quality of what they make. Quality comes first, way ahead of anything else. Jorg and Lance are always thinking about what they can do to make something just a little bit better. Their products are an accumulation of dozens of little details, all of them done just right. You can taste how much the distiller cares. It’s what makes genuinely great spirits.

For a third-party discussion on the difference between distillates made on pot stills and distillates from column stills, check out Pete Wells’ Food & Wine article.