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Ansley Coale and Jorg Rupf played major
roles in bringing old-fashioned European distilling methods
to California in the early 1980s. Twenty years later,
they decided to turn vodka into something genuinely wonderful.
Jorg Rupf brought a German
Holstein pot still to California in 1982. He founded
St
George Spirits and began to hand-distill
pears, cherries, and raspberries, plus such exotic items
as kiwis and quinces. In 1996, his pear brandy won best
of show in the prestigious Destillata competition (Austria).
Also in 1982, Ansley Coale partnered
with 10th-generation French distiller Hubert Germain-Robin
to found ALAMBIC in Mendocino County, where an antique
cognac pot still turns out some of the world’s
finest spirits. Hubert was the first distiller to make
serious use of high-quality grapes for distillation.
In 1998, the Robb Report named Germain-Robin XO the
best distilled spirit in the whole wide world.
In August, 2001, sitting at Jorg's kitchen
table, the two men agreed that there was a lot of room
for improvement in how vodka was made and in how producers
talked about it. Grey Goose and Belvedere had recently
created a market for $30 vodkas, and that’s what
a hand-made vodka using real ingredients would have to
cost.
Jorg spent months developing some very
special vodkas, vodkas that both 1) taste great and 2)
keep their quality after you opened the bottle, which
is technically very difficult when the distiller is working
with fresh fruit. Jorg drew on 20 years of experimentation
and experience in preparing and distilling fresh fruit.
Meanwhile, Ansley designed the package
and worked on ways to communicate what was special
about these vodkas. He chose the name Hangar One because
Jorg's distillery
was located in a former military
structure on the old
Alameda Naval Air Station.
The first bottles were put on the
market in April, 2002. What happened next was amazing:
three magazines named Hangar One “vodka of the year.” Respected
experts called it the finest vodka ever produced. The
phone began to ring, a novel experience for men who had
up to now produced very limited amounts of “niche” spirits.
The response to Hangar One vodka
was so positive that Jorg prepared to move into a larger
hangar. Ansley founded Craft Distillers to market the
vodkas (along with the original Germain-Robin & St
George brandies & liqueurs).
Ansley and Jorg hope that people’s
experience with Hangar One makes them want to explore
the rich world of small-production hand-distilled spirits.
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