Ari Sussman can quote the Code of Federal Regulations definition of vodka word for word: “neutral spirits” made “to be without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color.”
The co-owner of Ann Arbor Distilling Company is obviously paying the feds no mind: he says the vodka he’s making a block off Main St. aims for a flavor profile that is “creamy, [with] pear notes, a little banana sometimes; a silky mouth feel, very smooth, very little heat.”
Even tasteless vodka, adds Sussman’s business partner Rob Cleveland, is better than bad vodka. “If, God forbid, you should open a bottle of Popov”–the brand favored by students, cheapskates, and street vagrants–and take a swig, “you get heat,” and if you’ve got a good nose, “you might detect acetone and methanol,” impurities that are thrown off at the beginning and end of a distillation run, and that most high-end producers let slide down the drain–though Cleveland says “some people even like the taste.” Mass-produced vodkas are engineered for uniformity, so they’ll taste the same year after year. Sussman is proud that no batch of their vodka tastes exactly like any other.
Ann Arbor Distilling makes vodka, rum, and gin in a building of heartbreaking beauty, if you go for early industrial chic. The brick structure with its high chimney used to be a flour mill. Perched on the edge of the valley carved by now-buried Allen Creek, its setting looks a bit like nineteenth-century New England. The bottles of vodka, rum, and gin that come out of it are squat and almost medicinal looking. Their black-and-white labels (which give the hyper-local origin “Water Hill, Michigan”) are hand numbered and initialed.
Cleveland says the building was considerably less picturesque when he bought it from the Ann Arbor Art Center in 2009: “It was a fixer-upper.” He didn’t even know one of its most striking features was there: the wooden ceiling that arches over the great still was underneath a dropped ceiling. He discovered it only when he was trying to fix the exhaust fan.
The partners opened a tasting room in December, and more recently it has opened for happy hour, serving cocktails. Sussman is the distiller, but he says his original interest was wine, not spirits. About ten years ago he networked his way into an apprenticeship at a small village winery in the Languedoc region of France: “very rustic, but the product was good. It was from-field-to-bottle winemaking. You prune the vines, you pick the grapes, press the grapes, and make wine.” The winery also produced a little bit of brandy, which was where his thoughts eventually turned when he came back to Michigan. “I liked the idea of field-to-table winemaking but came back during a year of rough harvests” and realized the capriciousness of the wine business was not for him. He worked at eve the restaurant (then in Kerrytown) for several years, and then, drawing on what he had learned about brandy-making in France, wangled a job helping manage MSU’s distillery. MSU’s ag school has been a huge force in Michigan’s craft alcohol industries–first wine, then beer, and now micro-distilleries, he says.
The technicalities don’t make for an exciting read, but the length of the “stovepipe” in Sussman’s still is what allows him to start with raw ingredients, which very few micro-distilleries do. Shorter cooling stacks simply don’t have the power to produce all the alcohol on their own and rely on added ethanol. His vodka starts in the mash tub with corn, a little wheat, and enzymes. (Sussman says the mash itself is actually a pretty tasty product: “kind of like sweet grits.”) It eventually ends up as 90-proof vodka, and in the tasting room he shows the peculiar sniffing technique that allows you to pick up those banana and pear flavors before the alcohol deadens your sense of smell.
The small still you see when you walk in the door is used for gin. (The room looks like a 1950s chemistry lab, with beakers, graduated cylinders, and glass bottles of colored substances.) It’s where his own vodka is redistilled with various “botanicals,” then blended together. “Do a finger tasting,” he urges, meaning swipe a finger through the liquid dripping out. This particular botanical was coriander–his gin combines this with about eight other botanicals, juniper being the best known.
Currently, A2DC sells only a white rum (made from blackstrap molasses imported from Cajun country), vodka, and gin, all three of which can be drunk neat, though the happy hour showcases some of the cocktails you can make with them, like White Russians, made of their own coffee liqueur. They can’t sell the coffee liqueur by the bottle yet, but they’re working their way through the federal and state paperwork required for each new product. They’ll be eventually expanding into apple brandy and whisky–bourbon and rye.
Cleveland says, “We make all our own bitters, syrups, ginger beer.” As for food, often available are “my brother-in-law’s hand-cut potato chips.” His brother-in-law is chef Brandon Johns, owner of the Grange. “He’s thinking of doing some other food for us too.”
Ann Arbor Distilling Company, 220 Felch, 882-2169. Tasting room: Tues.-Sat. 4-10 p.m., Sun. 2-8 p.m. Happy hour cocktails: Tues.-Thurs. 4-6 p.m. Closed Mon. annarbordistilling.com.
