Vodka can be made using a variety of ferments, but 60% of it is just water. Water quality has a great influence on Vodka’s taste.
California’s drought resulted in water issues. So Vodka producer Hanger one came up with a sustainable source of water. The company started to use water collected from San Francisco’s fog for vodka production.
Fog-catching is a known technique, but fog catching for vodka is new. FogQuest is an organization famous for fog catching. It has been catching fog in the mountains of Africa, Asia and Latin America since early 2000.
They use a special net to capture the fog for water. These nets have a potential to collect approximately 3-4 litres of water per square meter in a day. FogQuest usually makes fog collectors of 40 square meters. Similar kind of net-like fog collectors is used by Hanger one. Last year the company collected enough water for this year’s batch production.
The company named the vodka as Fog Point Vodka. The vodka from fog is sustainable, but there’s a point when you have to wonder about taste. Fortunately, the Fog Point Vodka seems to taste good. Shoemaker the head distiller says that “Fog Point apparently tastes like light floral notes, little honeysuckle, citrus, almost like an Asian pear.”
Due to global warming, the amount of fog in the bay area has decreased. The lack of fog has influenced the cost of Vodka. Fog isn’t cheap!
“Over the last 60+ years there’s been about a 35% decrease in the frequency of fog along the coast”- Todd Dawson, an environmental scientist at UC Berkeley.
In an effort to promote water conservation and sustainable water harvesting methods Hangar One has raised a toast for the environment. Vodka from fog will help in raising awareness about water-conservation efforts.
Bottling San Francisco’s fog won’t keep it from thinning, but Nature’s resources are worth both toasting and saving.