Kania Vodka

We produced our first vodka more than a decade ago from potatoes grown on small farms around Kania Lodge, our home base in Kaszubia. It was truly artisanal. Farmyard manure was used to fertilise the fields. Horses ploughed and tilled the soil. Whole families turned out to harvest the potatoes by hand. At the distillery the fermented mash was distilled just once. This enabled us to retain flavours lost in large-scale commercial vodka production. We soon found that potato variety, soils, and weather influenced tastes from season to season. In fact, no two vintages of our artisanal spirit would ever be the same. So we added potato variety information and the year of production to our labels. Soon some of our best vintages were selling at many times the original release price.

By then we’d created an artisanal brand for export, calling it Vestal after the Roman goddess of purity and the hearth. Vestal was soon being served in venues like the Hotel Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London, swanky places for humble Kaszubian potatoes to end up in. You could also sip it in bars as distant as Sydney and the Maldives. The brand’s reach, prestige and popularity were soon noticed by big international companies and we sold Vestal when a British distiller and distributor made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.

But Kania Vodka, which bears the name of our boutique hotel in Kaszubia, remains firmly in the family. And we are still innovating. We now make both potato and rye vodkas. We age some in oak barrels and with oak chips, giving them a colour and taste redolent of fine Scotch whisky.  We also use fermented grapes from the lodge vineyard to distill a Kania eau de vie which has many of the characteristics of a very fine grappa.