The market · Spirits · Northern and Central Europe
Vodka
Spirit distilled close to neutral and cut to bottling strength. What's left to taste is the base — wheat, rye or potato — and the texture.
clean · neutral · faintly sweet grain
Kinds
- Wheat
- Soft, faintly sweet; the most common.
- Rye
- Peppery and drier.
- Potato
- Rounder and creamier.
Knowing it
- Where to buy
- A mid-priced bottle for drinking. For infusions the cheapest clean one is fine — the infusion is the flavour.
- A little history
- Poland and Russia both claim it, and it's been drunk across northern and eastern Europe for centuries.
- Worth knowing
- The blank canvas for infusions: hot chillies in an hour or two, citrus peel in a day, vanilla in a week. Taste often and strain when it's right — it doesn't stop there. A cream siphon charged with N2O forces flavour into the solids in minutes.