Review: Our/Berlin Vodka
What happens when one of the biggest vodka producers in the world decides to go hyperlocal? Our/Vodka, that’s what.
Absolut’s audacious Our/Vodka project, 3 1/2 years in the making, began rolling out earlier this year: The idea, to produce a number of “glocal” renditions of the iconic spirit. It works like this. Absolut selects a city, where it funds and builds a distillery, then hands the reins over to a local entrepreneur distiller. They then take the brand and run with it, making vodka using a recipe provided by Absolut but using only local ingredients and water. Bottles are small (just 350ml) and feature a generic label indicating the city the vodka came from. The idea (in part) is to see how each city’s vodka compares — essentially looking at how terroir impacts “neutral” spirits. Up first: Berlin (reviewed here) and Detroit.
By the way, depending on which bottle you get, you’ll notice the label says it is “vodka with a flavor.” Says Absolut: “The thing with the German label is that when we first did them, we didn’t know for sure if our patented yeast (that has been developed by the Pernod Ricard research center) and that can carry flavor fractions through fermentation, would pass without having to put “flavor” on the bottle. Now we know that we don’t need it.”
Finally, let’s look at Our/Vodka Berlin — aka “Local Vodka by Our/Berlin” — the first product to come from this project. The nose is extremely mild, just hints here and there of bananas, walnuts, orange candies, and cherries. Nothing major, but enough to make things interesting. The body is even less punchy. Very simple, some mild fruit flavors — again those lightly sweetened orange candies — are the most evident secondary characteristic, but on the whole Our/Berlin comes across as simple to the point of being almost too clean. Our/Vodka is bizarrely bottled at just 75 proof, which is part of the reason why the flavor is so neutral — almost like sipping on water, which makes it go down much too easily. That’s both a good and a bad thing, but it does set an interesting starting point for this series. Hopefully we’ll be able to compare it the vodkas that come from Detroit and elsewhere down the line.
A- / $18 (350ml) / ourvodka.com
Our/Berlin Vodka
$18
Haha funcky bottle