Alameda Distillers Release 'San Francisco In A Bottle' - A Vodka Made With Local Fog
ALAMEDA (KPIX) -- San Francisco fog. It's as iconic as the Golden Gate Bridge. So, when the distillers at Alameda-based Hangar 1 Vodka decided to transform an essential vodka ingredient, all they had to do was look across the bay.
"Sixty percent of vodka is water," explains Caley Shoemaker, Hangar One's head distiller. "We started thinking 'what's a way that we can make something that's fun and creative and different but that is gonna have a positive impact on this drought in California'."
On Friday, Hangar 1 released a first-of-its-kind vodka that has been cut and blended with water from San Francisco fog.
"Hangar One is about California and we wanted to make sure that what we were doing really had California in its DNA," Shoemaker said.
Shoemaker says that Hangar 1 worked with FogQuest (http://fogquest.org), a Canadian non-profit that installs fog- and rain-collection systems. They installed fog-catchers throughout the Bay Area and each collector captured between three and five liters per day of fog water for six months.
Now, Hangar 1's limited-edition Fog Point vodka is available for purchase.
A lot of detail went into designing the bottle. It has a copper mesh around the neck meant to suggest the mesh used in the collectors. Air bubbles in the bottle's glass are meant to look like droplets of mist.
The distillery made about 2,500 bottles of Fog Point and the price -- unlike fog -- is quite substantial: $125 per bottle.
Hangar 1 says all profits from the sale of Fog Point "will go to water conservancy in California."