The First Pour: How a Root Vegetable Became a Spirit
Most great spirits start with grain, grape, or cane. Ours starts in the soil — with the humble sugar beet. This is the story of how we turned a field crop into something you sip slowly.
Most great spirits begin with something familiar: grain for whisky, grapes for brandy, agave for tequila. Apollo Nova begins somewhere stranger and, we think, more honest — in a muddy field, with the sugar beet. A crop more associated with table sugar than with anything you'd pour over ice.
It took us three years of failed batches to understand that the beet doesn't want to imitate other spirits. It wants to be itself: clean, faintly earthy, with a sweetness that arrives late and never overstays.
Why the beet?
Sugar beet is one of the most efficient sugar crops on Earth. It grows well in cool northern soil, needs no tropical climate, and converts sunlight into fermentable sugar with remarkable thrift. For a distillery that wanted to make something local rather than imported, it was the obvious — if unfashionable — choice.
“We didn't set out to make a beet spirit. We set out to make the best spirit we could from what actually grows here. The beet chose us.”
That decision shaped everything that followed: how we ferment, how slowly we distill, and why our bottle tastes the way it does.
From root to glass, in four steps
- Harvest — beets are lifted in autumn, when their sugar content peaks.
- Ferment — wild and cultured yeasts turn that sugar into a low-strength wash.
- Distill — slow copper-pot runs concentrate the character and strip the rough edges.
- Rest — the spirit settles before bottling, rounding its sharper notes.
The result isn't a vodka and isn't a brandy. It sits in its own quiet category — and that's exactly where we wanted it.
What's next
Over the coming months we'll open up the still here on the Journal: tasting notes, the cocktails we're proudest of, and the occasional honest account of a batch that didn't work. Pull up a stool.