Small-batch Pau Maui Vodka from the Hawaiian heartland is the artisanal spirit your home mixology deserves.
Cheap, boring and industrial, vodka has long suffered from a poor reputation. However, good vodkas do exist, just as there are be good and bad whiskies, or great and terrible rums.
Vodka’s flavour profile and complexity all depend on the raw materials used in its production, and as you might have noticed, small-batch craft vodka is enjoying a global renaissance as discerning punters sip spirits that – by their very nature – are elegant in their simplicity and free of flaws because there’s simply no room to hide any.
This newfound passion for premium vodka has given birth to brands like Pau Mau Vodka, a silky-smooth, all-natural, gluten-free spirit from Hawaii that’s the perfect base for cocktails and an essential for martiniophiles. And guess what you lucky devils? It’s now available in Hong Kong!
Crafted in Upcountry Maui by the Hali’imaile Distilling Company, the secret to this terrific spirit is the island’s pure spring water, the distillery’s unique glass still, and the world-famous Maui Gold Pineapple.
We all know vodka can be made from almost anything. So why is harvesting the Maui Gold Pineapple, which takes 18 months to grow and only ripens in the field for 2-3 days, the starting point of Pau Maui Vodka’s origin story?
Pineapples grown in Maui have the benefit of warm sunny days, cool nights, fresh water, and volcanic soil, allowing for a very clean and delicious fruit. Maui’s Golden Pineapples are an especially sweet take on this tropical favourite, with high sugar content and low acidity making them perfect for fermentation. The fruit is only picked at optimum ripeness before being peeled and crushed at the local distillery, where the fruit’s pure juice is made into a mash that’s fermented with natural yeast.
Another unconventional feature of the Pau Maui Vodka production process is the laboratory-grade glass still engineered and designed by Master Distiller Mark Nigbur. Copper stills have traditionally been used to eradicate the unpleasant sulphur smell found in grain-based spirits, but because the Pau Maui Vodka distillation process begins with such a clean fruit base, the team opted to avoid copper – which can also alter flavours during distillation – and go with glass instead.
The resulting 96% ABV spirit is then filtered once through volcanic rock – this is Hawaii after all – and again through activated carbon, before being tamed to a mellow, soul-soothing 40% ABV with crystal clear Hawaiian spring water.
So what does Pau Maui Vodka taste like? It has an incomparable silky-smooth and rounded mouthfeel that is all-natural, meaning that no glycerin has been added, as is the case with many mass-produced vodka brands.
Containing just the lingering memory of pineapple on its zingy yet clean, Sunday-morning-silk-sheets finish, Pau Mau Vodka has an elusive sweetness on the front palate compared to grain vodkas, ensuring it lends itself to almost any drink you can imagine.
Infinitely smooth and endlessly versatile, Pau Maui Vodka delivers the Aloha spirit we think you deserve a dose of after the year that was.
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