The Benefits of Real Ingredients
By Litty Mathew
When you make anything with real ingredients, it will always taste better. Guaranteed. (Have you tasted margarine next to butter?) At Greenbar Distillery, we’re all about real ingredient spirits. What’s that, you ask? It’s when you have to pick something off a living plant and use it to flavor alcohol.
There was a time we almost lost our way. We listened to the flavor-industry experts. They told us we’d never be able to scale up, get consistency or stability without synthetic flavors. They scared us good so we asked for a sample of their “lemon” flavor. We stirred it into a sample batch. There were no further instructions. It was so easy we almost fell for it. Until we tasted it.
But here’s the thing. The synthetic lemon tasted like what I imagine an all-purpose kitchen cleaner would taste like. You know what I mean. It had a sharp and industrial taste with a hint of irritation.
No thank you.
Organic Lemon Grove in California
With real ingredient spirits, it’s a whole other game. There’s all the choosing of ingredients, the washing, the prepping, the zesting, the wiping of the brow, the constant tasting. It’s so much work. But so worth it for the real flavor. We happily went back to our real ingredient methods and our real ingredients spirits.
The problems the experts mentioned — scalability, consistency and stability? Those are real, everyday challenges. And we work very hard to overcome them and make our spirits taste like fresh food.
