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Vitae Spirits is a family owned and run craft distillery in Charlottesville, Virginia that produces small batch spirits made from molasses to glass. We focus on quality and hands-on artisanal values. Our customer connoisseurs drive us to innovate and provide exciting new tastes as well as deliver products that we believe someday will be called classics. We focus on authenticity and transparency and welcome our customers to visit behind the scenes as frequently as possible so that they recognize their central role in our mission.

part of trail

Virginia Spirits Trail

OUR COMMUNITY = OUR TERROIR
At Vitae Spirits we aim to redefine “terroir”. What makes our products unique isn’t solely the influence of the region’s physical environment, but also their place within a community. In one way or another each liquor made by Vitae Spirits strives to reflect a unique combination of influences from those that call central Virginia their home. For examples, take a look at our Golden Rum or Coffee Liqueur, or Damson Gin, or Conifer, or even our collaboration with the award winning botanical artist Lara Call Gastinger. It is all of these small contributions from a community that added together make Vitae Spirits products unique, not just the physical makeup of the ingredients, and it is through this uniqueness that patrons are drawn to visit the community; the only way to begin to grasp what makes a community special is to bathe in it and absorb it first-hand.

OUR PROCESS
Vitae Spirits Distillery prides itself on taking basic raw ingredients and turning them into faithful expressions of their botanical origins. To do this we rely on our custom built copper pot still from Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Louisville, Kentucky and custom built temperature-controlled fermentation tanks from Custom Metalcraft of Springfield, Missouri. Additionally, we do not pass our spirits through fine filters or activated carbon that can strip delicate flavors nor are the spirits ever stored in plastic, only stainless steel, wood, and glass.

THE STILL
Our still was custom designed in collaboration with the engineers and artisans at Vendome Copper & Brass works, America’s premier still manufacturer. It is a 250 gal copper pot still with a rectifying column and a tapered alembic helmet that harkens back to the distilling traditions of Scotland and France. These features make our still ideal for fine-tuning the capture of the very best spirits from our small batch productions.

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