Now, first off, we struggled with this, so let’s get one thing straight. According to Ian, Vitae’s owner, Vitae is pronounced “VEE-tye” (almost like maitai). Not… like the five other ways we tried to butcher it. Anyway. While some folks think of Charlottesville as a center for the “spirit of the South”, we found other, more modern spirits alive and kicking when we visited recently. Vitae Spirits, a growing craft distillery in Charlottesville, VA’s Rose Hill neighborhood, offers some of the tastiest liquors we’ve had the pleasure to taste, along with an amazing story.
Boyfriend Perspective: Local gin? Local liquor? Great bartending? Yes. Yes, please.
We’ve long been fans of their offerings, and were thrilled when liquor stores in Richmond and along the I-64 corridor in Virginia finally started stocking some of their products. But to get the full understanding of just who these folks are and why they’re doing what they’re doing, it’s essential to get into the space and really feel and see all the dedication and passion they put into this industry.
Table of Contents
The (new) history of Vitae Spirits
Dr. Ian Glomski spent most of his career in a lab. As a microbiologist working for the University of Virginia, he taught future scientists and ran research on (among other things) the workings of anthrax. A few of his previous students were actually in the tasting room while we were – he pointed them out and proudly told us that one is an expert on Ebola, and the other an emerging diseases expert who travels around the world.
But then, in 2014, Ian’s self-described midlife crisis hit, and he came back to one of his first alchemical loves: alcohol. In college, he had experimented frequenting with brewing beer.
Boyfriend Perspective: He literally told us that you can buy the components to brew beer when you’re 18 – you just have to wait a little longer to enjoy the finished product!
Now, as he looked for a new career, he drew up a business plan and started searching for a location so he could tap into Virginia’s storied and reemerging distilled spirits market. Currently, there are 72 distilleries and counting operating in Virginia – when Ian first registered Vitae in 2015, his new distillery was only #26. He stumbled upon an old school building listed on Charlottesville’s Craigslist, and after a year of construction and retrofitting, Ian fired up the stills for the first time in late 2015. He called his new distillery Vitae Spirits, after aqua vitae, Latin for “water of life.” They launched their first products in 2016, and opened their tasting room in 2017, and have been growing by leaps and bounds ever since.
What exactly is a craft distillery?
From an objective perspective, craft distilleries are designated based on their ownership (can’t be more than 10% owned by a larger company) and yield (under a certain number of gallons per year), among other factors.
From an emotional perspective, craft is so much more. In winemaking, the terroir – or, all the environmental factors that give each vineyard’s grapes their own special twist – is essential. It’s what can give a winery that “X factor.” What Ian calls “community terroir” is the influence here, because the things that make Vitae Spirits so special happen because of community collaboration, not just because of the natural environment.
Vitae’s distillery in Charlottesville leverages partnerships with local Mud House coffee to flavor their coffee liqueur, restaurants in Charlottesville like next door Ace Biscuit & Barbecue for the grilled sugar cane in their golden rum, and the flavor for their pawpaw liqueur came from Charlottesville legend Thomas Jefferson’s favorite dessert (pawpaw custard). Plus, their gin is the only one Ian knows of that’s made with bitter oranges, which are a hardy variety that he picks wild from a neighbor’s yard.
Even when it comes to their final products, Ian will proudly tell you that, while the big companies have exact formulas and precise data to tell them when they’ve reached their peak distillation, the final deciding factor of everything they do at Vitae is human interaction and opinion, not the data.
BF Perspective: They don’t want to be Bacardi, or bigger than what they are. They’re like the neighborhood restaurant that’s really good as what it does – and that keeps their feet uniquely on the ground. Ian even said to us, “It’s explicit in my business plan that I don’t want to be an international brand. I understand the value of Big Macs tasting the same in Tokyo Paris and New York – but that’s not what I want to do.”
And boy, are we glad!
The Vitae Spirits distillery tour
Visiting Vitae’s Charlottesville distillery is a treat, even when you aren’t getting a comprehensive tour. We’ve dropped by for cocktails and tastings a few times in the past, and have always enjoyed talking with the bartenders and other patrons. But today, Ian offered to show us around and share his experience as a distiller and small business in Charlottesville. When you walk into the tasting room, you can see the spotlessly clean working stills and other equipment walled in by glass. (I’ve always wanted to get a good picture here, but the glass makes it… tough.)
But at long last, Ian ushered us into the still room, and started to teach us about all of the art and science that goes into making a delicious, quality spirit. We got to taste evaporated cane syrup, the molasses-like substance that makes up the atypical base for all their liquors.
Boyfriend Perspective: Vitae’s gin is the last gin he knows of (outside the Caribbean) that’s still made from a sugar cane base. To my taste, it gives the gin more body. It’s almost syrupy, but isn’t sweet, and has a great, warm citrus nose on it. Meagan doesn’t like it straight, but… damn, it sure is good.
And the cane sugar is so gloopy and hard to work with – which you can see just when you try to get a dollop of it to taste – that they actually keep it in a heated room upstairs and sky drop it from a hole in the ceiling into the pot below!
As we walked, Ian told us that Vitae consistently has to be at the forefront of pushing for legislative changes that will allow Virginians to actually enjoy alcohol beyond beer and wine. Until the last few years, distilleries in Virginia weren’t even allowed to provide tastings – you could only sniff liquor prior to purchase! So, from pushing for tastings to, this past year, being involved in passing a bill that would more fairly compensate distillers for their efforts, Vitae is always focused on improving its community terroir and opening up this strangely taboo world for more people to learn about and enjoy.
From there, Ian showed us how they use steam for sanitization and heating (to work around the flammable nature of their product) and fire closest to hold all their aging barrels of liquor. He even popped a few tops off of tubs so we could get a whiff of liquors in various states of distillation and aging. Let me tell ya, we had some regrets at one point – and we also may still be lacking nose hairs from the smell!
Beyond that, we checked out the bottling area, which is still largely manual and requires 6 people to do efficiently. From pouring to labeling to corking to sealing, we found that they literally (and incredibly) handle and manually quality check every single bottle that goes out the door. That’s the kind of dedication that makes you really want to support a business, right?
While Vitae Spirits is fairly small inside, what it lacks in space it makes up for in passion and knowledge. We walked away feeling like we’d just had a lecture in applied sciences, because we got to learn about everything from working with evaporated cane sugar, to the molecular makeup of liquor, all the way up to what bottling for a craft distillery looks like.
Tasting Vitae Spirits gin, rum, and more
Finally, after our brains had absorbed about all they could, we headed back out to the tasting room to sample some of Vitae’s growing book of liquors and liqueurs. Our favorites are easily the golden rum, the coffee liqueur, and the orange blossom liqueur – all of which taste amazing alone for slow sipping or in cocktails for… less slow sipping 😉
In the tasting room, each person can only have a few ounces of liquor per visit – which amounts to 6 tastings, 2 cocktails, or 3 tastings and 1 cocktail – so you’ll need to plan your tasting carefully based on what you think you may like or what you’ve never tried before.
Boyfriend Perspective: Ask Ian and his bartenders for recommendations – not only for what to taste, but in which order to enjoy them. Then, sip away!
Other things to keep in mind are that liquor tastings aren’t for the faint of taste bud. Happily, their cocktail menu is both comprehensive and delicious, so you won’t miss much if that’s the route you decide to go (instead of sipping). They still had a previous event’s “tiki” cocktail menu live when we visited, so I ordered a very tasty passion fruit hurricane, while Luke enjoyed a beautiful, easy-drinking rum and orange liqueur mixed drink called an “In Bloom.”
We’ve loved Vitae for awhile, but after this visit, we honestly say that plan to keep coming back to Vitae whenever we make a trip to Charlottesville. And, in the meantime, we can’t wait to keep exploring all the ways we can adapt their products to our taste buds at our home bar. Let us know what you think when you visit!
In the meantime, pin it!
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