FAIR. Spirits

The Free Bacchus Story

Vodka is defined in most markets as a spirit made to be without distinctive character. It's the one category on the shelf whose legal identity is an absence, which makes any claim about its raw material harder to substantiate than in almost any other spirit.

FAIR's answer is quinoa from Andean growers, bought on Fairtrade terms and certified organic, distilled in Cognac. The Fairtrade certification is the part worth pausing on, because it audits something organic certification does not: what the farmer was paid and under what terms.

The quinoa comes from Cooperativa Anapqui in the Bolivian Altiplano, around 1,200 independent smallholders, bought direct on Fairtrade terms. It took a two-year project between distillers in Cognac and the Andean growers to work out how to make vodka from quinoa at all.

The quinoa vodka has taken Gold at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. It carries a faint cereal roundness that survives rectification better than a neutral grain base does.

Our standard holds vodka to a higher specificity bar than any other category, because organic certification describes a field and the process that follows is designed to remove what the field produced. A traceable single-origin raw material with an audited supply chain is the kind of evidence that clears it.