Square One Organic Spirits

The Free Bacchus Story

Allison Evanow had six-month-old twins and woke in the night with the whole idea already formed. Earlier that day she had seen an advertisement in Food & Wine for an American vodka calling itself all natural, and her thought, as she told C-VILLE Weekly in 2020, was that if it was all natural, why not go all the way to organic. She wrote down a name before morning. Square One: start at square one and do it the right way.

Vodka is the one category built on tasting of as little as possible, and the cheapest route there is whatever grain is cheapest that year. Evanow chose rye, which is neither cheap nor neutral. It carries a peppery, faintly bready weight into the glass that most vodka spends money taking out. Square One is made from 100% organic American rye, fermented, run once through a four-column still and lightly carbon filtered, at a distillery in Rigby, Idaho.

The certification is where this gets unusual, and it is worth explaining, because looking for it the obvious way ends in a dead end. Square One has no entry of its own in the USDA's organic register. What the register holds is the distillery — Distilled Resources, Inc. of Rigby, certified by Oregon Tilth — with its certified products listed one by one underneath it. Square One Vodka is on that list, certified since 16 May 2012, and so is the organic rye alcohol it is made from. The certificate is real. It is filed under the name of the people who run the still.

The flavoured bottlings sit on the same certificate — Basil, Bergamot, Cucumber, Botanical — and that is more than a footnote. Evanow's argument has always been that the flavour should come out of a plant rather than out of a laboratory, and an organic certificate on each infusion is the part of that argument you can check.

One thing to know before you buy. Square One is no longer independent: Uncle Nearest acquired it in May 2024, with Evanow staying on in a leadership role. We record ownership wherever it changes, partly because who owns a house is part of what you are buying, and partly because a certificate follows an operation rather than a founder.