A few weeks ago I wrote an article about my first experience with potato vodka and it turned out to be one of the most popular and most often accessed articles on my blog. With all of this interest in the subject I decided to do a little more research and flesh out my knowledge of how vodka is made.

Poland claims to be the home of vodka, although Russia is the country most often associated with the clear spirit. Nevertheless, for this article we will assume Poland's claim to be true.

Until the end of the eighteenth century, vodka was manufactured in Poland mainly from rye, wheat, barley and oats, which were cheap. In the mid-fifteenth century, the price of grain in Poland was a seventh of the price in Western Europe. Through the Hanseatic cities and later using the Dutch fleet, the nobility exported wheat and rye to the Netherlands, Flanders, England, Scotland, France, Novogrod and the Scandinavian peninsula. "Polish grain feeds almost all of King Philip's Netherlands; even the ships of Portugal and other countries travel to Gdansk for Polish grain," wrote the papal nuncio Fulvius Ruggieri in 1565. As farming techniques advanced in the West, the difference in price diminished (by the end of the sixteenth century, Polish grain was only four times cheaper); moreover, political circumstances and the protectionist policies of the western countries hampered export.

Johann Joachim Becher developed a method of producing spirits from potatoes in 1669, but it was not until 1798 that the first instructions for "a practical new way of distilling vodka from potatoes" was published. The history of potato cultivation in Poland had been as spectacular and as full of surprises as in the West. The first tuber arrived in the second half of the seventeenth century, but distillers did not begin to use potatoes on a larger scale until the 1820's. For a long time potatoes dominated production and are again coming into vogue. Most people nowadays automatically assume vodka is made with potatoes, although most of that consumed in the U.S., including the ultra premium brands, are produced from grains.

A century ago, a writer of comedy, Poland's, Aleksander Fredro, compared the making of vodka to the fate of man:

In the distillery, potatoes; in the world, men.

One course of life, one kind of end.

Into four stages their being's arrayed:

During the first it is pulped, cooked and weighed,

In the second fermented, in the third abates,

Until in the fourth, as if rent asunder,

The spirit goes up, and the mash goes under.

Vodka was also made from rutabagas, but the old recipe books warned that "rutabaga vodka must always be purged of its characteristic odor and flavor with birchwood charcoal added to the drawn-off vodka."

While the base ingredients used for making vodka are limited, the list of ingredients used to convey taste and aroma to vodka are almost limitless.