Empirical's process

We built our distillery in a Copenhagen warehouse that used to be a storage place for the Danish National Theatre Company. Not far from the harbor, it has also been the main welding workshop for the Refshaleøen shipyard.

This space allows us to have ton of equipment, a lot of which we designed and assembled ourselves. We’re always tweaking our methods, so our outcomes and our ideas are constantly evolving together.

There are eight key elements that set our process apart: grains, barley kōji, brewing, fermentation, ingredients, distilling, cuts, and blending.

If you want to make something delicious, you need to build flavor from the very beginning. Which is why we make our own base spirit, tailored to our preferences and ideals. We call it Helena, after Lars’ favorite Misfits song.

Helena begins with pearled barley, which we steam in a converted 60-year old butter churner that we call the Dairy Queen. We then inoculate it with kōji-kin spores—a type of mold you find in miso, shoyu, and sake. The kōji gives Helena its complex umami notes, which form the backbone of all our spirits.

Once the starches break down into smaller sugars, we transfer the wort into fermentation tanks and inoculate Belgian Saison yeast. We worked with White Labs to access thousands of strains of yeast and optimize our selection for the flavor that we want the yeast to help create.

We ferment our spirits slowly in order to produce layered, nuanced flavors. Fermenting each spirit multiple times—first in the kōji stage, then when adding yeast, and occasionally when we add things like distilled Kombucha at later stages—means we can achieve complexity and depth in each bottle.

We’re on a constant search for flavor, and that search often takes us all over the world.
We’ve sought out the perfect kōji in Japan, hunted down marula to ferment in Zimbabwe, and foraged for açaí in the Brazilian jungle.

We’ve also found what we’re looking for closer by. We harvested fig leaves on Bornholm, an island near Copenhagen, took coffee chaff from a neighboring roastery and reused our own spent kōji as a botanical. Regardless of where they come from, we look for ingredients that are both delicious and evocative.

Traditional distillation techniques rely on heat, which can kill off flavor. We vacuum distill our spirits in order to preserve the fresh flavor and aroma compounds of the botanicals we use.

Vacuum distillation relies on a pump that pulls air and vapors out of the distillation container, lowering the pressure so that less heat is required to reach boiling temperatures.

After a first distillation where we remove any remaining yeast and sediment, we have what we call a “low wine”, which is around 30% ABV. We transfer that into stainless steel barrels and macerate it with botanicals—if we’re using them—for anywhere from 3 hours to 10 days.

Flavor archive

Over the years, we've tried distilling almost everything we came across; roast chicken skin, oysters, Doritos, you name it. Here are some of the flavors that made it into a bottle.

2022