Polugar No. 10, Poland
Polugar a type of bread-wine which translates to half burnt is a historical product with history dating back to the 1500s. The history of bread wine is long and fascinating and many understand this to be the actual style of 'vodka' drunk by Russians over the centuries.
The vodka we are familiar with today was only 'popularised' in the late 1800's when Czar Alexander bought 300 French vodka style stills and decreed this was the only type of spirit to be made in Russia. Slowly bread wine and subsequently hundreds of family and local recipes and expressions disappeared and bread wine was lost.
Whilst researching vodka as part of Russian history, Boris Rodionov discovered that vodka stills were a relatively new invention, which raised the question as to what people like Rasputin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were drinking when interfering with Russian royalty of writing critically acclaimed fiction. As such in 2010 the Rodionov family set up the Rodionov & Sons distillery in Poland to recreate this historic spirit.
Polugar no.10 takes this one step further making what is believed to be the first bread-wine gin, using traditional gin botanicals as well as botanicals found in the Siberian Taiga.
