The spirits have started to flow at the Pemberton Distillery, where the new Schramm Vodka is now making its way into bottles and soon into B.C. stores, restaurants, hotels and bars.

Tyler Schramm, the company owner and master distiller, and his family members are working long hours to produce the organic potato vodka, spending about 17 hours in the distillery some days, doing the final spirit distillation.

The new vodka is being produced from thousands of kilograms of locally grown potatoes from Across the Creek Organics using a Bavarian Holstein-made modified pot still installed in the building Schramm and his brothers erected in the Pemberton Industrial Park.

In June, they started making trial batches to figure out how everything was working, and whether “we could actually produce the product that we wanted to,” Schramm said.

“We had a pretty high target in our minds, a really high standard that we wanted to meet for our vodka, and you don’t know for sure until you’ve actually done it if you can actually achieve what you have in your mind,” Schramm said.

“So it was good to actually be able to do that, finally.”

Schramm, who holds a Masters of Science in Brewing and Distilling from Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University, said the way to make a good vodka is by changing the amount of alcohol that you collect, so they tested several sections in the first trial distillations to decide what to aim for in the real collection.

Schramm said one of the benchmarks the producers set for themselves was to make vodka good enough to drink neat. Though he expects only a small percentage of the market to drink the spirit straight, “we definitely wanted to have it good enough” that vodka connoisseurs could do that, he said.

They completed the first bottling on July 16, putting the product into the custom-designed Schramm Vodka bottles, the labels of which describe the small-batch organic potato vodka and the Pemberton Valley.

“That was very exciting for everyone… (It) kind of made it real for everyone, to see it in bottles,” Schramm said.

As a family-powered operation, Schramm said the first bottle produced went to his father.

“He just lost his mom (recently), she was Mother Schramm, so it was nice for him to finally have the first bottle of Schramm Vodka,” Schramm said.

The “Schramm Vodka” title was chosen out of many ideas after a good friend suggested using the family’s last name, Schramm said. A Vancouver restaurant and bar owner cemented the idea by telling Schramm’s mother he would certainly buy something with the producer’s last name on the bottle, since it shows belief in the product.

Schramm expects to spend the next while putting in 15- and 16-hour days at the distillery, building up inventory as quickly as possible and making sure everything is running efficiently.

The distillery has a new director of sales, Johnny Beer, who has been getting to know the process and the product so he can market it to restaurants, hotels and private and government liquor stores around the Lower Mainland — and overcome his last name.

“Tyler wasn’t sure if I could actually sell a spirit, so we’ll see how it goes over when I’m actually out there handing people vodka and telling them my last name is Beer,” he joked.

Schramm said he’s had phone calls and emails from restaurant and hotel operators in Whistler and Pemberton interested in his locally produced vodka, and he feels there’s “a lot of excitement” about the product.

While Beer prepares to work first with Lower Mainland partners to sell the vodka, before doing some travelling around the rest of B.C., bottles of the product will soon be delivered to the Vancouver warehouse for the B.C. liquor stores so they can get into the provincial distribution chain.

Ultimately, Schramm hopes to finish work on the corner of the distillery that will be a store and sample area, and to produce a run of single-malt whisky once he can shut down vodka production for a few weeks — and then five years for the whisky to age.

The Pemberton Distillery will have a display at Across the Creek Organics for the Slow Food Cycle Sunday event on Aug. 16, giving away free vodka samples and information.