Dutch Craft Distillery is the international identity of De Kleine Distilleerderij and was founded in 2017. As the names imply we are a small craft distillery which is located in the rural town Zeewolde right in the center of Holland. Dutch Craft Distillery stands for artisanal production and high quality spirits and liqueurs; small scale production gives us a flexibility and product focus that is impossible at industrial scale, and ultimately leads to higher quality end products.
In addition, Dutch Craft Distillery operates in an open and honest manner producing clean label drinks from fresh ingredients. Our products do not contain stabilizers, thickeners, or colorants. The applied ingredients are also listed on the labels of liqueurs and both ingredients and production processes are shared on the website.
The Distillery
Heart of the operation is an electric fired pot still (on right hand side, with the copper helmet). This pot still has a maximum capacity of 150 litre per batch and a custom designed copper helmet that ensures optimal flavour transfer to the distillate. The setup is also flexible to allow distillation of a variety of products; in the right hand side image the still is setup for a gin distillation with an aroma basket attached between the copper helmet and the condenser.
In addition a Vodka still of polish origin (the well isolated tall column on the left) is applied to make neutral spirits, and also to recover most of the off-flavour alcohol from the pot still distillations. In each pot still distillation 25% to 75% of the distillate contains unwanted components and therefore ends up as waste. Luckily the reflux column of the vodka still is able to seperate the good from te bad, and as such helps us recover a large percentage of the waste alcohol.
