Someday soon, the same company will be able to fill both your jet’s liquor cabinet as well as its fuel tanks. Air Company, a start-up in the sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) market has introduced Air Vodka, an award-winning spirit that is derived from ethanol, a by-product of its SAF refining process which uses just carbon dioxide and hydrogen as its source material. “In many cases of CO2 conversion technologies, ethanol is on the pathway to making the longer hydrocarbon chains that you end up making your sustainable aviation fuel out of,” explained Stafford Sheehan, Air Company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
Currently one of the most exclusive spirits in the world, Air Vodka is distilled at the company’s pilot test facility in the industrial underbelly of Brooklyn, New York, which is proving and perfecting the company’s production technology at a small scale before hundreds of millions of dollars are spent constructing full-scale production plants. As a result, the company—which was founded in 2017—produces only a limited amount of SAF that is used mainly for test purposes. The amount of ethanol produced is even less, resulting in a yearly production of only a few thousand bottles of vodka a year at most.
In 2019, before making the vodka available commercially, the company decided to enter it into several prestigious international blind liquor test tests such as the Luxury Masters International Spirits Challenge to prove it wasn’t just a novelty, and it came away with several gold medals.
Given its small production, Air Company decided to initially limit its Air Vodka distribution to high-end, Michelin-starred New York City restaurants. “That’s where we had initially started to put the vodka out, and then Covid hit and they all shut down,” Sheehan told BJT. “So as a business, we then had to pivot. We actually took a lot of our ethanol and used it to make hand sanitizer just to help out the pandemic effort.”
As production has since resumed, Sheehan noted that the vodka is sporadically available on the company’s website, but sells out almost immediately. With new refineries being built to slake the thirst for billions of gallons of SAF as part of aviation’s mission to decarbonize, that will change. “When we go to production scale, the idea is that we are going to put [Air Vodka] in every liquor store all around the country,” said Sheehan.