No heat, just flavor in Flying Pepper vodka

Anyone who chanced to open the freezer door at Kevin Bobal’s house last fall should have been warned to watch their toes.

Bobal and his colleagues at Pittsboro-based Fair Game Beverage Co. had perfected their recipe for Flying Pepper vodka late in the growing season and had snatched up all the Tobago peppers they could find to freeze in preparation for making the first batch. The team had been inspired by Fair Game distiller Chris Jude’s love for the pepper and his experimentation with home infusions.

“When we all first sipped it, we were like ‘Holy cow!’ We’re like ‘I’ve never had anything before like this in my life.’ … It took us about a month or so to get it dialed in and then once we had it dialed in, we said, ‘We’ve got to find enough of these peppers.’ We kind of had to scramble a little bit. It was late in the pepper harvest. We were putting them in bags, putting them in freezers, we had peppers everywhere. If you opened up the door of my freezer you had a real risk of five bags of peppers falling down at your feet.”

If you’ve been in the vodka aisle of an ABC store lately, perhaps you’re thinking that what the world needs now is not another pepper vodka, but Bobal’s assertion that Fair Game’s Flying Pepper vodka tastes like nothing else on this continent is no exaggeration. You don’t even have to taste this stuff to realize it’s unique. Just stick your nose in it. Where most vodka smells like rubbing alcohol, the scent wafting off Flying Pepper is like a cross between a smoldering campfire and the essence of roasted vegetables – smoky, perky and fresh. The taste is vegetal, but in the lightest way, with hints of both smoke and sugar. And it’s not spicy. No heat. Just flavor.

Fair Game has been quietly gaining attention for its North Carolina-based fortified wines and brandies for a few years, but Flying Pepper has taken off in a big, new way. Along with plenty of statewide media, Huffington Post recently featured a hefty piece about the spirit’s Greensboro debut. Mixologist Bob Peters at the Punch Room in Charlotte’s Ritz Carlton recently featured it in a Mixology Lab program. Bobal said The Rockford on Glenwood South is infusing its Flying Pepper with bacon. Possibilities abound. Bobal jokes that Flying Pepper is a “gateway drug” to Fair Game’s other products. The idea was born of a need for speed. Jude was looking for a spirit with a quick turnaround time.

“We wanted to come out with our first spirit that we didn’t have to age in barrels,” Bobal said. “Chris had been introduced to the Tobago pepper by a local farmer in Pittsboro, Doug Jones, the pepper guy.”

The team chose TOPO’s North Carolina-made wheat vodka as the base for the infusion, so it’s very smooth to begin with. Once the ingredients were lined up, the Fair Game team pulled all their peppers out of their hiding places and proceeded to tear the small, lantern-shaped peppers by hand and add them to vats of TOPO vodka, where they sat for a week or so before being filtered.

The group’s first bottling of Flying Pepper, a little more than 150 cases, is out in North Carolina stores and bars now. They will be making more as pepper season takes off, with an eye on expanding to metro markets like Atlanta and Washington, D.C. They picked seed lots, zeroing in on a familiar strand of the pepper, and gave the seeds to six North Carolina farmers to grow Tobago peppers just for them.

Curious tipplers can taste what the fuss is all about at Fair Game’s tasting room, a mile outside Pittsboro. It’s open Friday-Sunday. Check the website for hours and tour times: http://fairgamebeverage.com/tasting-room/

You’ll also find them pouring tastes at The Grande Taste Experience at the Durham Armory on April 21, the Sanford Arts & Vine Festival April 30-May 1, Taste for the Cure Gala in Oxford on May 1, Asheville Cocktail week May 3-8, and Saturdays in May through October at the farmers market in Saxapahaw.

This story was originally published April 16, 2016 at 1:12 PM with the headline "No heat, just flavor in Flying Pepper vodka."