ATOMIK is a spirit (or "moonshine"), a homemade vodka made by people in villages all over Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and Russia since about the twelfth century. Traditionally, people would (and still do) ferment grain, potatoes or fruits to make a "mash" (something like a strong beer or cider) then distil this in small stove-top stills to increase the alcohol content. The maximum % alcohol you can get in a stove top still is about 82%, which is where ATOMIK differs from what we now know as vodka. To get higher alcohol content (96%) you need to add a rectification column, invented in France in 1867, to your still. This drives off more of the water and produces a product which (like our spirits) is then diluted with water down to about 40% alcohol. So the modern definition of vodka in the U.S.A. is "a colourless, odourless, flavourless spirit" made from diluted 96% alcohol.

 

Grain and fruit spirits have more flavour compounds than vodka - by multiple-distilling and filtering, we are producing a spirit which keeps the flavour and character of homemade vodka ("samogon") but isn't quite as rough around the edges. We dilute our distillate with a mineral water from deep aquifers. Our experimental grain spirit used water from  below the town of Chernobyl about 10 km south of the nuclear power station. It is pure and of high quality, having characteristics of a typical limestone aquifer such as that found in the South of England or the Champagne region of France. We're currently trying to work out exactly how many thousands of years old this water is but it definitely wasn't anywhere near the surface in 1986.