Luxco likes to be under the radar. The consumer products company is not a household name. Its logo is not widely recognized. And its main facility is a nondescript industrial building in Southwest Garden that gives new meaning to the color beige.

But the St. Louis-based company owns popular hard alcohol brands such as Pearl Vodka, Rebel Yell whiskey, Saint Brendan’s Irish Cream, and Everclear. SLM visited their bottling and blending facility to see how one of their vodka brands, Pearl Vodka, is developed, bottled, and distributed.

× Expand Photo by Steph Zimmerman

To make Pearl Vodka or Everclear, you first need grain spirits alcohol, which is shipped to the Luxco facility from several different suppliers in the Midwest. Each truck can transport about 6,500 to 7,000 gallons.

×

Trucks carrying shipments of grain spirits alcohol arrive in St. Louis three to four times each week. When they arrive, a sample from each truck's tank is taken to Luxco's testing lab for inspection. Staff members ensure the sample is the correct proof and correct color; they perform visual comparisons to preexisting alcohol samples and test for taste and smell. (They need to make it through a full workday, so after they taste the sample—which is diluted with water—they spit it out.) Once the sample is approved, the grain spirits alcohol is offloaded from the truck and transported into one of Luxco's 120 storage vessels, some of which can hold up to 40,000 gallons.

× Expand Photo by Steph Zimmerman

Before any product is produced or bottled, it needs to taste good. The person in charge of ensuring that happens is Director of Corporate Research & Development John E. Rempe. He develops the flavors of the different products at his lab also located in Luxco's bottling and blending facility. Hundred of dark vials from various flavor developers are stored in a cabinet in his research area, a space that has more in common with a science lab than a kitchen. The vials contain flavor extracts such as mint, cherry, and orange.

When Rempe is developing a flavor, he combines extracts in a beaker that automatically mixes its contents. Throughout the process, he tastes the mixture, resetting his palette with purified water and unsalted crackers. "Some people are just born with the ability to taste and smell very well," says Rempe. And some are not. "A lot of people can't taste salt."

Just like fashion, tastes are subjects to trends. "When I first started," says Rempe, "there were hardly any flavored vodkas." But about ten years ago, he says, flavored alcohol took off. Pearl Vodka came out with pomegranate, coconut, red berry, and other flavors. Then sweet confectionary flavors—such as cake-flavored drinks—became popular. "But a few years ago, it's gone back to your standard cucumber, orange, red berry," he says. "The real sweet, cake-type flavors have all but gone away."

×

Boxes of glass bottles come into the bottling facility and are flipped upside down in what's called a decaser. The bottles fall out of the boxes onto the production conveyor. The empty boxes will meet the bottles again at the end of the production line, where the filled bottles are dropped in before the box heads to the shipper.

×

After the bottles first leave the box, they travel down the production line and are filled with Pearl Vodka. The vodka includes St. Louis city water that has gone through a reverse osmosis water system—or as Director of Manufacturing Chris Wieczorek calls it, a "fancy Brita." The system can remove magnesium, iron, calcium, chlorine, and more from 100 gallons of water each minute.

×

The filled bottles are then capped and sent down the production line to receive labels.

×

After the labels have been applied, an employee scans the finished bottles, picking out specific bottles that might have a problem: a misplaced bottle cap, a crooked label, etc.

×

The filled boxes are stacked and organized...

×

...and then wrapped together to be shipped around the country.