Distillery

Located 50 miles south of metro Tucson, Flying Leap’s winery estate in Elgin features a world-class distillery, barrel house, tasting room and spacious event center in the heart of Arizona’s scenic wine country. Our distillery began operating in August 2016. As one of Arizona’s largest growers of wine grapes, Flying Leap’s distilling emphasis is on grape-based spirits, including vodka, brandy, grappa and an assortment of delicious infused liqueurs made from eau-de-vie. Our facility also includes a robust grain spirits production capability. We operate a large hammermill for the grinding of malts, which are fed into our mash tuns, fermenters and stills. We produce whiskies of all kinds, including aged bourbon, clear moonshine, rye and single malt spirits.

Flying Leap operates four stills, all of hand-hammered copper: two kettles and two column stills (including a vodka column), all manufactured near Stuttgart, Germany by CARL Artisan Distillery & Brewing Systems. The stills are as much works of art as they are achievements of engineering, and Flying Leap’s distillery tasting room includes large viewing windows to allow our guests to view the stills and watch our production team in action while sampling our spirits. The kettles – one of 650-liters volume and the other of 1,500-liters volume are used for the primary distillation of alcohol from either mash or fruit must, and the columns are reserved for refining the base spirits. Our distillery is powered by an onsite gas-fired steam plant, and our stills are cooled using recovered water chilled by a large evaporative chiller.