Florida Distillery Replaces Glass Bottles With Cardboard Bottles

The bottles of Half Shell vodka are made with recycled paperboard and aluminum.

Distillery 98 was already operating as sustainably as it could, but then a chance encounter with a bottle changed everything.

This Florida panhandle-based craft distillery was already sourcing hyper-local ingredients, recycling its water and feeding livestock with its spent grain, but then founder Harrison Holditch discovered a new way to bottle his Florida-grown, corn-based vodka.

“I have a buddy who is in the wine industry, and he showed me this bottle,” Holditch says. “I held it in my hands, and my eyes lit up, as I asked ‘What is this?’”

The bottle was a bottle made with 94 percent recycled paperboard (or cardboard), with an aluminum cap and an inside plastic sleeve. “I think this is the future of our industry,” says Holditch.

The bottle is made by a U.K. company called Frugalpac, and this spring Holditch’s company, Distillery 98, became the first U.S. spirits company to use its bottles for Half Shell vodka, which retails for $24.99. Half Shell’s carbon footprint is six times less than its competitors, mostly because it takes significantly less energy to manufacture and transport the bottles than glass containers.

“Glass is recyclable, but it takes a bigger carbon footprint to recycle them than to manufacture them,” Holditch says. “We had glass bottles when we started, but that’s because we didn’t know better. My goal, with our vodka, is to make these paper bottles a more common, household product.”

The bottles fit right in with the rest of Distillery 98’s ethos. Half Shell’s distillation process uses only hyper-local ingredients, from the Florida-grown corn that is its base to the Gulf of Mexico-harvested oyster shells that are a part of its signature filtration. To cap it all off, all distillation is geothermically cooled by water from local aquifers, keeping all equipment at 50-60 degrees year-round.

Distillery 98 founder Harrison Holditch is holding a paperboard bottle of Half Shell Vodka. The ... [+] bottle is not only made from 94 percent recycled materials, but instructions on how to recycle it are printed right on the label.

Holditch is meeting early next month with a wine company in California that will be manufacturing the Frugalpac bottles state-side. “Our main goal is to work with those guys and help them produce this bottle inside the United States to cut down on the carbon footprint even more,” Holditch says. “We also will be meeting with other craft distilleries to show them how it works. Some distilleries might be a little scared to get into it, but we’re here, and we’re the proof that this bottle works.”

The bottle itself is sturdy, as Holditch notes that you can hit it, drop it and freeze it, and it won’t break.

“Just don’t go swimming with it, and don’t get into a bar fight with it,” Holditch says. “The bottle is sturdy. You can put it in your freezer, and actually, the cardboard and that wine bag inside insulate it better than a glass bottle so it will stay colder longer, and you can take it to your beach or on a boat. We take it down to the beach a lot.”

Though Distillery 98 does make a rum, as well as a selection of liqueurs, for its tasting room, and the distillery is aging a whiskey, Half Shell vodka is the only product they distribute throughout Florida. The vodka will also be available in the near future through an online distributor, and there are plans to expand to California.

“We think that by focusing on this one brand, we can make a bigger wave in our industry,” Holditch says. “I absolutely would love to get rid of all the plastic bottles inside a typical liquor store. That would be my main goal.”