A professor’s quest for the purest vodka

Liquor was always more than a drink for Ames resident J. Hans van Leeuwen.

It was a science experiment, and, to him, the distillation process longed for further perfection.

As a boy, Leeuwen, a Dutch native raised in South Africa, was fascinated by his parents’ advocaat, a drink that involves infusing eggs with vodka.

As a young educator, his brother’s pot still and its endless moonshine possibilities intrigued the scientist, newly trained in the ways of methodical trial and error.

And as a seasoned Iowa State University engineering professor, Leeuwen’s research into air and water purification triggered an epiphany: He could use his lifetime of experiences and reams of knowledge to create a volatile-impurity-free vodka.

After more than a decade of work, Leeuwen’s vision of a cleaner, smoother liquor has been realized — and bottled — as ingeniOz vodka.

Made with corn sourced from Iowa, drinking ingeniOz or any clear alcohol with fewer impurities might result in a lighter hangover. Federal regulations bar ingeniOz’s makers from saying as much, but a 2009 Brown University study found people who drank alcohol with more impurities or “congeners” reported feeling worse than people who drank liquor with less impurities.

On a recent hot spring day, Leeuwen, 68, met with investor Jerry Krause and distiller Todd Dunkel, owner of Cumming’s Iowa Distilling Company, which produces ingeniOz along with a suite of other spirits.

Standing near the big, blue ozone generator and various filtration systems responsible for ingeniOz’s purity, the men peppered funny family updates with discussions on sales plans and production strategies. The brand, which launched last summer, has been “just barely” in the black since December, according to Krause.

Leeuwen, the Walter White behind ingeniOz, is the Vlasta Klima Balloun Professor of Engineering at Iowa State. In addition to a collection of scientific honors, Leeuwen was named 2009 Innovator of the Year by R&D magazine, an award also given to Larry Page (Google) and Elon Musk (Tesla). And he has patents like most people have punches on their Subway Sub Club cards.

Leeuwen’s vodka experiment is a passion project for the scientist, one born of his personal enthusiasm for distilling.

“I’ve always been interested in the various flavors of alcohol,” Leeuwen said. “I’m curious about different drinks. I always want to try them.”

The liquor analysis is an offshoot of Leeuwen’s main research topics, including producing animal feed from ethanol industry waste and the treatment of ships’ ballast, the water held in a ship’s hull to keep it afloat.

“I work a lot in water and air purification and a natural part of that process is ozonation (the use of ozone gas to aid purification),” Leeuwen said. “You could actually take fairly polluted water and with an ozonation process, make purified water. That brought me to the idea of using this type of approach with alcohol. That was really the big ‘aha moment.'”

The purity of ingeniOz vodka and Leeuwen’s findings that ozone gas can facilitate the removal of volatile impurities from alcohol were independently verified by both Iowa Distilling Company and two of his ISU colleagues, Lingshuang Cai and Jacek Koziel.

Vodka is supposed to be devoid of “distinctive character, aroma, taste or color,” according to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Unlike spirits such as whiskey or gin that employ impurities for flavor or color, vodka doesn’t need additives, aging or the right zip code to be classified as vodka.

The difference — in price and taste — between various vodka brands is in how well impurities are filtered out of the base ethyl alcohol. “Bad” vodkas don’t do a good job of filtering impurities, hence their metallic, robot-corpse flavor and battery acid burn.

“Good” vodkas filter out impurities so that the liquid is, well, basically flavorless.

IngeniOz goes a step further than filtering by first exposing its liquor to ozone gas.

To make a complicated process simple: Iowa Distilling Company pushes ozone gas through 190-proof ethyl alcohol and, in doing so, alters the impurities in the alcohol and makes them easier to absorb, according to Leeuwen. Then, when the alcohol is filtered through activated carbon, impurities that were previously nonremovable are eliminated.

Many vodkas, even good vodkas, fall victim to the “filter myth”: the idea that just continuing to filter liquid over and over will make it purer.

“In general, whether you use three filters or 1,000 filters, whatever got through the first one is going to get through the next one, too,” Dunkel said. “We are changing the product (through ozonation) in such a way where we are able to get volatile impurities out that filters can’t. It’s a different approach. It has never been used before and it works.”

Pouring a taste for himself, Leeuwen pauses before sipping to address the morality of his process. Is a purer form of vodka that’s easier to drink really a good thing?

“If people aren’t going to drink our product, they are going to drink something else,” Leeuwen said. “If they are over 21, it’s legal. I don’t feel guilty because if people drink responsibly, like we do ourselves, they will be pretty safe.”

Then, staring at the ingeniOz bottle and its bright blue label, Leeuwen sighs deeply before asking his partners if they like the bottle. And what about the logo design? The tagline?

The men fall into a deep discussion, analyzing each element.

They have a very long way to go to compete with worldwide brands like Absolut and Smirnoff, but for Leeuwen and his partners, the “ozone’s” the limit.