Unusual & knobbly Indonesian lime. Hangar One use the leaves too
- they are the ones you see in Thai cuisine. Great fresh lime taste, without any of that artificial overtones that spoil so many lime products. Normally, lime is really hard to distill without ending up with something that smells artificial & candy-like. Thats why Hangar One turned to Kaffir lime, which goes in directions that standard lime or key lime cannot. Kaffir limes & leaves are mainstays of Thai cuisine because of their high aromatic oil content & intense flavour. There are notes of wood, white pepper & cucumber. Hangar One infuse Kaffir leaves with the fruit to increase the richness & complexity. At one point, they owned every commercially available Kaffir lime leaf in North America. Since theyre an East Asian plant, there arent tons grown in the US. Hangar One were going gangbusters with the lime vodka, & then realised that they had tapped out the supply channel. An internet search turned up a nursery that had bought way too many Kaffir lime trees after a Sunset Magazine article had made it sound like they were the next big thing. Their trees arent selling, but they keep growing, so from time to time they go out & prune the leaves & send them to Hangar One. They now have a few devoted growers in Californias Sacramento Central Valley who have planted Kaffir lime trees just for Hangar One. They planted a few trees of their own right next to the distillery.