By B.J. Roche

Anyone who eats, or who's read a food magazine in the past few years knows about the pleasures of locally-grown food.

(If you live in the country, you already knew this. But things don't count until an academic or New York Times food writer has discovered something.)

Never mind!

Some people even go the distance (or not) by sticking to  a so-called 100-Mile-Diet, eating only regionally-grown foods. Not so easy in New England, but still.

Until recently, depending on the calendar, you could get good local asparagus or strawberries or tomatoes. But the vodka came from Finland.

Thankfully for the  locavore who likes to drink, those days are over.

I was shopping for Christmas wines one evening last year and ran into Paul Kozub, a young guy who was giving out samples of mixed drinks featuring his V-One Vodka, distilled in Poland from  organically-grown spelt raised in Hadley, Mass.

It was part labor of love, part obsession for Kozub, who comes from an old Polish family in the valley.

And it was great stuff. Very smooth and very drinkable. So I bought a bottle. Because I support my local farmers. Plus, because I could. It's available in liquor stores all over western Mass. and Connecticut.

Wherever you live, there's probably a guy like Paul Kozub producing gin, vodka, liqueur or amber-colored liquor. A growing number of micro-distillers are treading the path of the micro-brewers who have given us some fine local beers over the past two decades.

Neal MacDonald, who runs a great booze-based website called Proof66, notes that most of these micros are based in agricultural areas: upstate New York, the midwest, the Pacific Northwest and California.

In the Wisconsin, there's Great Lakes Distillery,  and Illinois has North Shore Distillery.

Microdistillers produce small batches of vodka, gins, liqueurs, often using offbeat or locally-grown ingredients, including maple syrup, like Vermont Spirits' Vermont Gold.

"They all come out with a vodka and gin right off the bat, and that’s pragmatic," he said in a telephone interview. "Rums are harder to do and whiskeys have to age. Most have to make money fast, so they come out with gins and vodka out of the gate and experiment with rums and whiskeys later on."

MacDonald has seen cucumber and tomato infused vodka, poblano pepper vodka and rhubarb-flavored gin, produced by North Shore Distilleries.

And these spirits are taking the industry by storm; Bluecoat Gin, produced in Philadelphia, was named Best gin by the 2009 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. 

These folks are often on second careers, are doing it for the love,  and often take a Ben-and-Jerry approach to marketing. Here's the pitch on the Vermont Spirits website:

A share of profits goes toward alcohol education and alleviating rural poverty worldwide.

So you can do good while getting tanked. Win-win!

What I also liked about meeting Paul Kozub in that liquor store was that he loved his product, and he got me to buy up (I'm a Smirnoff gal), because of it. As Bill Gates says in Fortune this month:  fanaticism is underrated.

These are generally higher-priced tipples, but no more than, say Absolut or Grey Goose. And, based on my experience with V-One, they are worth it.

Proof66 is a good place to learn more about microdistilleries in your neck of the woods. And my former Greenfield Recorder colleague Joel Brown writes about a distillery you have GOT to see up in Gloucester, for The Boston Globe. Here's to finding a new gin to sip with your tonic this holiday season, and may your limes remain blessedly unbeached.