by | December 17, 2025
Half Shell Spirits Uses The Ocean’s Most Efficient Clean-Up Crew
This Panhandle distillery uses oyster shells to naturally filter their spirits.
In the wild, when a bit of gunk gets stuck in an oyster, it turns it into a pearl. At one Santa Rosa Beach distillery, when an impurity encounters an oyster shell, it’s filtered out to make a smooth vodka.
“It’s kind of this play on taking this product, filtering it with oysters and having this pearl of a spirit for our customers to enjoy,” says Harrison Holditch, co-founder of Distillery 98, the micro-distillery behind Half Shell Spirits.
Ever since Holditch and his brother-in-law, David Kapitanoff, opened their business five years ago with the mission to make high-quality liquor as sustainable as possible, their farm-to-bottle process has remained the same. The small team first collects corn from Walton and Okaloosa Counties, mills the grain in-house and cooks it to break down its sugars. Then the corn ferments and runs through 18 rounds of distillation. The distillery often gives the leftover cornmeal away—sometimes to local cow farmers to feed their bovines, or to a fellow neighbor along the Redneck Riviera looking to make fresh cornbread.
Ready to mix things up? Try Distillery 98’s Gold Rush cocktail.
Meanwhile, Distillery 98 collects oyster shells from local restaurants and Gulf Coast farmers. The team scrubs the shells of any remaining protein, but just in case they’ve missed a spot, they hand the oysters off to the most efficient cleaning team in Walton County: ants. “We actually set them out near ant beds, and the ants come in and do a majority of that cleaning,” Holditch says.
But don’t worry—the oyster shells are promptly and thoroughly disinfected with high-proof, house-made alcohol. They’re then placed into a 520-gallon tank with carbon, extracted from coconut shells, where the spirits will slowly seep through the organic layers over the course of three days. Holditch likens the process to a giant Brita filter, where the carbon from both materials removes any undesirable flavors, acetone or other chemicals.
The result is a clean vodka—and as of this fall, rum and gin—packaged in a biodegradable cardboard bottle. There’s no lingering hint of oysters, save for a spirit smoother than the Gulf’s finest pearl.
Make Distillery 98’s Bycatch Punch cocktail at home.
About the Author
Helen has an aptitude for finding alligators and a passion for covering the weird and wonderful of Florida. The Tallahassee native graduated with her bachelor's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. At Flamingo, she helps organize advertising and write stories (usually about Florida's fantastic fauna).
