A family company that began in candy and newspapers.

UV Vodka is the flavoured vodka family of Phillips Distilling Company, a privately held, family-owned drinks company in Minnesota. The brand’s own website says UV is produced and bottled by Phillips Products Co. in Princeton, Minnesota, and labels it “made in the USA”; the same site says the core vodka is made from 100 per cent grain neutral spirits. Phillips’s corporate site carries the name United States Distilled Products Company, of Princeton, Minnesota, in its footer and lists facilities in Princeton and in St Paul. The Spirits Business described United States Distilled Products as the owner of UV Vodka in March 2015.

The parent company is far older than the vodka. English Wikipedia says Phillips was founded in 1912 as Ed Phillips & Sons in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, selling candy, newspapers and tobacco, and that it turned to liquor when Prohibition ended in 1933. The family then moved the business to Minneapolis, where it began making schnapps, and English Wikipedia says that at the end of the Second World War Ed Phillips & Sons was the largest liquor producer in the United States. Phillips’s own site says the company was founded by the Phillips family in 1912 and has called it Minnesota’s oldest family-owned distillery.

Ownership changed hands and then came back. According to English Wikipedia, Ed Phillips sold the company to the American conglomerate Alco Standard in 1971; when Alco Standard began to sell off businesses in the mid-1980s, the Phillips family bought back its former company in a leveraged buyout, kept the brand-management side and renamed it Phillips Distilling. English Wikipedia adds that Dean Phillips, later a member of the US Congress, was the company’s president and chief executive from 2000 until 2012.

A colour for every flavour.

UV’s identity is built on colour. Phillips describes UV as “a family of colorful and flavorful vodkas made with all-natural flavors,” made in America and distilled four times, and the brand’s own copy calls its bottles “colorful.” UV Blue heads the list of flavours in the company’s 2014 trade announcements. The brand’s current website opens its story with the line “Charged up.”

The website for the brand was online by July 2002, when the Internet Archive first captured uvvodka.com under the page title “Phillips UV.” The range then grew quickly. In July 2014 FoodIngredientsFirst reported the launch of UV Sugar Crush, which it described as the brand’s 21st flavoured vodka; the same report listed UV Blue, Lemonade, Cherry, Apple, Salty Watermelon, Coconut, Grape, Orange, Vanilla, Citrus, Espresso and Sweet Green Tea, alongside the unflavoured UV 80 and the higher-strength UV 103. Phillips said then that it had been one of the first in the industry to take up dessert-flavoured vodkas, with UV Cake, UV Chocolate Cake, UV Whipped and UV Candy Bar, and that UV Sriracha was the only Sriracha-flavoured vodka on the market.

Limited editions followed. BevNet reported in 2014 that UV Salty Caramel Apple was the brand’s first seasonal flavoured vodka, and The Spirits Business reported in March 2015 that UV had added UV Ruby Red Grapefruit to a line-up of more than 20 flavours FoodIngredientsFirst reported a UV Sangria flavour the same year. Jason Connelly, Phillips’s vice president of sales, told the trade press in 2014 that consumers “serve as inspiration for our product development” and that “the millennial audience can connect to many of our flavors.”

The brand also points to trade recognition: UV’s website says it was named a “Hot Brand” by the drinks trade publication Impact for eight consecutive years, from 2005 to 2012.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drinks names: Founders, Coors Light, Akashi, Proper No. Twelve, UV, Cappelletti and Select. Drinks brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a bar list.

A drinks brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle or can than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One vodka family inside a wider Minnesota portfolio.

UV sits alongside a long list of other Phillips brands. The company’s site lists Prairie Organic Spirits, Trader Vic’s, Revel Stoke whisky, Sour Puss liqueurs and the Phillips schnapps and liqueurs, and in November 2021 Phillips agreed to buy the Leroux brandy and liqueur range and Kamora coffee liqueur from Beam Suntory, as The Spirits Business and the Star Tribune reported at the time. English Wikipedia says that as of 2021 Phillips was the largest liquor producer in Minnesota. It also notes a link to another vodka covered in this library: Phillips introduced the Polish rye vodka Belvedere to the United States and produced it before selling the brand to LVMH, English Wikipedia says. In August 2020 Phillips named Andrew England its chief executive, the company announced.

The name needs care online. “UV” is far more commonly read as ultraviolet, as in the UV index, UV lamps and UV-blocking lenses, so searches for the vodka work best with the full name; the brand’s own site is uvvodka.com, and Phillips Distilling’s is phillipsdistilling.com.

For a design guide, UV Vodka shows how a two-letter name and brightly coloured bottles can hold a family of more than 20 flavoured spirits together under one brand. Compare Finlandia, the Finnish barley vodka in its ice-textured bottle, and Tito’s, the Austin corn vodka. For this guide we use electric blue, cobalt and neon magenta with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep UV Vodka’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.