The idea for the Tampa Bay area’s first premium hand-crafted, micro-distilled vodka made entirely of Florida ingredients started as a hostess-gift conundrum.

Lee and Sarah Nelson were going to Denmark to visit friends and wanted to bring something emphatically American as a present. They ended up taking cigars, but the seed was planted.

“Why can’t we produce something really great that represents Florida?” thought Nelson, a projects manager for the treasury services department of JPMorgan Chase. He joined forces with a buddy from his hockey team, Pat O’Brien, in 2010 and began planning the artisan vodka. They pooled their savings and borrowed $30,000 from the crowd-sourcing site Lending Club.

On Wednesday, idea turned reality at the launch of Cane Vodka, made of Florida cane sugar and filtered water drawn from the Floridan Aquifer. The initial product is an unflavored premium vodka, but in a corner of their small Florida Distillery ‘” in an office park in the curiously spelled Faulkenburg Centre on Falkenburg Road ‘” Plant City strawberries stewed murkily in a batch of liquor for the company’s first flavored vodka. Oranges from Indian River, blueberries from Brooksville and grapes from Gainesville will follow.